The Diary of A Simple Man

I had one last fear for Elmer's move: that he wasn't going to eat properly once he got to Boston. Unfortunately my fears have continued to prove true since the move, at least the reasonable ones. I thought we were likely to get screwed at the drop-off, that no one was likely to show up at 4.30. Ding-ding. And I thought Elmer was going to have troubles eating upon his arrival. Ding.

So today I woke up and it was two days since we'd sent Elmer off, and his first fresh morning in Boston was by then six hours or more past. And there was still no eating. Which put us over two days since he'd last eaten and quickly heading toward three.

Now cats can cause problems with their liver by not eating. They start burning fat, the fat gets into their liver, which doesn't work as well as ours, their liver starts failing, they start having nausea, and so they eat worse. It's apparently particularly problematic for overweight cats, and Elmer is. I saw some places that said 2-3 days is when problems can start to occur, but the number 3-5 seemed more common.

So all three of us, Kimberly, me, and Elmer's new guy were all increasingly worried about this today.

Fortunately, Elmer's new dad is super responsible and really taking the cat-dad thing seriously. So he got a car so he could take him to the vet ER today, and did. Elmer was apparently looking good, but they were of course worried over almost three days of not eating, so prescribed him some Mirataz, which is a topical appetite stimulant. You just rub it in the ear, so there's no trauma from pills or anything. That all seemed great, but we knew the appetite stimulant wasn't going to have any effect today, because the general consensus is 1-2 days to take effect.

Meanwhile, we'd decided that we'd just asked Elmer to do too much. We'd put him through a stressful trip and sent him to a new home and a new person. Cats don't do well with change, and that was too much at once. So we decided that Kimberly was going to fly out there so that she could help give Elmer someone he was familiar with, reducing the amount he had to deal with by one. If he got weaned back onto food, and then she disappeared again, that wasn't likely to cause problems. We figured worst case, she got out there and Elmer had already started eating, but with it taking almost a day to get there (we found some 16 hour flights with layover), we didn't want to put it off, especially when things could get worse by the day.

So, we OKed it with Elmer's new dad, found a flight, found a hotel, got everything booked, and at about 5 o'clock we headed out to the airport. Kimberly's flight was at 8.30pm, to arrive in Boston tomorrow at 3.15pm.

Less than a block out of the house, a message came through on my phone and I handed it to Kimberly so she could read it. Elmer's new dad had walked into the safe little closet that he'd put Elmer in after the vet and found him up and acting friendly. He'd tried churu one last time for the day, and Elmer had eaten it all. He'd purred, he'd licked his hand, and he'd eaten a few bites of wet food too! (And Elmer doesn't even particularly like wet food!)

Now that's still nothing calorie wise. Maybe 15 calories, and he should be getting 300 a day. But it sure sounded like a a big change in his attitude. I turned on the street between us and the highway rather than going out to the highway. As I drove up it, I asked Kimberly what she thought, and we agreed it sounded like a big change, and maybe she didn't need to go out to Boston. Besides the expenditure of time and money, it might actually interfere with the bonding process, and we were hopeful that the big push from her being there was no longer needed.

So another block and I turned again and took us back home, and I started cancelling stuff. Hotel was no problem. Cost of the plane flight was lost because it was same-day, and I didn't buy refundable (and it wasn't Hawaiian where I think everything is still refundable or at least changeable). But it had been a one-way trip at least. (I though "One-Way Trip to Boston" might be the name of this journal entry, went I figured I'd write it after dropping Kimberly off at the airport.)

Kimberly unpacked.

Ah well, I thought she could have an enjoyable visit in Boston after the Elmer situation resolved, as she hasn't had a real trip like that away to anywhere but Oahu in some time. Not this time. I do hope we can visit him at least once in the years ahead though. (I quite enjoyed Boston in my week there for Rebooting Web of Trust some years ago.)

Elmer clearly isn't out of the woods, but he sounds like might have calmed down a lot and be on the road to improvement, especially with the appetite stimulant cutting in sometime in the next day. (I joked that we'd scared him straight with that visit to the vet.) So we have hope that we'll be hearing better news tomorrow, and as Kimberly says, it feels generally like optimism now, not just hope.

Not to bury the lede: Elmer made it to Massachusetts this morning and is still pretty scared at his new home, but at least wandering about, even to somewhat open spaces like shelves. He hadn't eaten yet, which is my last big stressor, as cats can hurt themselves if they go more than a couple of days without eating and it's been a day and a half for Elmer at this point. But hopefully he'll chill enough to eat sometime today. (He's always rejected even treats if he's too wound up, but I'm hopeful Elmer's new dad will be able to tempt him with Churu.)

But yesterday, Elmer's moving day SUCKED. Especially the morning.

The biggest problem is that Island Pet Movers, the company that we hired on to make the process easier and less stressful for us and to make sure we had all of the right info on the process, at some considerable expense, did none of that.

We'd already had some problems with them giving us straight-up incorrect information prior to yesterday, such as carrier size, and not giving us crucial info, such as their desire to see the health certificate before we left. But yesterday morning took the cake.

We got to Hawaiian Air Cargo at 4.30 in the morning yesterday. We knew they opened at 6, but IPM had assured us that they had talked with HAC to have someone there at 4.30, to check in Elmer, and that it was a requirement we be there to check him in 4 hours before his 8.30 flight. IPM did warn us that they might be on "island time", so we shouldn't be worried if they weren't there until 4.45 or 5.00, but said that it was important we be there, waiting on them, rather than vice-versa, so that if we missed the four-hour window, it was obviously their fault, and so they'd still take Elmer.

When they hadn't shown up by 4.45, I figured someone had forgotten about the early wake-up, so Kimberly messaged IPM and got them into motion getting someone there. Except they were totally useless. All we definitively know that they did was wake up IPM's owner to tell them about the problem (or at least so they claim, I no longer really believe them) and call the empty office in front of us. After 30 minutes or so they shrugged their shoulders and said, "There's nothing we can do, they'll probably be in around 6."

DUDE, this was exactly what we paid you to do. This was literally the one job you had this morning, and you not only did not do it, but had us totally uselessly standing out in the dark for an hour and a half before Hawaiian opened their doors at 6.00, exactly on their schedule. And when they opened their doors, we never heard a single person say, "Oh, shoot, we were supposed to be here at 4.30" or, "Oh Yeah, we knew you were coming", though IPM absolutely claimed they knew we were coming! At this point I don't know if IPM lied about talking to someone being there at 4.30, "arranged" it in some pointless way like leaving a voice mail, or is completely incompetent, but they 100% did not do their job. (Generally, I'm drifting between them being incompetent and rent-seeking grifters at this point, but I don't know, and moreso other than still being pissed about it, I mostly don't care.)

Anyway, Hawaiian told us that no, the deadline was 2 hours before the flight, not 4. We hadn't needed to have Elmer checked in until 6.30. (So we could have given him two hours not in the crate, and we could have given us two hours more of sleep.) A fairly cold and curt clerk, exactly not what we needed, and quite surprising for Hawaii, then proceeded to get Elmer checked in and deliver us a few more problems.

First, she insisted that Elmer had to have been offered food within four hours of the flight. This was in direct contrast with our supposed experts at IPM, who told us not to give Elmer any food starting about 12 hours before his flight. We fortunately had a small bag of food in case of emergency layover, and we offered it to him, and as I knew would be the case it was totally pointless. I wish we'd had churu, because there is some small chance he might have eaten that.

Second, they told us that if Elmer had an accident before he left Kauai, we'd have to come clean it up. That obviously meant he would miss his flight. IPM had never even acknowledged this possibility, and of course they'd made it more likely by having him sitting around for hours more.

But, we got our boy off, and I could already see he was increasingly scared, but we hoped that would soften when he actually got on planes, because contrary to myths about animal cargo transport, they're in a quiet, temperature-controlled area that's not different from the cabin.

And that was mostly the end of the bad part of the day. I mean, we were stressed for the next few hours, and I was jumping at every phone call, afraid it was Cargo calling to have us take Elmer back. Because I definitely didn't want to put us and Elmer through this trauma a second time. But the only time they called, when we were just almost out of Lihue, it was to check on the ID of the people picking Elmer up.

And we continued to be disappointed in IPM.

They'd told us we'd get updates as Elmer moved through his journey, but they oversold it. All we got was updates through Hawaiian's cargo app, which was sometimes delayed for minutes or hours after events occurred (e.g., we didn't see Elmed loaded on either plane until after the plane's departure time).

They'd implied they'd be taking care of him in Oahu on his long 5-hour layover there, but no, they never saw him, and we were told at that point that they only would if there was an accident and they needed to change out his bedding (he had extra rugs taped to the top of his carrier).

We assume that didn't happen, and that he got onto his plane to Boston fine, but there was no commo.

(If you wonder what IPM _actually_ did: they arranged Elmer's flights. They arranged a transport for him on the other side from the airport to his adopter's house, which would have been very difficult for us to do. They gave us a bunch of info on what we had to do for the flight re: paperwork and accommodations, but got a good chunk of it wrong. If our adopter had been able to pick Elmer up at the airport himself, it would 100% have been better to do everything ourself. Even with the need to figure out transport in Boston, we probably would have been better doing it ourself. There would have been more stress, as we would have been likely to worry that our interpretation of things was incorrect, and so we might have problems, as opposed to us assuming that IPM had it right until we were suddenly confronted with their newest mistake.

Oh, and if not clear when I listed out what IPM did: they did absolutely nothing on the actual trip. Our baby cat getting safely from Lihue to Boston was pretty much thanks to Hawaiian Air and no one else.

Anyway, I now wish we'd flown Elmer to Oahu ourself in baggage, stayed at a pet-friendly hotel, which I know there are some right at the airport, and then sent him on via cargo. But that little revelation didn't come to me until I saw his itinerary, which didn't include the overnight layover that they'd originally told us to expect, and so put him on the road for 22 hours straight including a long layover in Hawaiian's care.)

I was able to go to bed at around 11pm. Kimberly was not. But she woke me up around 2am to tell me that Elmer had arrived safely at his new dad's home and showed me a video of Elmer in Boston. (Elmer had apparently climbed under his bedding, something we hadn't anticipated when we taped it down front and back in the carrier, and of course had had an accident by the time he reached the end of his 22-hour-long-day, but the new adopter was able to deal with that all upon his arrival.)

So, hopefully the worst is over, though I'll be somewhat stressed until I hear Elmer is eating. But Elmer's new dad has been able to heft him around a bit without complaint (so that he could clean the carrier), and Elmer has been willing to wander out and about, though it sounds like he's mostly hiding.

Mango has been freaky since Elmer left. Yesterday when we got home from our early-morning send-off, he went and hid under the couch. Today when I got up, he was mrowing and racing around, and even got in the shower and all wet when I was preparing my morning ablutions. (He has literally never done that!) We suspect he realizes something weird happened yesterday and that there's something wrong and maybe even that his brother is missing. He'll calm down, I'm sure.

Megara seems less unconcerned, though she of course had a different relationship with Elmer. Both of the kits had what we now recognize as an abusive relationship with Elmer, since he randomly struck out at both of them. But for Mango it was confused with familial/long-time ties, and for Megara it was just terror. But she got to stay out in the house (as opposed to our bedroom) last night, which has been a fairly infrequent happening, just for a brief week or two when we tried to integrate her into the house before we realized that Elmer was constantly chasing and assaulting her, and just for a brief night or two more recently when we tried to settle into our new routine with Elmer locked downstairs, before Elmer's attack on Mango left him wounded and we realized a different solution was needed.

So we're picking up the pieces. I got a pretty small amount of work done yesterday, and I traded my tech-writing work I'd usually do today for later in the week, so that I could offer my best quality attention. I'll probably still be able to get some of my own work done today: I have a history of Modiphius from a few years ago that I'm trying to get updated, and I think I have the structure for the rest of it. Meanwhile, I hope to start to getting life back to its regular (new) rhythms. I mean, we've even had dirty dishes piling up for a few days, just because everything other than taking care of the move and doing my regular workdays was pushing a huge boulder up the hill.

Meanwhile, we seem to be getting some of the moisture from Hurricane Kiko this morning. Which is well appreciated. We had an almost California-dry summer on Kauai this year, which is very unusual. We definitely have a rainy season and a dry season, but even during the dry season we expect to see rain most weeks in some quantity. Instead the golf course near our house is brown, brown, browner than I've ever seen it. So the rain is appreciated. Hope to see more before Kiko passes by.