Purr Baby
The contents of this website are mine personally as usual do not have anything to do with the US government, the Peace Corps, or Romania, and therefore do not reflect any official position thereof.

I've been thinking for weeks what should my next blog post be about? How hard I'm working on this gingerbread castle project? My other "secret projects" none of you know about? How surreal my life sometimes is? The pictures I saw of Hurricane Ivan and how it made me feel? More about the problems in my country? What I'm thinking for the future - after Peace Corps? The Supernatural Marathon weekend I just had with two Peace Corps friends that involved Chinese food, delivery pizza, potato chips, coca-cola and the Winchester brothers Seasons 1 & 2?

As I debated in my mind I recalled I wanted to post on September 18th - the day we celebrate Bella's Birthday. The one year anniversary of the day Bella came to me. We celebrated with a whole packet of Whiskas Supreme Sardine cat food, and I toasted her with hot coffee. To one year together and many more.

I would post a picture of how big my baby's gotten, but for the time being my camera is being repaired in Bucharest and I don't have it here, so you'll just have to me due with this kind of cute old picture.
In the meantime Bella and I have been at odds lately. Last week I hosted a family of couch-surfers , a mom, a dad, and their 8month old baby boy for three nights. Bella seemed to be both interested and afraid of Baby and seemed to have fun playing with the other members of the family. Her personal space and patterns of sleeping were invaded I thought minimally, and even though everyone of the visitors warmly appreciated Bella I still tried to give her as near the same amount of attention I would normally.

However, when visitors left on Friday evening Bella, I guess decided to tell me exactly what she though about me inviting overnight guests into her apartment: She took a dump on my bed.
This is an unusual turn of events for Bella. I punished her with a time out in the kitchen and much later made sure she had some "mommy time" to know I wasn't still mad at her and hadn't abandoned her.

Then my weekend-guests arrived and the Supernatural Marathon did commence and once again, the guests appreciated and enjoyed playing with Bella and aside from two more people sleeping in the apartment than usual, I thought Bella's daily interactions changed very little. ALthough I did notice her scratching herself much more frequently when our first guests were here. I announced that Bella needed a bath. That her itching was worrying to me although she couldn't have gotten fleas because she's never outside. A joke was made that the couple with the baby brought fleas to my cat. I commented that that would be some trick because I think you'd have to go through a lot of specific actions or troubles to bring fleas inside to someone you knew would have a cat.

Well the itching increased and Sunday morning after my fellow Supernatural fans departed Bella got her bath. I was concernedly drying her and in fact picking newly discovered parasites of some kind off her skin when I smelled it...She rewarded me for my weekend guests in the same way she appreciated the couch surfers!

I don't know what's going on here, but my cat has fleas and has taken to crapping on my bed. This is worrisome behavior for a cat that is coming to the USA with me someday and is going to have to learn how to cope when "mommy" gets a job and is hopefully out of the house from 8-5 regularly.

In the meantime, she's had her flea bath and I can go pick up some emergency medication against fleas on her body hopefully tomorrow. The only explaination of how I think she could have gotten them is that flea eggs survive in my apartment - and necessity has forced me to be somewhat OK with that. I tried to wash one of the cushions Bella's been so fond of sleeping on lately but whether or not the washer actually washes things with water is touch and go - so when I pulled the washers contents out dry earlier I said "let that be a worry for another day."

Since my tools for cleaning the carpets is a broom and I beat and washed these rugs already this year, there's not much that's going to be done there, and since I have actually zero disposable income - i.e. income not already budgeted for something else, it's going to be a hard sight to see how we swing this flea medication. In the meantime I'm sleeping in my dish-soap cleaned bed because it takes two-days for the sheets to dry on the line if the machine uses water so usually I only wash them when I'm going away for a while. Besides Bella has done so much sleeping on me or with me that there's no way I could claim avoiding exposure for flea eggs and a massive laundry overall would just be too little too late.

The best I can do I figure is bathe her again if she continues to scratch, find a way to pay for the medication that will kill all hatching fleas on her for a number of months, and pray I don't get fleas myself .... until I do, I guess I have to be Ok with that.