The photo of him in the tree was taken about 2 or 3 years ago. It's one of my favorites.

Before we lost our house in the 2009 wildfire, and sometime after he was neutered, he got mixed up with one or more nasty cats in our area and spent a few weeks healing on the top bunk with Evan. We didn't have the money to take him to the vet, but I/we think he was somewhat brain damaged from that fight/those fights. He recovered, but his balance wasn't the greatest.

He was one of the 4 out of 8 cats that survived the fire: Lily Potter, Loveslug, Liberty and Bean.  Loveslug died last year from cancer & Lily Potter (she had an accident a couple of years ago),  Liberty, Bean & Pixel (our almost 7 year old dog) are the only ones left from before the fire. 

The cats we have now are: Bean, Liberty (he'll be 13 this year), Luna (5 this summer), Marshallow, Peppurr (she'll be 2), Bleumaus, Cracker & Cheddar (they'll be 1 in May) and Nocturna, an elderly girl that Evan found at Sonic a few months ago.

Dogs are Pixel (almost 7), Indy (5), and Nutmeg (probably 4: although she was probably full grown when we found her, she still had puppy-chewies)...

Some of the details are mostly notes for myself and the family... unless you're really interested or/and want to make a family pet tree for us, you can ignore those details! Yeah, I know, I could put them someplace private, but I like going back to old blog entries to look up stuff like this.

He was a pretty happy cat overall. He purred a LOT and I told the others (before my CI surgery) that it looked like his meows were loud. They said "barely audible"... his purrs, however, were audible with my hearing aid. Unfortunately, when I first heard his meows (after having the CI for a while), they sounded amplified by his breathing problems.

He loved belly rubs and loved the family & our friends. He loved cleaning the other cats. He also let me use him for weight training. 

Back in November, Micah noticed that Bean was having trouble breathing, so off to the vet we went. She put him on antibiotics and prednisone and then when he was still having problems, she sedated him so she could look inside his throat to see what was going on. It was swollen & inflamed. She also noticed that his breathing relaxed when sedated. More antibiotics and prednisone. Then when that didn't help (and we were having more & more problems getting him to eat enough, and his balance was getting worse, etc..), she sedated him again & took an xray and found a polyp around his ear... in a place which would be very risky to operate on. She sent us to a specialist who said he couldn't help him (prognosis would be poor if surgery to remove the polyp was performed & he would still have nerve damage from the polyp, and other things).. this description isn't complete and may not be accurate, but it's the best I can do from a layperson's perspective. 

We've been bringing him to the litter box (which he uses when we bring him to it; he's had a few misses, which I won't speak any  more of (ahem)), and feeding him baby food, which I made for him after finding out the price of commercial baby food is... boil chicken, let cool, remove from bones, puree in blender with the broth that was used to make the chicken... I bought a package of chicken thigh quarters for around $5 or $6 and tossed in a chicken breast & it made approximately 35 jars worth of 2.5 oz baby food... the commercial stuff was over $1 per jar. People: you can make baby food: for the cost of 35 jars, you can get a nice blender and with $7 of chicken make up enough baby food to fill 35 jars!

I also made some twice cooked pork the other day and saved the broth and used some of it to mix in with his food.  This morning, we gave him a little bit of milk (I know, milk isn't good for cats, but in this situation, I think we can go with what we think he'll enjoy)... he lapped at it a little bit (we offered him about a tablespoon or 2?) and he didn't finish it. Sigh.

I'm going to miss him a lot, he's a very special cat. I'm torn about taking him in, but he's not comfortable, occasionally paws frantically at his face and doesn't want to be petted, although he's fine with staying on the bed with us.

We lot another special cat earlier this month, January 12th... we were getting ready to go pick Bean up from the vet when I found Boomerang on the living room floor, dead. NO idea what happened, Gary looked him over & didn't see any signs of a dog attack or anything. Micah said that he had been throwing up the night before.

Also, Crookshanks went missing around that time... he's our semi-feral boy. He usually shows up when it's on the colder side of cool, so I'm hoping for another cold spell and hopefully he will show up.

Here are some more photos:

And a photo from last night of Bean and Liberty together: