My Love-Hate Affair with Petco

I love Petco. I hate Petco.

More accurately, Staff loves and hates Petco, but being the end user of its products, I bear the brunt of the consequences. Also, I have a blog and Staff doesn't. Neener neener.

I (the Godlike "I") love Petco because it's only a mile away from our apartment and open seven days a week, 10 am-9 pm, and the staff there is always super-friendly (if not as knowledgeable as Staff would like) and never give Staff a hassle.

I (the Satanic "I") hate Petco because it's located in a cul-de-sac of sorts at the strip mall, next to a bridal shop, with limited adjacent parking. And that bridal shop gets busy. And brides and their entourages spend hours, not minutes, there. So sometimes Staff has to park at the main mall and walk over or (gasp!) park illegally on the side of the building and hope not to get ticketed or (ack!) towed.

I love Petco because it has so many different brands of cat food at reasonable prices. Staff can and does get some of those foods shipped via Amazon Prime, but not everything we like is available there. There are some high-end brands Petco doesn't carry, but that's OK because I won't eat any of those. No organic grain-free hormone-free cage-free $25-per-pound artisanal cat food for me.

I hate Petco because they're often out of stock of the handful of cat foods I actually will eat, especially when they're on sale.

I love Petco because they never give Staff a hassle about returning cat food when my housemate, Scully, or I have decided, on the spur of the moment and usually after Staff buys a 24-can crate, that we'd rather not eat that particular item anymore, kthanxbye. Can't do that with Amazon without paying crazy return shipping charges. At one point this summer, we hit the "like" and "unlike" buttons practically simultaneously on four different varieties of cat food.

I hate Petco because it takes them forever to ring up returns, and other customers always show up immediately to pay for their purchases, and Staff has to apologize 3-4 times for the delays and still gets the stink-eye from them. It's bad enough when we give him the stink-eye but when other humans do it...

I love Petco because they invented Soulistic Luna Tuna, which is shredded tuna in grain-free pumpkin soup, and I actually lap up all the soup and eat all of the tuna, and it's priced at a very reasonable 89 cents per pouch. Right now, it's the one food that gets me to clean my bowl. I also will eat 80-85% of Soulistic's Sweet Salutations chicken and tuna in grain-free gravy, which makes it my #2 favorite.

I hate Petco because Soulistic Luna Tuna is impossible to get. It's an exclusive Petco brand, so you can't get it anywhere else. You can get Soulistic foods on Amazon, but only through Petco, which adds shipping charges (no Amazon Prime there). And you can get almost all of the Soulistic foods at Petco.com -- but NOT Luna Tuna. The Petco store can't special order it because "the regional distributor won't do it." And whenever the store gets some, it gets no more than two boxes of eight pouches each. For me, that's a mere two-week supply. The Sweet Salutations is in stock more often, but I don't like it nearly as much. We've tried the other flavors, and I don't like them. I like my tuna straight up, not mixed with mackerel or shrimp or salmon or crab or snapper or sardine or barracuda or piranha or fishzilla or Nessie.

So thank you, Petco, for getting me hooked on one of YOUR foods and then not making enough of it. One pouch a day. That's all I want. Is that so hard?

Love Petco. Hate Petco.

Next time, I want a pre-nup.

Books I Would Read If I Could, Part 3

Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper is an inspiring memoir of Homer, a little blind black cat who came to live with the author and her two other cats in Miami Beach and ended up in New York City. Homer may have what most humans would consider to be a crippling disability for a cat, but he never got that memo. He's utterly fearless and eternally curious and quite remarkable, and Ms. Cooper has a way with words. Now in paperback and e-book format.

Homer is on Twitter as @HomerBlindCat, and we exchange tweets every so often. Well, he tweets and I make a snarky comeback and he tilts his head just so and thinks, "What the heck is that Mulder smoking, anyway?" but remains unfailingly polite. He may be blind, but he can see right through us wiseacres. He and Gwen are good people. Read the book.

Eh, It's Been A While

A long while since my last blog. Sorry about that. Things happened.

The Big Thing that happened was that I was diagnosed with a lymphosarcoma and ulcers in my stomach. So I co-opted Staff's 401(k) savings contributions and have been getting chemotherapy for nearly a year. A recent endoscopy showed that the original tumor has disappeared and the ulcers have cleared up -- but biopsies found similar cancer cells in my intestines. So the chemotherapy will continue until either (1) Staff runs out of money or (2) my weight drops to the point that I become the Cheshire Cat -- naught but a pair of gleaming golden eyes and a devilish grin.

Staff says the chemo, despite the expense ($250 per session every second Monday, $1500 for endoscopy and biopsies), has been worth it because I would've died before last Christmas without treatment. Before chemo, I was throwing up after every meal. After chemo began, the barfisodes almost stopped completely (maybe once a month). Chemo doesn't seem to cause any serious side effects in cats like it can for humans, although all my lovely whiskers fell out and have been replaced by stunted little hairs that make Scully chortle madly whenever she looks at me. The worst part of a chemo day is having to be dropped off at 7 a.m. and sit in a cage for 13 hours -- for a 15-minute session -- until Staff can pick me up after work at 8 p.m. But I get my own back -- I bitch nonstop for the 20-minute car ride home. And baby, I can wail like a banshee.

Another Thing that happened was Staff replaced the bedroom carpet -- my favorite place for barfisodes -- with some wood laminate flooring. So when I do barf there on occasion, a little Windex cleans it right up. Staff wants to do the entire apartment with this stuff. I hate it. When I hide under the bed, Staff just has to grab me by the scruff and slide me out like a furry curling stone.

Another Thing is that we've been visiting my regular vet every day. Yes, EVERY DAY. I don't like taking pills. I REALLY don't like taking pills. So Staff slides me out from under the bed every morning, sticks me in the carrier, drives me 2 miles to his vet at 7 a.m., and holds me while Dr. Cameron pries open my jaws with one hand and shoves two 5-mg pills down my gullet with the other. 7 a.m. EVERY DAY. Except Sunday, when it's 8:30 a.m. Or Chemo Days, when the animal hospital gets that pleasant chore. And even though I've become somewhat resigned to Dr. Cameron's masterful touch, I still won't let Staff do it on his own. A cat's got to keep the help in their proper place, you know.

I also acquired an opportunistic viral infection in my eyes over the summer, but antiviral eyedrops cleared that up in about six weeks and for about $600. So Dr. Cameron also puts prophylactic drops in my eyes three days a week now.

Anyway, that's how things stand now. Life is pretty much the same as long as it's not Chemo Monday or the 30-minutes from 6:45 a.m. to 7:15 a.m. I still rule Staff's lap with an iron paw, eat only a very select menu -- Fancy Feast Appetizers tuna and chicken, Fancy Feast shredded tuna fare, and Soulistic Sweet Salutations chicken and tuna -- and sleep on my fleece blankets or in two Petco shipping boxes lined with crackly kraft paper that drives me bananas because I know there are mice under there making those crackly sounds!

Catch you on the flip side, 'mkay?

Books I Would Read If I Could, Part 2

Now while Aunt Michelle's book doesn't have any cats (or other pets) in it, there are some book series we like that do have cats in them that we like a lot.

The Midnight Louie mystery series by Carole Nelson Douglas. Our favorite series! Midnight Louie is a big black tomcat who thinks he's a private eye in the tradition of Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. He prowls the neon casinos, back alleys, and desert sands of Las Vegas, and solves mysteries for his "little doll," crack PR person Temple Barr who is torn between her love for the athletic magician and counter-terrorist Max Kinsella and the former priest-slash-radio talk show host Matt Devine. There are almost as many animal characters as humans, and Ms. Douglas has weaved an intriguing story arc into the individual books' plots.

While the self-contained mysteries often get shuffled into the background in favor of the romantic and personal entanglements, and the wordplay can be a bit much at times, Staffpurrson devours each one of these books as soon as they come out. There have been 22 books so far, the latest of which is "Cat in a Topaz Tango," and word has it that Ms. Douglas will solve the Big Mystery in the 28th book -- if she sticks to the alphabetical titles all the way through U, V, X, Y, and Z. (Still trying to figure out what color she'll find that begins with the letter "X".)

The Eve Dallas mystery series by J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts). While tough NYPD detective Eve Dallas and her filthy rich and incredibly talented husband Roarke (yes, just Roarke) are supposedly the stars of this series, my favorite character is their fat gray cat, Galahad. He made his presence known in the very first book, Naked in Death, by saving Lieut. Dallas from the murderer, and shows up periodically in the 30-plus books published since then. He was amply rewarded for his heroism with a lush life in Roarke's palatial mansion, cadging bacon from their plates, sleeping on top of Eve's naked bum, and getting along better than Eve does with Roarke's steely-eyed majordomo, Summerset. He may not show up as often as Midnight Louie -- after all, it's the Eve Dallas series, not the Galahad series -- but he's always welcome in my house.

Staffpurrson also used to read The Cat Who series by Lillian Jackson Braun, featuring KoKo and YumYum, and the Mrs. Murphy series by Rita Mae Brown, but he feels those have fallen off in quality in recent books. The early ones are still good reads, though. There's also Jad-bal-ja, the Golden Lion, who was featured in Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs and shows up in some of that series' subsequent books. A most noble fellah is he.

Books I Would Read If I Could

See? I told you I would be back shortly.

My Staffpurrson's sister, Michelle Cameron, recently had her first novel published.

The title is "The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz." It's historical fiction, set in the 13th century, and it's about an ancestor of Staffpurrson's family, a renowned rabbi and Talmudic scholar, Meir ben Baruch of Rothenberg. Now that may not sound very exciting, but the 1200s were an increasingly dangerous time for Jews in Western Europe. The book has suspense and romance and royal intrigue and desperate measures and death and love that endures. Plus poetry and historical events and figures.

Its greatest fault is that it lacks cats. I don't know why we got left out -- we had a rough time then, too, what with being unfairly associated with witches and all. So I give it only four stars.

Staffpurrson, however, says it deserves five stars because it's really well written -- Cameron is a published poet, so she knows how to craft beautiful sentences -- and very gripping, and the characters are compelling. Some people say Shira herself (about whom nothing is known because women were invisible to medieval chroniclers unless they were Eleanor of Aquitaine) is a bit passive, but she is true to history and she does fight in her own quiet way.

It's available at bookstores everywhere and online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-a-million. And check out the author's Web site at http://www.michelle-cameron.com.

Aunt Michelle says her next novel will have a sacred Egyptian cat in it, but people need to buy this one to get that one published. So what are you waiting for?

Updates Coming Soon! Honest!

You know about those initial bursts of enthusiasm when you're doing something new, and then they burn out almost immediately?

This was a perfect example of that.

All I can say in my defense is that I find it easier to jabber in 140-character tweets. I'm a cat, after all. I have a short attention -- ooh, shiny!

Where was I? Oh, yes. Short attention span. At any rate, I promise I will post an update today. I've had an eventful summer with some things I'd like to share with you. I hope you find them interesting and informative.

Back shortly. Honest.

Five Things I Love

Truth be told, I'm just a plain old cat. No exotic tastes, no peculiar habits, no cross-species love affairs. Merely a simple creature with simple tastes common to the vast majority of felines out there. Well, except for the Twitter addiction and this new blogging kick I'm on.

So the first Five Things I Love are not going to shock or appall anyone. In no particular order:

(1) Sunpuddles. I love to relax and snooze in a nice bright patch of sunshine on the bed or the sofa or the floor. One reason we decided to go with Staffpurrson is that his place has a lovely southern exposure and he likes to keep the blinds partially raised so that we get sunpuddles every sunny day, even when he's not home. And when that sunpuddle hits my fleece blanket on the bed dead-center, it's Nirvana and Utopia and Shangri-La all rolled into one. For at least five minutes.

(2) Staffpurrson's lap. It's an ideal spot. He lets me sit there for extended periods. He likes to stretch his legs out to maximize the floor space. He'll give me head and chin skritches while I'm there. And he minimizes the fidgeting and repositioning so that I don't get lapsick. What more could you ask for? (Well, he could hand-feed me bits of tuna and salmon jerky, but that's a subject for the next round of contract negotiations.)

(3) Water from the tap. Cold, oxygenated, loaded with minerals, fresh from the municipal pipeline, in a nice thin trickle perfect for lapping. That Drinkwell fountain with the 50-ounce reservoir in back? I use it to wash my paws. And don't even mention the ceramic bowl on the cat table in the kitchen that gets "fresh" water twice a day. If it's more than 5 minutes out of the tap, it's not fresh. I wonder if the water in the big white porcelain bowl tastes as good, but Staffpurrson keeps closing the lid and muttering something about "chlorine bleach" and "falling in and drowning." I hope that doesn't happen to him.

(4) The laser pointer. This both satisfies and frustrates me at the same time. I'm not sure how that can be, but it does. I use my laser-tracking vision power to keep it in sight at all times, and once it's less than a foot off the floor, I pounce. And yet... I can never catch it. But one day I will, and the fabric of space-time will tear and we'll all end up in some alternate reality where cats have goatees.

(5) Long stringy things. String is good. So is gift wrap ribbon, the plastic tie handles on garbage bags, rubber bands, twist ties, packing tape torn off shipping boxes, shoelaces, what have you. If a cat toy has a string on it, I don't care if it's the soft, chewiest mouse with the best catnip at the end of it -- I'm going for the string. Staffpurrson should be very glad he doesn't have dreadlocks.

This is not to say that I'm a complete idiot. I have no interest in those plastic covered cables and cords behind the computer desk and entertainment center. I can smell the electrons coursing through there, and I'd prefer that they not course through me. For which Staffpurrson is profoundly grateful.