The Long Tale of Mr. Tippy
Winner of the 2024 Cat Writers’ Association Muse Medallion for a Long Form Entertainment Article
Tom and I are often asked at parties to “tell the story of Mr. Tippy.” Here it is at last, reconstructed in diary format from Facebook posts, frantic emails, and family photos.
The Long Tale of Mr. Tippy begins in Orland, California, in the winter of 2014.
Our friend Arlin was in the midst of rehabilitating and rehoming more than two dozen cats whose loving owner had died two years earlier. We urged her to advertise them on Facebook, as we had with Mr. Cat.
The first cat Arlin posted in February 2015 was a charming little Manx named Tinkerbell. She seemed perfect for our household. I was interested in a second cat, a tuxedo-ish male named Mr. Tippy, but Tom thought that bringing another male cat into our household would be too much trouble. Reluctantly, I agreed.
Our plan was to drive from Seattle to the Bay Area to pick up Tinkerbell from Arlin. The Friday before, Arlin went up to Orland (the town where the cats were living) to get Tinkerbell along with a second cat, an orange female, who was to be adopted by a mutual friend of ours in Seattle. The deal was that Tom would drive back with both cats.
Once Arlin got to Orland, the problems began. She put Tinkerbell into a carrier, but she couldn’t catch Simba, the orange cat. When she called me, I suggested that she grab a nearly identical-looking cat named Droopy instead.
This advice would come back to haunt me.
Arlin then mentioned that she had been able to catch Mr. Tippy and wouldn’t I like to adopt him as well? He wouldn’t be any trouble, she said.
I said yes.
And thus the $38,000 “Long Tale of Mr. Tippy” got underway.
In addition to Arlin, her husband, Michael, and us, the saga would involve two Wiccans, a federal judge, a mobile Honda repair person, one of Tom’s ex-girlfriends, several contractors, our heating company, our electrician, Seattle Animal Control, our vet, the family that tried to adopt the orange cat (see Perdita’s story), the local emergency vet, Swedish Hospital, our State Farm Insurance agent, and a dozen friends and neighbors. In the following five weeks weeks, four of these people would be bitten by cats (fortunately, not the insurance agent).
Here’s how it all went down. From our point of view. Mr. Tippy still refuses to talk about it, and soon you’ll see why.
The Trip Back from California
On Friday, Arlin drove Tippy, Tinkerbell, and Droopy from Orland to her home in the Bay Area. She then realized they were infested with fleas. She decided to bathe them before letting them into her guest room. During the bathing, Mr. Tippy, who suffered from badly decayed teeth, panicked and bit her. A day later, Arlin had to go to the hospital to get the bite treated.
On Monday, the Bay Area vet who saw the freshly bathed Tink and Tippy decided they both needed immediate dental surgery. So Tom delayed his drive to California for a few days while this got dealt with. In the meantime, the friend taking the substitute orange cat, named Droopy, drove down and picked her up.
Tom headed down to California on Thursday to collect Tinkerbell and Tippy. At this time, our elderly deaf white cat, Sheba, was going into kidney failure. I needed to give her subcutaneous fluids. With Tom gone, our neighbor Jerry came over to help me. Jerry knew a lot about how to give sub-cu fluids, but he underestimated Sheba. She bit him—savagely—and he dashed off to the local emergency room.
I raced off to the local wine shop to get a nice bottle of wine as gift from the supposedly apologetic Sheba to Jerry.
We got a thank you card from Jerry the next day. He wrote: “Sheba, thank you for the bottle of wine. You have quite good taste for a cat. I hope that you are doing better with your sub-q fluids these days. I know that it’s not a pleasant experience for you, but your parents are just trying to help keep your appetite up. I know that you did not mean to bite me and it really wasn’t too smart of me to put my hand near your chompers while you were struggling. I hope that we can remain on good terms in the future.”
Meanwhile, down in the Bay Area, Tom had loaded up Tink, Tippy, and their post-surgery antibiotics and headed north to Seattle. He stopped for the night at the home of an old girlfriend in rural Oregon. Candy rescues large dogs, so her house wasn’t a safe place for the cats. Tom had a litter box in the car, so he let Tippy and Tink out of their carriers (on my advice, which I soon would regret) and left them in the car for the night.
When he went out to the car in the morning, Tinkerbell was sitting there, looking at him.
Mr. Tippy was gone.
Tom’s cell phone didn’t work in the rural environment, so he went into Candy’s house and called me on the landline. I quietly freaked out.
Tom and Candy had already put Tink back in her carrier and were searching the car for Mr. Tippy—all the while being careful to insure that he didn’t leap out of some hiding place and race into the forest. Knowing what we now know about Mr. Tippy, it’s a miracle that didn’t happen, in which case he’d have been coyote food and I wouldn’t be writing this story.
Tom and Candy realized that Mr. Tippy might have worked his way out of the car via the dashboard. But they kept hunting and, sure enough, they found the cat inside the dashboard wiring, wrapped around the steering column. He wasn’t moving. They thought it was possible he was dead.
“Don’t start the car,” I shrieked when Tom called me in Seattle with this status report.
We set about trying to find someone to take apart the dashboard. On a Sunday. In rural Oregon. Candy had an appointment in town, so now Tom was on his own at her house full of barking dogs, with a car he couldn’t drive, and his only mode of communication was the landline in her house.
I started making calls. The regional fire department near Cottage Grove wasn’t interested. The only Honda dealer anywhere nearby handled only motorcycles, and wasn’t open on Sunday. The nearby animal shelters couldn’t help. Desperate, I posted the following on Facebook:
URGENT REQUEST: Cottage Grove OREGON — Do you know an individual with tools who could help rescue a cat stuck in a tight place? The cat is not doing well and may be in respiratory distress. My partner is in Oregon with the cat, I’m in Seattle. He has talked with PD, FD, etc. and, with the exception of 911, they are out for the weekend. It’s a small town, no animal rescue. We need socket wrenches to get the cat out, and…it’s a long story, but…please contact me via Facebook if you can help.
I finally found a mobile Honda mechanic up in Eugene who was willing to drive down to Cottage Grove and help free Mr. Tippy.
“Let me give you my credit card number,” I said, intending to prove we weren’t flakes.
“I only take cash,” he replied.
Gulp. I knew Tom didn’t have much cash on him. But I told the mechanic to head on down, and I got back on the phone. Fortunately, our friends Marilyn Mauer and John Hedtke lived in Eugene at the time. They were out shopping, but were willing to hit a cash machine, head down to Cottage Grove, find Candy’s house, and pay the mechanic.
John texted me: “Talked to Tom, bought a socket set, and we’re now at home dropping things off and picking up more tools…Oh, I also grabbed a cat carrier in case we needed one for some reason.”
(Note: John is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Disaster Preparedness. Exactly who you need on your side when a cat is stuck in your dashboard.)
**FACEBOOK UPDATE** We now have two sources of assistance headed to help Tom and the cat in Cottage Grove. Thank you all very much!
And I had contacted a 24-hour emergency vet in Springfield, Oregon, in case Mr. Tippy needed treatment.
The mechanic took apart the dashboard of our Honda Fit and removed the terrified and traumatized cat—who nearly escaped when the carrier collapsed while they were trying to get him into it. But eventually John got Mr. Tippy secured, and the mechanic got the dashboard reassembled (well, there were a few parts left over, but the car continued to function without them).
**FACEBOOK UPDATE** Cat has been freed and seems OK (physically at least). Pictures at 11. Again, thank you to everyone. John Hedtke and Marilyn Mauer are our heroes.
Tom headed for Seattle. I texted Arlin: “Mr. Tippy has been freed, seems to be OK, has been given a painkiller and placed in the carrier. I’m headed out to do errands up here. I have Mr. Tippy-proofed the basement, including a latch for the pantry door, and a box for him to hide in behind the sofa. Some day we will look back on this and laugh.”
No, we wouldn’t. Just wait…
Tom arrived in Seattle, where he brought the two cat carriers into the basement guestroom. This is a cozy room where we have successfully housed several cats and kittens over the years. That’s important to note because of what happened next.
Tom opened the first carrier, and Tink walked out and looked around. He opened the second carrier and Mr. Tippy exploded into the air and vanished.
Mr. Tippy Is in the House. Or Is He?
March 2, 2015—Facebook post—While new-cat Tinkerbell settles in to our TV room with much purring and cuddling, Mr. Tippy has…disappeared. Again. Without doing anything loud or invasive, we’ve searched the TV room thoroughly, cubic foot by cubic foot. No Mr. Tippy. And yet, the cat must be…somewhere—if only in the ceiling.
I took an old laptop, an old XBoxLive USB camera, and a 30-day demo of SecuritySpy software, and set up a web-served “Tippycam” in the TV room. It was trained on the cat food dish and the litter box. You could watch from any web-connected device, so the Tippycam was running in the background on our computers, and I had it on my iPad. I drafted my mom, in Florida, to monitor the TIppycam in the early morning hours when were asleep, the house was quiet, and Tippy was most likely to emerge from wherever he was hiding.
No sign of Mr. Tippy. We began to wonder if he had somehow gotten out of the house:
March 3, 2015—I drove down to Home Depot and rented an infra-red camera, hoping that it would pick up Tippy’s body heat in the wall or ceiling. It was of no help.
March 4, 2015—Facebook post—The search for Tippy continues. Today’s excitement: Furnace company coming to dismantle ductwork in ceiling of basement…Four bookcases have been packed into boxes and moved.
March 5, 2015—Tinkerbell vanished into one of the holes in the drywall, but Tom got her out and we’ve put her into my office. Now we could monitor the cat food, water, and litterbox in Mr. Tippy’s hideout. No sign of Mr. Tippy. At this point, we began to suspect he had somehow gotten out of the house.
March 6, 2015—Facebook post—I have mixed feelings about being out here on the Olympic Peninsula at a writing retreat while Mr. Tippy is still missing and Tom is at home coordinating the search, which has moved deeper into the walls. Tom’s doing everything that can be done, and we check in when phone reception allows. But I feel very sad.
March 12, 2015—We were distracted from the hunt for Mr. Tippy by the not-unexpected death of our amazing deaf white cat, Sheba the White Tornado, from kidney disease, March 12.
After taking Sheba for her last trip to the vet, we drove down to visit the family who’d adopted Droopy. (Remember Droopy?) They’d posted on Facebook that she was not the friendly cat they had hoped for, and was not fitting in with their bird and dog, and they would be taking her to the Humane Society. I felt responsible for her, so we went down to get her. We found her completely freaked out (there is an explanation for this, which will come later). When I picked her up to put her in the carrier, she bit right through my hand. I headed for Urgent Care to get antibiotics.
Droopy’s family obtained a large cage that could be closed using a string when the cat went inside to eat.
Meanwhile, the heating company reinstalled the ductwork in our basement ceiling so we could use the heater.
March 15, 2015—Droopy took the bait, and we picked her up in her cage in the evening. We got her home and put the cage in the hallway outside our bedroom. When I tried to slip a litter box in the cage, the cat blew right past me and dove into a closet. Now we had a cat hiding in the second floor as well as one (possibly) hiding in the basement.
March 16, 2015—Facebook post—The Hunt for Mr. Tippy, Day 14. We’ve been told to check the stuffing and interiors of all our sofas and chairs. We ripped apart the old hideabed in the basement, and now are carefully checking the underside of our leather Dania couch in the living room. Sure enough, the loose-weave fabric that covers the hollow interior beneath the seating area had been pulled off on one corner, enough to allow a cat to slither inside. So we ripped off the rest of the webbing and found this:
Twenty-five cat toys…and one quarter. Apparently our cats had been systematically tucking toys up into the sofa. For years. We found one feather toy, 8 mice, 8 crinkle toys, and 7 handmade catnip-filled puffs. What’s mysterious is that Zoe (our big tabby) is the one who plays with puffs. But her sister Kaylee (the small tabby we lost last year) was the one who fetched and carried crinkle toys. Did they collaborate on this project? Sheba (our big white cat, who died just a few days ago) didn’t play with toys, yet there was a lot of white fur near the hiding place. Was this some household-wide feline conspiracy? Now that Kaylee and Sheba are gone, we’ll have to see if Zoe tries to hide any more toys…
Oh, BTW, there was no sign of the still-elusive Mr. Tippy.
March 18, 2015—Droopy was still in the upstairs closet, eating food, using the litter box, and coming out two or three times during the night to serenade us. Since we knew we were going to change her awful name, we decided to call her Perdita, after the opera singer in Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade. Perdita X was a young opera virtuoso who stood in the wings and sang while her less talented (but skinny, blonde) friend lip-synched onstage. We thought this was just about perfect.
To recap: At this point, we have Tinkerbell living in my office on the main floor, Perdita in the closet on the second floor and (maybe) Mr. Tippy in the ceiling in the basement.
March 22, 2015—By now our basement was an absolute shambles. Ripped drywall on the floor, huge gaps in the ceiling, insulation and wires dangling everywhere. I would go down periodically and tuck towels sprayed with Feliway, a cat-calming substance, into the ceiling. Finally, I smelled cat urine in the ceiling and was convinced Mr. Tippy had died there. We called our friend Hank, who rushed over with a Dremel tool, climbed up on my Craftsman desk, and began carefully taking more drywall off the ceiling.
“There he is!” Tom yelled. “Grab him!”
We looked up and caught a glimpse of a white-and-black cat in the ceiling.
But Hank, already leaning far off the desk, couldn’t quite reach Tippy. The cat retreated further into the rafters. We could see two eyes. He was alive!
I put food in the ceiling, which remained untouched. The next morning, we called Seattle Animal Control. They dispatched Officer Jackson, who spotted Mr. Tippy.
“Mr. Tippy, you come here,” he coaxed, as he put the long extension tool with the loop at the end into the ceiling. But after several attempts, Officer Jackson changed tactics. He set up a cage trap, baited with food, on my desk. He predicted that if we all went away and were quiet, Mr. Tippy would come down during the night.
Wrong.
I posted on Facebook: We found Mr. Tippy. And, to our astonishment, he’s still alive and moving around. And still hiding our our basement ceiling. Well, actually, in a section of the ceiling — the little that’s now left of our ceiling — obscured by a tangle of heating ducts and the main beam that runs beneath the middle of the house. When we uncovered his hiding place, he stuck his head out, looked at us, and backed away, out of reach. He is not coming out.
We’ve taken pictures of him, but yesterday he eluded a very patient and kind gentleman from Seattle Animal Control who spent 90 minutes trying to extract the cat. Mr. Tippy showed no interest in the Animal Control trap baited with food we left out all last night. He has never touched the food we’ve left in the basement every day for the past three weeks, so we have to assume he’s starving and dehydrated. At our vet’s advice, today we surrounded the area he’s in with rags soaked in Feliway (it soothes cats) and placed food and water into the ceiling, about four feet from where he is, in the hopes that he’ll eat.
Your good wishes are appreciated. We’ll report back in the morning.
At this point, our vet told us to forget about the trap, just put food and water in the ceiling. I did, but the food and water went untouched, and now there was no sign of Mr. Tippy. I realized the cat must be hiding out next to the main beam under the living room floor. So I asked two contractor friends to help me cut a hole through our living room floor so we could reach down and grab him from above. They refused—fortunately, as you’ll find out if you read further.
Hundreds of friends on Facebook were following this situation. We were getting all sorts of well-intentioned advice (as well as some rather unhinged suggestions). Our friend Kier contacted me by private message and said she thought she could get Tippy down. Kier has an uncanny sense about animals. I told her to come on over and do her magic.
March 24, 2015—Kier walked into the basement guest room—now an avalanche of shredded drywall—and announced, “He’s not in here.” Then she opened the door to our garage and pointed at the insulated ceiling beams. I gasped. There was something very heavy up in the ceiling insulation.
Kier and Tom and I tiptoed around, quietly placing a step-ladder beneath the bulging insulation. I climbed up the steps and shoved my hands into the insulation to prevent Tippy from crawling back into the guest room ceiling where he’d been hiding. Meanwhile Kier and Tom tore down the insulation, pulled the struggling cat down my back, and dumped him into the carrier we had at the ready.
Of course, it was now 6 p.m. and our vet had just closed for the day. Yelling our thanks to Kier, Tom and I put the carrier in the car and raced to the nearest 24-hour emergency vet. I called ahead to let them know what we were bringing in. When we arrived, I was hysterical. Mr. Tippy was very quiet. They took him in back and returned to report that he was perfectly fine, just dehydrated. They hydrated him and fed him and I begged them to keep him overnight because I was sure something must be terribly wrong. They gave him a bath (he was covered in old insulation) and we picked him up the next day. Here’s what Tippy and I looked like:
Following the sage advice of our friend Morna, we put Tippy in Perdita’s cage (now in my office), and gave him a cardboard box to hide in. Tink seemed pleased to see him.
Within an hour of Tippy’s arrival, Perdita emerged from her upstairs hideout and entered my office. I have never seen a cat so visibly relieved. She immediately moved into the office, and all three cats lived there for a good while until they were ready to explore the rest of the house. But not the basement. I closed the door to that guest room and left it closed for the next two years.
A week later we took Tippy to our vet for a followup on his tooth surgery. They discovered the Bay Area vet had used non-dissolving sutures and the poor cat had been tormented by all the sutures in his mouth. Our vet removed them.
There you have it. The Long Tale of Mr. Tippy.
A Bit About the Aftermath
Insurance. Remember I said four folks had been bitten? The story mentions Arlin (during Tiippy’s flea bath); Jerry (during Sheba’s sub-cu fluid injection) and me (while trying to get Perdita from her first placement). The fourth bite victim was Kier, who bravely said nothing about it at the time. Tom and I were busy rushing Mr. Tippy to the emergency vet. But it turned out that Tippy had chomped Kier on his way down from the ceiling, and she went to the nearby hospital emergency room for antibiotics.
A few months later, when I tried to pay her ER bill, the hospital wanted to charge me twice what they would charge Kier’s insurer because I wasn’t an insurance company with negotiated prices. So I called my home insurance company, State Farm. They informed me my policy covered only one animal attack for the life of the policy. Since a cat bite is relatively minor, I told them to forget I’d ever called, and I paid the hospital directly.
Home Repairs. It turns out that Mr. Tippy’s escapade probably saved our lives. Two years after the search for Mr. Tippy, we hired a contractor who completely redesigned and rebuilt the demolished guest room/workroom area into something quite lovely. We ran gas pipes for a fireplace insert upstairs, redid all the wiring, added a luxury vinyl floor, put up drywall, and installed fancy canister lighting. The very last piece of work involved mounting two wall lamps on the main wall that runs under the middle of the house—exactly the area where Mr. Tippy had taken refuge on his way into the garage ceiling.
But…the electrician couldn’t find any studs in the wall. The contractor was incredulous. He tore open that wall—the only wall we hadn’t opened during the Tippy hunt—and discovered the previous owner of our house had for some reason removed all the studs in the wall that supports the main beam of the house. The contractor, recently recovered from a heart attack, looked as though he were about to have another one. Needless to say, he had to rip down that wall, put in studs, and re-do the drywall.
Mr. Tippy is completely worth it.
~ END ~
April 1, 2015—Check out the paws. This was the first time we saw Tippy in what we now know is his characteristic pose: Hanging 10.
April 10, 2015—Cleaning up, post-taxes, this morning I stuffed a document into the shredder under my desk. I didn’t realize that Mr. Tippy was sleeping down there, behind the wastebasket. When the shredder roared into action, a terrified Tippy leaped onto my desk chair—which spun, and threw him across the room. He landed in the cats’ food and water bowls, all of which he knocked over in the process of clawing his way across the room and out the door to parts unknown.
Two hours later Mr. Tippy reappeared and took shelter on the desk behind my computer. I told him the shredder is now permanently exiled to the garage.
October 1, 2015—We were really cautious about letting the new cats, referred to as “The Orlands” outdoors where Max, the neighborhood cat, and Zoe, our older cat, spent their days. This is their first picture outside:
2016: Mr. Tippy Settles In
Feb. 26, 2016—Mr. Tippy has been deeply traumatized by the application of ear medicine. We did one ear, and then, somehow, he was gone—managing, as he fled, to throw the medicine container (and its lid), and all four cotton-ball applicators onto the floor. He has not been seen since. Tinkerbell ate his dinner.
2017: MR. TIPPY EXPLORES
Oct. 10, 2017—For the black and white challenge:
2018: ONWARD WITH MR. TIPPY
April 18, 2018—Mr. Tippy achieves new heights. The woodblock print in the background is by Lilian May Miller.
April 21, 2018—Mr. Tippy continues to explore the living room furniture:
April 30, 2018—The refinishers just left with our Danish modern cherry dining room table. Mr. Tippy is sitting in the living room, staring at the blank place in the dining room in horror. I finally realized that he is wondering how he will get his treats at 9 p.m. because he usually gets them on the dining table. (Not to worry, Mr. Tippy fans: Tom and I will bring a plastic folding table up from the basement for everyone, including Mr. Tippy, to use.)
May 3, 2018—Mr. Tippy photobombs the wisteria shot:
2019: ZoolandeR
July 29, 2019—back porch railing
2020: MR. Tippy At Home
May 18, 2020—Why not? asks Mr. Tippy
June 21, 2020—Mr. Tippy, garden meatloaf:
2021: MR. TIPPY abides
Jan. 12, 2021—Mr. Tippy’s surgery to remove pre-cancerous areas from his ears (and, well, most of his ears) went well. We brought him home and put him in the Mr. Tippy Suite (where the World’s Best Cat now lives) and he reprised his famous performance of six years ago: flying around the room wild-eyed. But this time he was unable to wedge himself into the ceiling and is instead staring at us from under a bookcase. He looks absolutely ghastly (they shaved his head) but we are confident that he will calm down and start eating. The World’s Best Cat is looking at us as if we had just assigned him Vincent Van Gogh as his roommate.
Update: We got Tippy home at 3:15 p.m.. Tom went down at 4:30 to see if Tippy had eaten the food we left out. I heard “AUGGGGGGGGGGGGH!” followed by clatter-clatter-clatter, whoooooooooooosh, clatter-clatter. And then Tom again, “He’s REALLY FAST.”
Tom was rather shaken. Apparently, he’d opened the door expecting to see the cat on the floor, but Tippy was across the room atop a bookcase. Tippy took a flying leap, traveling over Tom’s head, into the hallway and then bounding up a flight of stairs into the kitchen. From there it was down the hallway and up the second flight of stairs to the bedroom. I saw Tippy as he went past my office door and the speed was astonishing.
Tippy is now on the second floor, under the bed. And, yes, he had eaten his food. And under the bed (rather than cowering behind furniture) is a total win.
We are planning to use the garage as an airlock for the next two weeks.
April 26, 2021—Every spring we get photo ops of Mr. Tippy on the mantelpiece. Here he embraces a sculpture by Bryan Barrett. Check out the April 26, 2023 image, as well. This is currently the earliest picture on the website that shows Tippy with his stylishly trimmed ears.
2022: Mr. Tippy SLOWS DOWN A BIT
Feb. 22, 2022—Mr. Tippy came through his radioactive iodine treatment (for hyperactive thyroid) successfully and is perhaps just a bit less hyper. He can now sit still on my desk for several minutes without walking across the keyboard and activating iTunes.
March 4, 2022—Mr. Tippy likes to bed down on books or piles of paper. We think he found the right household.
May 10, 2022—Mr. Tippy has left his GPS collar somewhere in the gray zone between Bluetooth access and Wi-Fi access. The hunt for the collar continues in the morning. Last time, the GPS tracking company, Jiobit, located the lost collar using a satellite network and sent us a photo. We’ve appealed to them for help again. Never a dull moment with Mr. Tippy…
[NOTE: Thanks to Bluetooth, Mr. Tippy’s GPS collar was located and recovered in the depths of the bramble thicket in a neighbor’s overgrown sideyard. Ouch.]
June 28, 2022—Tired of annoying the neighbors when we try to call in the cat at curfew, I’ve started yelling “Mr. Tippy! Party of one! Your table is ready!”
August 28, 2022—Mr. Tippy mistakes a laptop for a lap. He was not able to log in.
Sept. 18, 2022—We watched while Mr. Tippy tried to decide between going inside to get dinner and staying outside past curfew to piss us off. The cat nearly had steam coming out his ears from the effort.
2023: MR. TIPPY IS A neighborhood fixture
March 30, 2023—We’re in Florida. Mr. Tippy’s home in Seattle with a cat sitter. What could possibly go wrong?
This Mr. Tippy story starts with a Jiobit GPS cat tracker and ends with a call to the police.
Before Tom headed down to meet me in Florida, he made sure Mr. Tippy’s GPS cat tracker collar was fully charged. Unfortunately, he forgot to put the collar back on Mr. Tippy.
Our cat sitter arrived later in the morning and opened the back door to let the cats run in and out. It wasn’t until she was getting ready to gather them all in, around 5 p.m., that she realized she hadn’t seen Mr. Tippy all day. Then she looked at the cat tracker app on her phone and realized the tracker was suspiciously still at 100%. And then she realized the tracker was sitting on the kitchen counter, still in the charger.
There was no way for her to locate the notoriously elusive Mr. Tippy. She just had to wait and hope he got hungry.
She called, she waited by the back door, she called some more. No Tippy. Finally, at 7 p.m., she texted us with the bad news.
I checked the Wyze security camera that is trained on the cat shelter under my office. Oddly, Tippy hadn’t been through there all day.
By 9 p.m. Seattle time, there was still no sign of Mr. Tippy, who spends a lot of his time hiding in a gigantic shrub in the overgrown yard just across the alley.
Tippy likes our neighbors, so I texted two neighbors for help. They went out with flashlights while the cat sitter stayed inside (we thought Tippy might be avoiding her). I now had three text chats going.
Of course, 10 minutes into the cat hunt, the sitter found the collarless Tippy hiding under the bed where, apparently, he’d spent the entire day (snacking from a bowl of dry cat food).
She texted me with the good news. But…the story wasn’t over!
The neighbors, prowling around with flashlights in search of Tippy, had discovered a break-in. The house on the corner—a property that sold to a developer a year ago but has sat empty since then—has a squatter. The neighbors found the basement door wide open, and evidence that people were using the yard as a bathroom.
The neighbor called the police non-emergency line to report the break-in, then tracked down the real estate agent and asked them to have the developer secure the place.
We think it’s amazing what Mr. Tippy can do without even leaving the house.
(BTW, the cat sitter got the tracker collar back on him, for which she deserves combat pay.)
April 26, 2023—I’m back in Florida, but Tom has sent me this photo of Mr. Tippy doing his annual April dusting of the mantelpiece. Note the brown fur on his chin; yes, Mr. Tippy is possibly a male calico. (He is also wearing his GPS tag upside-down. Sigh.)
Oct. 27, 2023—Tracker woes: Mr. Tippy went out today wearing his Tractive tracker. The app showed him ranging through eight neighbors’ yards. I find it suspicious that when he wears the Tractive, we see this detailed data but when he wears the Jiobit, it just shows him going back and forth between our yard and the overgrown yard across the alley. The Jiobit (Tile) folks are definitely skimping on their data! They used to be very accurate and timely, but now…bleh. I just wish the new Tractive device, now much lighter, were also less bulky.
2024: MR. TIPPY GETS HIS DNA RESULTS
May 12, 2024—This is my annual warning to friends with cats and screened windows, especially anyone who moved over the winter and is dealing with a new place, or a new cat: Cats can easily push spring-held screens out of a window and escape or fall. Mr. Tippy figured this out a few years ago with the large, flexible screen in our kitchen window, pushing out a corner, leaping out, and mysteriously turning up outside in the morning. It took us a day or two to uncover his modus operandi, as the screen snapped right back into place after he departed.
I now secure the kitchen screen with a exterior wood “bar” over the base of the screen. Upstairs I have purchased cheap expandable screens from the hardware store that I attach with screws to the window frame to prevent Tippy from tampering with the larger, flexible screens.
Now, back to the garden where I am ripping extraneous wood hyacinths out of the front garden beds and attempting to remove overgrown heathers.
May 19, 2024—About once a month Tippy refuses to come in at 5 pm and instead hides out in the overgrown jungle across the alley. We can catch glimpses of him, and see his general location through his tracker app. This is what happened tonight, so instead of going out for a salmon dinner at the Lockspot I sat out front and yelled for Tippy while Tom brought home some takeout from Katsu Burger. The cat eventually appeared at the back door and we plied him with treats. Reprimands don’t work with cats.
UPDATE: Rabbits. He’s hunting rabbits.
July 20, 2024—Mr. Tippy is fine. Tom had texted me at the Two Hour Transport outdoor reading today with the news that Tippy was limping and favoring his left front paw. I figured it was either a sprain (not serious) or a bite/abscess (potentially serious, and thus requiring immediate veterinary attention). After I got home, and we ate dinner, we went upstairs to investigate. The leg seemed fine, but I found, between two of Tippy’s toes, a rose thorn. It came right out, and Mr. Tippy seems much happier. Whew.
Sept. 3, 2024—Annie the Pirate Kitten is adjusting relatively well to the vet-mandated plastic cone she is wearing post-surgery. They assured me they sedated her, but she’s trotting around with her usual enthusiasm. I went to let Mr. Tippy in for dinner and she scampered over to greet him at the door. Tippy took one look at the Monster with the Plastic Head, turned tail, and fled into the yard.
Sept 26, 2024—Mr. Tippy’s DNA test results!
When I worked as a cat columnist for Rover.com, I wrote an article comparing the two major pet DNA-testing companies (Basepaws and Wisdom Panel). Tinkerbell and Toby were the test cats. Both turned out to be mostly Western breeds (Tink looks like a Japanese bobtail, but her short tail turns out to be the result of Manx genes).
While I thought Wisdom Panel provided more detailed results, the home-testing procedure for Basepaws is easier (read: not life-threatening to the human). So I later used Basepaws to test Max the neighborhood cat. Max was, as everyone expected, American Shorthair/Maine Coon/Siberian. (Toby had turned out to be part La Perm, and has the curly undercoat of that recent Oregon-based breed.)
We did not test Mr. Tippy at the time because we were, quite frankly, afraid we’d discover he was an alien.
Well, we finally did it, and here’s the reveal: Mr. Tippy is a mostly Western cat, primarily Ragdoll with some Siberian. The surprise was that he has significant Peterbald (hairless cat with huge ears) DNA as well. Mr. Tippy has the abundant Ragdoll fur. He used to have the large Peterbald ears, until he got skin cancer from California sun exposure and both ears were trimmed short by our vet!
The tests did not find any significant genetic links to major cat diseases—with one exception: Mr. Tippy is at risk for serious tooth disease, both periodontal and resorption. They were right on the mark: As a result of those conditions, Mr. Tippy (now 17) has only one tooth left (a front lower fang).
Mr. Tippy and his friends 