Crazy cat cuisine, open up the hood
So I get home yesterday and look at the plate of wet cat food and see that it is once again untouched. Instantly my frustration level swells. I talked to the vet earlier in the day about the reluctance to eat. She said we should try to look at the area where the tooth was to see if there is a lot of redness or swelling. She also said we should stop with the antibiotic and pain stuff in case it was causing nausea. (no problem with that!) Three days of solid not eating is the time to sound the alarm according to the vet, well Thursday would have been the third day since I saw the cat eat. Of course prior to taking the cat to the vet I think she went at least a solid week without consuming any solid food.
On top of all that the vet said she was leaving that day for vacation for a week so if the cat continued to not eat we would have to take her to a different vet that is handing emergencies, more hoops to jump through. So anyway I was resigned to having to take the damn cat back to a vet at some point soon, exactly what I did not want to do.
Last night I put her food down on the plate, the cat comes over like she is interested, looks at it for awhile and walks away, wtf??? So last night after Ali gets home she is sitting at her desk eating a salad. The salad has feta cheese on the top of it. Spook was mulling about at Ali’s feet so for the hell of it Ali pulls a piece of cheese off and holds it down for Spook. Spook instantly gobbled down the piece of cheese hungrily! I was in disbelief that Spook ate the cheese. Quickly I encouraged Ali to give her more cheese which Spook continued to eat. I was excited that the cat was actually eating. Her mouth mustn’t be bugging her too much if she will eat from a hand. I furthered the experiment by bringing in a small piece of tuna and handed it to her, she ate that as well.
Ok so what the hell is going on? To me, it seems like the cat is visually associating the small plate with pain. So last night before bed I took her food off a plate and put it in a small tupperware thing. This morning it looked like she had eaten some of it. I furthered the experiment by dumping the dry food out and putting a different color bowl down with fresh dry food. For the first time in weeks I saw her by the dry food bowl a few minutes later! It’s hard to believe if the cat was starving that something like bowl or plate the food was in/on would make an ounce of difference. Well we will continue the psychological feline experimentation over the weekend.
Yesterday I decided to go grab an updated video card for my PC at home. It’s hard to believe that my PC is now almost three years old. In human years that means it’s probably my age, well into middle age. The Nvidia 6800 card I built the system with is now pretty sad in performance compared to today’s hardware. I didn’t go crazy I picked up a Nvidia 9500Gt board with a gig of dedicated video memory. It was only 100 bucks. This morning I picked up some additional memory I spotted at Wal-mart on clearance (along with a Wii controller!) to bump the puter up to a robust 4 gigs of system RAM. These couple of improvements should extend the shelf life of the box a year or two yet.
This weekend we are NOT painting.