Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember?
Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 6th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally posted on December 6, 2010 in my now defunct blog.
Never Fly With a Cat
There are some adventures that you just have to experience for yourself. One such adventure is flying cross-country on an airplane with a cat. Sure, there are a few websites that suggested it’s a bad idea to fly with a cat. And just about everyone raised their eyebrows when my wife and I told them we were going to be flying from Boston to San Francisco with our beloved pet cat. But seriously, how bad could it possibly be?
The simple answer is that flying with a cat is worse than you can ever imagine. Have you ever seen a cat panting like a dog? How about drooling some sort of clear, mucous-like substance from his mouth? Or throwing up all over the inside of his Sherpa travel carrier at 38,000 feet? Gross!
What a disaster that flight was for our poor kitty. I’ve never seen so miserable and frightened an animal in my entire life. It was an awful trip for him and not so pleasant for us. Throughout the flight we were trying our best to comfort and reassure him while struggling to keep him inside his carrier from which he desperately wanted to escape.
At one point during the flight my wife had him sitting on her lap while I put a fresh “pee pee” pad inside the carrier, but one of the flight attendants told her that the cat had to be back in the carrier. “Sorry,” he said. “FAA regulations.” So I finished my clean up job and we put him into the carrier, and it was right about at that time that he chose to toss his cookies. Timing is everything.
Later we were petting and comforting him while making sure he was still mostly inside the carrier (his head was peeking out) when a nasty flight attendant told us the carrier had to be fully zipped. What a friggin’ bitch! We zipped him in for a minute or two until she went to the back of the plane and the cat started crying. Then we then unzipped the top of the carrier and resumed petting and, as best we could, comforting him. My wife was holding his head and stroking him through much of the flight, while I was cleaning up the mucous-like substance that was pretty much constantly drooling from his mouth.
Although he was a very unhappy kitty for most of the journey, in the end he managed to survive the traumatic flight from the east coast to the west coast. As did we.
He is now adjusting to his significantly downsized living space in San Francisco and he seems to be doing fine. As are we.
This, That, and the Other 
Must be very traumatic for you all.
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It was!
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Never to be repeated again.
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What a lovely boy. Ours won’t even get into a car, although one of them likes to sit *on* it.
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Nightmare, but hey at least all is good now and that’s the main thing 🙂 I used to have a cat that every time it was placed in a carrier it screamed till it was let out, people used to look at me at the vets and think l was being cruel!!
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Cats are not good travelers. On the other hand, our dog loves to go for a ride in the car.
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Scrappy used to be the same Fandango, sadly she can no longer get in and out of the car unaided, and sadder still we can no longer travel with her in the car 😦 But she loved road trips 🙂
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Hey. I don’t have one from 12/6 in either of the years I’ve been blogging. But, if you do one next week, I do have one from 12/13/17…which feels like it ought to be a lifetime ago given what all has happened between now and then!
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I will definitely have another next week. But if you don’t have one for 12/6, you can use one from the 6th of any month since you started your blog.
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Poor cat. It is interesting to me that you were able to have the cat in the passenger cabin with you. We’re not allowed to do that here. When we moved from South Australia to Tasmania our cat was flown over as cargo.
Polly, my present cat, has never flown but she has had to do a couple of long car trips, most recently from my old house to my new one. I had her in her carrier in my sister’s car and when we stopped at her house, which is about a third of the way there I let Polly out because it was a hot day and we thought she should have some water. It was a bad move. she hid under a cabinet and I had quite a job getting her out. I had to drag her out in the end and she was very upset as was I but we still had over three hours journey and needed to be there by dark so I had no choice. Last summer when we were evacuated from home due to bushfire I had to repeatedly stuff her into her container to move to a safer location. I didn’t like having her in a car for hours but again there was no choice. Luckily she soon got over the trauma.
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Small dogs and cats are allowed (or at least they were when I originally wrote this) in the passenger compartment on flights as long as they are in a carrier. Our cat also soon got over the trauma of the trip, which was very traumatic for all of us!
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Poor kitty! Mine can barely survive a 7 minute car ride to the vet. He howls as if his life is ending. Can’t wait to move him to our new apartment tomorrow! 😱
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Good luck with that!
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You certainly painted this sad little episode very well. Our late and much lamented cat had to be sedated just to get him into his carrier for the fortunately rare trips to the vet. I can’t imagine a transcontinental foray…
Here’s my post from a year ago. Genetic testing for both consumer and medical reasons has, of course, continued to soar. It’s even used to determine what breeds a rescue dog or cat are comprised of!
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A very interesting post.
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Thanks, Fandango. I responded to your comment there.
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My vet told me that most of the “dog” and “cat” DNA tests are phony. That all they do is guess by looking at the animal. We can already do THAT.
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Yeah, I know that cats don’t like to travel.. what a nice picture of it!
Here is mine from December 6 2018 on my GiftSmart site: http://www.giftsmart.com/purple-on-the-water/
Thank you for this! 🙂
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Here’s one from Mar. 6 2019
about THE BLUENOSE a Canadian Sailing icon
https://jengoldie493473930.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/the-bluenose-a-canadian-icon-queen-of-the-grand-banks-and-her-captain-angus-walters/
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I had, or a Siamese had me, who loved going out walking on a leash. She also fetched things for me. But I started her as a kitten. She loved the car and meeting new people. I guess she learned early to trust me. Unusual for a cat they say. She had her cat ways though. She hated the Vet and bit him more than once lol I don’t like doctors either so I couldn’t blame her. I’d love to have bitten him a few times.
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Our cat was a stray at the time we took him in. He was about a year old, so his nature, and antipathy for travel was apparently there when we made him part of our family. But he does, hiss, growl, spit at, and bite the vet when we take him there.
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Smart cat 🙂 I still miss mine. But she was very special. I was lucky she’d have me. She was 6 months old when I got her.
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I’ve been thinking about getting a fancy cat; I used to have a chocolate-point Siamese (who had been wandering around a pet store and met us at the door — not a certified pure-breed, they gave him to us). We moved him from the Midwest to Silicon Valley. It must’ve been via cargo… I remember nothing of traveling with him. Oh, yes. We shipped also some furniture and a car, while we drove there in our other car. Wow… I don’t remember what went on for the cat. Was he shipped via truck? Obviously, we took days traveling across the Rockies.
Yeah, we didn’t adopt him because he was fancy. He was friendly. He was well worth spending the first couple days pulling fleas off of and out of his fur.
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Wow! That’s a great story 🙂 My siamese wasn’t a highly bred either. She was a Blue Point.
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We had purebred Siamese cats for years, but when Mao died, I just couldn’t get another. We got a gorgeous golden Abyssinian … and when HE died (12 years later), I felt we’d had the best cats in the world an couldn’t do it again. But Siamese are so much fun and they talk.
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I’ve been owned by 5 felines. All wonderful and lived between 13 and 18 years. None of them were as animated as my Pyewackette (My Siamese) but all very loving. I think it depends on who’s taking care of them as far as communication goes. Pye was a real chatter and accepted almost anything from me.
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We could have whole conversations with our Siamese (we had three, at one point). They were so quirky and so much fun. Here, cats are a problem. We have a doggy door and hey could get outside … and housecats don’t last long here. Too many predators. I think about it, but I don’t think so.
When we had cats, everything breakable was already broken. In the interim, we’ve accumulated lots of breakables … and kittens … well … you know. They are “let’s knock this over and see what happens” kind of fur kids.
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I could talk for days about my girls. It’s true if you don’t want it broken you put it high enough (But sometimes thats not high enough lol) I had sheers at one point…….ACK! Pye even brought those down trying to climb them. But they were fun and interesting times. Pye loved her leash. I say wanna go out and she’d go to it. Damn I miss her after what? over 30 years? Sorry.
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Ours talk to us when he’s hungry.
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We had to fly our Newfoundland and the vet gave us a tranquilizer for him. The only problem was we should have put him in the rear seat of the car first. It took me and my son to lift him in a doped up state. He was big! We took the three cats by car and they didn’t like it but were ok.
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We brought our cat all the way from Montréal to Guinea, when we moved there. She was a bit overweight, and to be sure that the airline would let us take her with us in the airplane, my parents had bought a cardboard carrier (lighter than the plastic version). We also gave her some cat sleeping pills, but our timing was a little off. And she woke up, absolutely furious to be trapped in a cardboard box, and clawed her way out of it. She shredded the whole carrier just when we were about to check in. We obviously had to leave her behind for our first year abroad…
Cats and planes… try it, at your own risks.
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Wow. Poor kitty.
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Oh yeah, it was epic… My brother and I cried a whole lot during that first flight from Montreal to Brussels! The good news is that we got to take the kitty back with us the next year (using a much stronger built carrier 😉 )
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I reuse posts often, but I inevitably rewrite them, sometimes to such an extent that they aren’t recognizable by EVEN me. I figure they rerun stuff on TV all the time. It’s my stuff. So can I. But then I get into making it relevant to what’s going on NOW and by the time I fix one paragraph, I have to fix the next one. So a rerun for me is never entirely a rerun — though some are more set than other. Jonestown is run every year on the same date (November 18th) because it’s a story that new readers need to know about. We are losing our own history and replacing it with mythology and outright lies. I still think that’s a BIG part of the problems we are having.
The late novelist Michael Crichton said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
“History teaches us not only about the leaves of existence; it teaches about twigs, branches, trunks and roots of life.” -https://www.dailydemocrat.com/2018/02/23/clergy-corner-if-you-dont-know-history-you-dont-know-anything/
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Please, count the typos. WHY don’t they give us an edit option?
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You mean typos in comments? Way back when, when I was using blogger, there was an option to preview a comment before posting it. That was a way to catch some typos before the comments were posted. I recommended to the Happiness Engineers that they add that functionality to WordPress, but the seem to have ignored my suggestion.
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They ignore ALL our suggestions. It’s their “thing.”
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Okay. One is up tomorrow. Mostly not changed. Mostly.
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It sounds like that was quite the experience. Glad you all “survived” and settled into your new home.
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It was an ordeal, for sure.
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Two words: “Kitty Valium”. I had a biggish sized dog (for me she was a biggish dog) who got car sick. And would vomit. The vet gave me some tranquilizers which helped a lot. She still drooled, but at least she wasn’t yakking on my upholstery…
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