Another Darn Cat Post

Me: QUIT LICKING THINGS!

Cat: licklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklicklick

Me: drives over to petsit puppies for friend

Puppies: barkyaplickbarklicklickbark peeeeeeeeeeeee barkbarkbarkbark

Me: ARG! I want to go camping now. Without things that lick!

The cat has progressed to licking everything within a two inch radius of her - my pants, her butt, a chair leg, whatever. The Pomeranian pups are sort of like bedroom slippers with springy legs for racing about and little teeth for nibbling. They might stay still for a two second petting session in between trying to get back at the orange tabby for being bigger than they are, and racing around like rabbits on speed.

I must taste great. The cat keeps licking, and licking, and licking. At night I have to pull the covers up high and keep my hands under. She licks my arms, hands, fingers….

Thank goodness she’s not a lion or something. Thank goodness my facial cream appears to alter the flavor of my face.

The boxes, and the stuff, and the dust. And the cat, because mommy’s packing again god help us now I must run around like an idiot and knock things over and bash into walls.

When I collapse in front of the tv for a break she jumps on my stomach and wriggles and flumps and purrs and digs her toes in until she finds just the right position, which looks like every position she just tried, whatever…. and then I have to dislodge her to go pee because she just poked my bladder eighty times in a row. Rinse, repeat. Clingy idiot. I guess she thinks I’m going to leave her behind? Like I ever did that, however tempted I might be.

I am barely getting started and already I have visions of backing the Uhaul up to a cliff and shoving everything out. BLEAH. Anyone want a metric ton of books?

I help u make bed

oh no! no pictures of me helpin!

3:43 pm: get home from library and gas station with shiny new car. Note mud spatters on white paint. Note that have not yet washed car in the couple of weeks since purchase.
3:52 pm: organize car care products. Lock kitty door; back car out of garage. Bring out the hose.
3:55 - 4:15 pm: wash car.
4:16 - 4:30 pm: squeegee excess water, then dry car with multiple towels. Move car back into garage, noting the return of moving neighbors with huge long trailer. Close garage door. Unlock kitty door to restore access to kitty litter.
4:30 - 5:00 pm: apply variety of detailing products appropriately, washing windows, cleaning and protecting dashboard, dusting, shaking out all-weather mats.
5:00 - 5:30 pm: apply wax to all but the trunk lid, which is too close to the garage door for comfort; buff. Admire shiny car, making faces to show off reflection in various panels.
5:52 pm: Go into garage to move wet laundry to dryer; note cat curled up on hood. Shoo cat. Throw very old afghan over shiny hood and tuck under windshield wipers to keep it from sliding off.
8:05 pm: BOOM! MeeeeeeeeeoooooooW!
8:06 pm: Go out in garage - note: afghan on floor in front of car, cat wigging out and darting between feet into apartment. Deduce cat jumped up, afghan slid under her weight on newly waxed hood, shot cat into the front of the washing machine, where she then ricocheted into (now overturned) laundry basket. Laugh butt off.
8:10 pm: put afghan on hood. Wait. Possibly cackling softly and holding camera.

Nothing says love like standing around in the hallway yowling plaintively while Big Person is labeling eleventy jillion wires as a precursor to swapping thermostats, then eating random bits dropped on the floor. Plaster bits, a page of sticky labels, a stray wire… a screw….

…

She may have played with the screw and batted it into a corner. But, she also tried to bat around the hammer. Kitty needs a new brain cell or two.

*hack*

The sounds of the Barfmaster 10,000 at work. (Well, it’s actually more of a *hokhokhokeeeechkkk* but that’s so difficult to spell that I opted for the familiar.)

She’s still freaking out about the move, I guess - now her fun thing to do is not eat cat food all day, then snarf up a ton when I get home, then barf it up in assorted spots.

My favorite was the very middle of my comforter.

Time for the understudy comforter, which is not as soft but is also not caked with EW.

Apartment Complex of Confusion has instituted some draconian rules about pets. We’re now supposed to coop up the cats indoors, which is safer blah blah so on, but really the cats have never gone much further than the front of our building. They’re fraidy cats. ACC has said they will be trapping strays and taking them to the pound.

I figure, both our cats are wearing collars with tags, one has a microchip, the other is so freaked out when a shadow moves I doubt she would go near a trap even if it had a pile of smelly tuna fish in it. Also, she doesn’t like tuna. Go figure.

Anyway, this has sent Roommate into a tailspin in which he is plotting The Cat-Proof Yard(tm), from which there will be no escape, muhuhahaha. This will evidently involve some fabric hung in some clever fashion so that jumping cats will bounce back into the yard when trying to leave. I’m predicting some fun pictures, also mixed results, because if my idiot cat can’t go where she pleases she’ll figure out another way.

Lately, Roommate has taken to going out to get Idiot in the evenings. Our usual routine is, call them in for food at 7, shut cat flap for the night. Idiot has taken to eschewing dinner to stay outside and watch the corner o’ mouse infestation. There’s a corner with a vent into the neighbor’s water heater closet where mice come through and try to nest in Roommate’s storage area. Idiot will sit there for hours at a time watching, watching, watching…. Some nights when I call, one cat will rush in and Idiot will stay out all night, but with the trap “out there somewhere,” Roommate worries and goes to get her. So she learned a new bag of tricks. When she hears me calling, she jumps on the roof. Pretty smart for an idiot, but an idiot she remains.

Overall, the cats - one decrepit, one declawed - have caught six mice since we moved in. Five of them in the past week.

I left a few days ago in the morning, noting on my way out that the cats were sitting near the bookcase too close together - they never sit that close unless something’s up. But I had to leave, so I did. And when I got home they were still there.

I sat at the computer for a few moments before they raced through the apartment into Roommate’s bedroom, where they sat in front of his smallest bookcase near his bed (yes, we have five bookcases). And that was when I saw the mouse.

The Great Mouse Hunt lasted for a few hours, as the cats dashed around after it, while it tunneled under the sheets on the bed, scrambled into the mess of wires behind the desk, romped into the bottom shelf of one of the other bookcases and hid behind the collected works of Cherryh. I think by the time Roommate got home his bedding and most of the books were in one corner, the cats were bouncing off the walls, and I was tired of looking under things. The mouse was nowhere to be seen. We found it again once before it vanished again. Roommate was ready to start moving the heavy stuff when I, poking around with his walking stick, found the fuzzball cleverly hiding on the hilt of one of Roommate’s Japanese swords propped up in a corner near the bookcases. One waste can ride to the dumpster later, no more mouse.

Until five minutes later, when the other mouse raced from under the bookcase in the living room. Fortunately that one was quickly wastecanned.

This morning, declawed cat kept running over to a small cupboard we use for a phone stand. I told her, look, no mouse - and opened it up and there was a mouse, sitting there on the phone book. At which point I shut it again, went to the clinic, came home, opened the cupboard and used the kitty poop scoop to pitch the mouse into the waste can. Off to the dumpster!

I think I’ll get a bunch of traps. I’m tired of waiting for Orkin. If a declawed cat is doing a better job than management’s “professionals” it’s time to take things into my own hands.

Overheard in New York: The Voice of the City You’ll go in with a straight face and roll out on LOLlerskates.

I had two out of four scheduled clients show up today. One was an assessment for a schizophrenic. One is never really aware of the intolerance of our society until confronted with the mentally ill. Schizophrenics frequently have little insight into their own difficulties and can’t articulate what’s going on with them, and this one was so isolated by people who treat her like she’s crazy that I could tell I was the first person in a long while who actually listened to her talk. She cried for a while, and the rest of the time she was angry, repeating over and over that she wanted a job, wanted help, and no one would help her. To which I replied, what kind of help do you need? I can see why some people make a career out of helping people like this - sometimes in a budget-crunched system all you can give is compassion, and sometimes that’s the difference between scraping by and jumping off an overpass.

In other news, tomorrow the clinic is closed due to one of those holidays the government offices take off, but the rest of the world doesn’t. I’m going in to train my replacement at Job. Hopefully, the gal will be quick on the uptake.

Really, I just want to sleep. Yesterday I had to cancel an appointment due to a migraine, which plagued me all day, until I got home, hurled lunch, and crashed for four hours straight, which meant I couldn’t really sleep last night. I kept waking up to find the Roommate’s tabby asleep in awkward spots, like between my feet, on my hip, or tucked up against my abdomen with her head in my armpit. I had this long, now-vague half-waking dream, in which I re-imagined every story in the C&C series - sort of the series I would have written if I started it today. Quite different, and some of it stuck with me after I woke up this morning. I was groggy most of the morning even though I had my requisite double-strength coffee. Today, I fear, I was not quite on my game. So I got home this afternoon feeling quite inadequate and with the first vibe of short-timer’s disease - I know that I will not be hired at the clinic, and it’s April this Saturday, which means seven weeks left in the semester, which means…. I need to find a friggin’ job in my field of choice.

I think I need yoga now.

Recipe for madness.

Ingredients: one cat. one internet connected computer. one office chair.

1. sit in chair and face computer.
2. surf, download, check email.
3. watch cat saunter into room and coil furry self around ankles.
4. repeat 2.
5. cat, realizing that the Power of Cute failed, leaps into lap and stands with tail vertical and head turned at optimal eye contact angle, turning on the Cat Mind Control Device(tm)
6. telepathic waves of feedmefeedmefeedme bounce off skull toughened by the warm rays of the internet
7. notice cat isn’t moving, and place hand firmly on cat butt - SHOVE.
8. repeat 2
9. repeat 5, 6, 7, 8, until skull melts, brain turns to mush, and cat finally gains control over body, forcing you into the kitchen to open a can of stinking meat product.
10. return to the internet to recover from evil influence of cat telepathy.
11. notice cat has returned and curled up on your wrists, utilizing now full, fat and sassy catness to inflict carpal tunnel on your flimsy girlie arms and telepathically ordering your body to eminate warmth and comfort.
12. repeat 7.
13. repeat 2.
14. repeat 7, 2, 7… until it’s bedtime.
15. curl up in bed. Notice cat has curled up three inches from you, purring, now beaming instructions to eminate warmth for cat’s benefit and not move an inch now that it’s comfortable.

I could go on and on. I’ll just be off… for some reason I have the urge to open a can of stinking meat product.

… the outcome of my car problem. It was, of course, maliciousness on the part of the car that lit the service light, and nothing more. They changed the oil and reset the computer and called it ‘working order’.

To offset this good fortune that removed several zeroes from my imagined auto repair expense, I came home and found a dead bird, right where I could step on it and do the icky-squicky dance. My roommate’s cat may be old, but she’s still got it. She’s just too senile to actually do more than pull off a few feathers and give up. “What was I doing? Eating? This tastes like feathers!”

Still with the not-showing-up clients. And, the rumors of closing down the clinic are running round and round. Joy.

Like so many little kids who get neat toys then end up playing with the boxes instead, my cat steps up to the plate post-Christmas. I gave her a little plastic mousie with rattling things inside. She is currently playing with a jalapeno pepper. I did not give her the pepper, she thieved it from the counter in the night, from a pile of late-late-season harvested peppers from our plant in the backyard - which, again, is putting out more peppers, in spite of winter.

Roommate’s cat, otherwise known as ‘my other laptop,’ has turned into That Little Sack of Jello Wrapped in Cat Fur that Lays Across My Arms. If I sit down anywhere in the apartment she gets in my lap and curls up, somehow spreading her compact little tabby body into an arm-swallowing mass that evidently wants only to soak up the warmth of a lap.

She’s sitting on the powerbook to the left of the trackpad. When I backed away from the desk, she balanced there nicely but didn’t stick around for another shot.

Nice TNG mouse pad, yes? None of the characters actually look like the actors. Someone gave it to me a long time ago.

We’ve expressed concern about The Tabby before, about her age (13) and whether or not she’s senile. Roommate has a theory about cat brains. There’s a board with holes in it in their heads, with labels on the holes — hungry, sleep, crazy, poop, pee, hunt, shed, etc. And there’s a marble that, when it falls in a hole, determines what mode the cat is in, until something knocks the marble out, and next thing you know the cat’s collapsed in a fur heap and falling asleep after tearing around the apartment five times like a crazed lunatic.

Tabby must have grown a ’senile’ hole, or perhaps a ’suicide’ hole. I came home, opened the door, and she greeted me right there with a raised tail. I went back out to the car for grocery sacks and as I left the doormat she dashed out to come with, I guess, and a half-***ed attempt to brush my pantlegs she stuck her foot under my shoe. She’s okay, just her pride wounded, but dang. She used to be better at footsy than that.

Now she’s sitting in my lap purring. Short memory, or hungry cat?

You expect weird noises when you have parrots. My poor departed grey parrot imitated everything, especially foul-mouthed carpenters fixing the roof and high-pitched alarms/squeaking hinges.

What I’ve never expected is the array of noises cats make. My roommate’s cat has burped, smacked her lips, creaked, moaned, snored, and made this odd little ‘murp’ noise that sounds like she’s trying to talk. Plus her usual grouchy meow when I haven’t fed them on time. My cat does a ‘mirrrrrr’ sort of half-purr, half-meow when she wants something, plus the usual array of yowling and meowing, which the other cat doesn’t do, plus she has a softer whirrr for when she’s doing something she thinks is going to annoy me into getting up and chasing her.

Last night, she was jumping on counters - I know this because I heard her hitting the floor. Repeatedly. She sincerely believes I can psychically tell when she’s up to something and will rise to give her attention if she does things she knows are forbidden. She’s so dumb, and yet so smart…. The food dish is empty so she needs me to fill it. I have chastised her for being on the counter. If she gets on the counter…. and the chain of reasoning breaks down, because I’m not about to get out of bed and shoo her off the counter then fill the cat bowl. But I swear she thinks her antics will get what she wants, because she does the whirring noise when she expects results, whereas other nights she quietly goes about her counter-hopping and we only know about it if we’ve left a vegetable out for her to play with. Once I found an eggplant on the floor in the living room.

She’s escalating her antics. This morning I found the earphones for my iPod, sans foam covers, sprawled across the carpet. I panicked momentarily because she usually chews string til it breaks (as I’ve discovered by leaving yarn out) but this time, it appeared she had only eaten the foam covers. I discovered this was untrue when I got home and vacuumed — the foam covers were conveniently stuffed under a chair.

I’m just waiting for my shoes to start disappearing. This could be useful if I could train her to hide eggs — I’d make a killing. The Easter Cat!

… she hides behind it all night waiting for the cats to go away.

Sometime in the night, the cats found a mouse in the house and chased it behind the wine rack. I was lingering in bed this morning, hiding from Saturday morning yoga class, and the bird started shrieking. Her cage is across the dining area from the wine rack, so obviously she was reacting to the sudden, intense presence of hunting creatures as a three ounce prey animal would — by sounding the alarm.

Roommate nudged me out of bed to help him catch the mouse. He’d taken all the wine out and moved the table and piled every loose item on it, among the wine bottles, and so there was this leaning tower of cdr’s and magazines and bills and tablets, cd cases, dvds, cd cases, allergy medication….

We finally did it, but not until we’d wrestled the cats away and gotten the broom. Mice climb. Mouse made it to the top of the sliding glass door by climbing up the metal frame behind the vertical blinds. We knocked it down, stunning it, then nudged it into the box. Roommate threw it outside and called the cats — who ran round to the kitty door, since we’ve all but beaten them into believing that departure from any other door will result in scoldings and a foot in the face. (He would have let them have it inside, but we are not found of mouse guts on the carpet.)

I think it got through the back fence. The cats aren’t watching it any more.

On one hand, it’s amazing that they survive. On the other — climbing the wall? No wonder there are more mice than people.

I got up, stumbled around, pulled the tabby off my chest where she’d been since 4 am, and fed everyone. Fish. Cats. Bird. Then made coffee, and opened the cat flap.

While checking on the status of the latest BSG I heard a scuffle in the room where the cat flap resides. I went to look, and as I crossed the living room for the hall, I saw what I thought was a gray fluffy blur. We have no gray fluffy blur — we have a white shorthaired blur, and a tabby shorthair blur. So, eep, there’s a strange cat in the house. I looked in at the cat flap to find the tabby staring back at me.

“Why didn’t you keep the cat out?”

Stare.

“Fine.”

I upended my bed, ran the broom in all the nooks and crannies, and… no fluffy gray.

Near as I can tell, I heard the scuffle and imagined this. We’ve worried about this before, but Roommate figures our cats will be territorial and keep strange cats at bay, just like they keep each other at bay — we’ve caught them taunting each other through the cat flap. Once, the orange tabby from across the way came over and stared in at them, and they sat together in a temporary truce to stare down the interloper, until Roommate got the hose and drove Orange away.

So unless a gray fluffy blur leaps out of a closet, I have an active imagination. (Like this is news.) Or, we’re being haunted by the Ghost of Cats of Tenants Past? Hmmm.

We have a cat door. Each evening at approximately 7:30 pm, we bang on a ceramic cat dish with a table knife and the cats race inside and dine on canned cat food.

In theory, anyway. The tabby who owns my roommate is so eager for the feedings that she’s usually watching for me to get home and haunts me for two hours, getting in my lap, flopping out on the floor at my feet and rolling on her back with her cute little paws curled in and looking up at me with big limpid eyes — everything short of yelling “yo! two-legs! NOW would be good!” The white cat-shaped thing I adopted one day in a parking lot comes in when I get home, looks around diffidently, and wanders back out the cat door. Sometimes she comes back in at dinner, sometimes she wanders around who knows where until she gets bored and wants to come in. By which time Deathly Cute Tabby has eaten her share, plus Dumbbell’s share, and curled up on the back of the couch to watch the fish tank.

Last night, Dumbbell didn’t come when called — not at 7:30, not at 9, not at 10. I gave up and locked the front door, the cat door, and the sliding door. This morning she bounced inside the minute I opened the door and fairly yowled an operetta when she found the dish empty. And tonight, she hurried in when I got home like she was going to die if she didn’t get inside.

I’m thinking the dumb is an act — she’s capable of learning this in one go, plus there’s all those times I’ve caught her trying to figure out the doorknob. All those times she did stupid things, like running headfirst into a wall or jumping on precarious perches and hitting the floor in a heap — deliberate attempts to fool us two-legs into thinking she’s just another dumb cat, while she’s figuring out doors and slipping out to harrass other cats. Or maybe taking the car for a spin.

I need to go put my keys in the freezer. I don’t think she can reach that — at least until she figures out how to unfold the step stool, or move a chair.