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Ah, man. I'm gonna have to comb Lady at least once a day to keep her from vomiting hairballs. Even the hairball control Meow Mix isn't enough to stymie them. She vomits some really huge ones.

She is so cute when she wants treats or wet food. (Yeah, we've discovered Lady likes wet food.) She runs in circles, squeaks, puts her front paws up on the cabinets, wags her tail, and her pupils get really big.

I'm glad she likes wet food. I get coupons for Nine Lives sometimes, but Pepper doesn't eat that kind. She only eats Friskies. But Lady eats the Nine Lives, so I don't feel like I'm wasting coupons (although so far she seems to like the flaked tuna more than the Super Supper type).

Lady also went upstairs this morning, which she hadn't done in awhile. I went up to brush my teeth and see what she was doing, and she kind of grumbled at me and went back downstairs. I have no idea why. It's almost as though she thought it was another cat coming up the stairs and got mad about it, but when she saw it was only me, she was like, "Well, I'm mad at you for making me think another cat was coming up here!"

Friday night, Lady was playing pretty intensely for about a half an hour. The next morning she didn't get up to greet me like usual. She just stayed sleeping on the lookout in the sun room. I know that sometimes when Pepper gets overstimulated, she sleeps in the next day. I thought the same thing was going on with Lady, but when she hadn't woken up by the afternoon, I thought I'd check on her. It turned out that her eyes had some weird greenish-yellow discharge and the right one was sealed shut. I cleaned them out as best as I could. Within a few minutes, she was up and moving around, and her right eye was finally open, but they were still weeping the yellow mucous. By late afternoon, the left eye cleared up, but the right one kept weeping. She spent most of the day sleeping.

By Sunday morning, she seemed better. Both eyes had stopped weeping, she was up moving around, and I cleaned the rest of the crusted stuff off her face. Today she looked fine, too. I'm not sure what happened. I noticed a few days ago Pepper's eyes looked runny (though it was pure liquid, no color) and she vomited four times in one day. I wonder if Pepper had a cold and passed it to Lady. I wonder if whatever it was, it was more likely to affect older cats because Mel and Hermes didn't get it.

Poor Pepper. She lost some patches of hair on the back of her ears, and the right ear has little tiny red sores on it. I googled possible ailments that could cause this. I don't think it's ear mites because everything I've read said that you can see a brown crusty stuff inside the ear and the mites walking around on it with your naked eye, and I don't see any of that.

This happened after she spent a day of vomiting all her food. I think she had an allergic reaction to something in the wet food I gave her, and I wonder now if she's allergic to the red dye in the salmon-flavored Friskies. She lost a bit of hair on one of her ears before and she's vomited that type of food before, too. Don't remember if both incidents happened together, though. She does clean her ears a lot and she may be overcleaning them. This morning she spent a ridiculous amount of time rubbing around her right ear, and when she was done, her hair around that ear was all sticking up and looked disheveled.

The internet said to increase the cat's intake of Vitamins A, C, E, and Zinc. I'm pretty sure Centrum has all of those (though I'll check it when I get home for sure), so I'm gonna crush up a Centrum and put it in with her food.

If it doesn't look like it's going to clear up in a few days, I'll take her to the vet, but I'm going to have to find a cheaper vet than our normal one.

I never gave Pepper the Centrum because Crawl was concerned that some of the other stuff that Centrum contains could be bad for cats. Also, I looked at the ear when I came home from work and it seemed to be healing. This morning all the red spots had scabbed over. I've been alternating putting Polysporin and Neosporin on it. I'm not sure which is better. Polysporin protects against infection, but Neosporin stops itching so that makes her paw at it less.

I still think it was either an allergic reaction to something in her food or possibly a fly bite, or a vitamin deficiency caused by the day she kept vomiting all her food and didn't get much to eat.

On a positive note, she came upstairs to visit us before we were awake this morning. I put her in the bed and she stayed a little while, but eventually left to explore the upstairs. Mel was with us in bed for at least half the night.

Hermes, on the other hand, is still having disciplinary problems. He doesn't "rampage" anymore and instead, he's replaced it with "attacking Lady and Caramel from behind" for his entertainment. He did this again to Lady this morning, and she roared again, and I chased him upstairs with a broom.

I'm going to start locking him up for this behavior. I really want to adopt Baby once I've got full-time employment again, but I can't if he's going to be doing that to her.

I'll need to knock on wood after saying this, but the cats have been really well-behaved lately. I'm trying a new disciplinary tactic with Hermes by locking him up in a bedroom for about an hour after he attacks another cat. The problem is that no matter how much he gets scared off by me yelling at him and chasing him and rattling the coin can at him, he's figured out that he doesn't actually get hurt by any of it, so he gets over it in a few minutes and is right back to his bad behavior. But getting locked up provides a less desirable result of being bad.

What made me realize I had to do something more drastic was that the other day, Pepper jumped on the printer and he smacked her so hard, she flipped over on her back, and then he smacked her again. Usually, he is scared of Pepper, but he's getting more brazen with that behavior. I chased him upstairs and locked him up for about an hour and a half, and he hasn't touched any of the other cats since.

He's also starting to rampage again at night, so maybe that'll wear him out enough that he won't chase the other cats as much. He's also playing more with toys. He played with one of Mel's plastic balls for awhile last night and I think he pulled a toy mouse out of their toy box (someone did, and I'm guessing it was him since he spends the most time in that room).

He also chased a flying beetle around for a few minutes last night, but I felt bad for it, so I eventually caught it and put it back outside. It didn't seem like he injured it at all.

Mel likes to get between my feet during the night and clean herself, and when she's done, she walks up onto my chest and falls asleep.

Lady is still very shy around the other cats, but I'm thinking of enticing her to come out to the front rooms more by rewarding her with a treat whenever she does.

Oh my. Lady came into the dining room while I was playing Puss n Boots, and stayed next to me for awhile. Eventually she got onto one of the dining room chairs. Mel came into the room a short while later and got on the office chair. Both Mel and Lady have fallen asleep. I have both of my Calicos in the room with me, and this is the first time Lady has slept anywhere other than the sun room or the basement in a long time.

I heard a yell from upstairs. Hermes nipped at Crawl's leg, but he didn't break the skin.

You know, sometimes it seems like a cat's personality can depend on its environment. Something about the apartment must have suppressed Hermes's bad behavior. Bringing him to this house has brought it out, and this is probably what he was like at the shelter (when I wasn't around), which would explain why they warned me about him.