Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Calypso in May, 2014

Calypso turned 17 nearly two months ago. It's hard to believe we've been together for so long. Health-wise she's stable, though there's a certain sense of inevitability when it comes to her age-related kidney issues. Her BUN and creatinine levels were last checked two years ago, when they were 51 and 2.63, respectively. She's scheduled to have follow-up bloodwork next week. She drinks a lot of water, as is expected when faced with kidney disease, but so far she's managed to keep her weight up and enjoys a fairly good appetite.

Before she'd switched to a wet food diet almost exclusively a few years ago, Calypso would eat virtually anything set under her nose. Now there is but a short list of canned food she'll eat: Friskie's Turkey & Chicken Dinner with Cheese, and Sheba's Whitefish and Tuna entree. Both pates look fairly offensive to me but, thankfully, I'm not quite the cat food connoisseur Calypso is.

My girlfriend lost her 23-year-old cat in January to kidney disease, and what a great cat Big Kitty was. Her distinctive personality is sorely missed. Even now when I visit my girlfriend's apartment, I expect to see Big Kitty trotting up to greet me. I'd grown to love her as though she were my own.

My cat site is as old as Calypso. So many things have changed on the Internet since I started in 1997. How different it would be if Kat, Calypso and I were young and had started up the site in this decade. We'd likely be posting regularly on YouTube. It's a golden age for cats right now, as the advent of high-speed fiber-optics and HD streaming entertainment have made stars out of cats like Maru and Simon's Cat.

Of course, it's still nostalgic to see the original catcam.com still up and running after all these years. How quaint and dated those concepts all seem now!