That Tigger was smart enough to figure out how to get out of his cat carrier while I was in the bathroom, but not smart enough to run far, far away and hide under the bed; instead he stood right next to the carrier and investigated it thoroughly, thus allowing me to easily stick him right back inside and take him to the vet anyway.
Can You Hear Me NOW? Mwa ha ha ha ha!
For creatures who lack the ability to speak, our cats have developed a large number of ways to communicate to us EXACTLY what they are feeling in any given moment.
One of their more effective communication methods is that of Knocking Stuff On The Ground.
After living with these particular animals for the past nine years I have begun to decipher the different meanings behind each level of this process.
The first level is pretty casual, taking place when they are bored, or curious, or just feel like messing around. They will jump up on my desk or the kitchen table and start batting around things like pens, bottle caps, scissors, pills, or anything that is small, light, and rolls easily. Here the meaning is pretty much along the lines of,
-“Hey, I’m bored.”
-“Hey, pay attention to me.”
-“Hey, look what I found.”
-“Hey, this is so cool! I’m totally stealing it for myself!”
The next level is a little more intense since it is an expression of their frustration and irritation. It usually takes place early in the morning on my nightstand, where they precisely and deliberately knock off One. Item. At. A. Time, calculating just how many THUNKS it will take before I can’t stand it anymore and will get up and do whatever they want if they will just PLEASE, LET ME SLEEP A LITTLE LONGER!
I thought I was getting pretty good at understanding what they were wanting. But apparently sometime during the night we moved to a new level in this process, because when we woke up this morning we saw this:
We’re still trying to figure out exactly what it means.
I’ll Take Door Number 2
So the other day I faced quite an interesting quandary.
You know how some people think that we’re here on this earth to learn lessons? Well apparently one of my lessons is Learning How To Take Care Of Things Myself When My Husband Is Gone.
That’s fine when it is something like, hm, I wonder why we’ve lost power in these back 3 rooms but the electricity is still functioning in the rest of the house or, hm, the washing machine seems to be seeping out some kind of sticky brown goo. But I’m really not okay with this when the lessons involve insects, rodents, or reptiles. Because, as was clearly stated in our marriage agreement, my husband is The Person In Charge Of Creepy Crawly Critters. Not. Me. [Read more…] about I’ll Take Door Number 2
Great Imponderable Mysteries of the Universe #3
This is our screened in porch, where the cats spend most of their time.
This is our backyard.
Notice the absence of any large bodies of water.
This is our screened in porch from the outside. See how there’s nothing underneath it?
So having shown you all of this, I know that when I tell you that recently I was unable to make the cats come into the house because they were fascinated with a creature who had come inside our porch to visit with them, you will of course say, “Well clearly that visitor was a frog!” And you would be right! (Apparently all the local lizards were busy that day.)
Because an enclosed porch in the middle of suburban Atlanta with no water in sight is The First Place a person would check when they are looking for a frog.
Not.
(PS-As awesome as it would have been to get a picture of this, I was unable to due to my freaking out at the appearance of wildlife on my screened in porch and my yelling for my husband. And while I could have then snapped a quick shot once my husband was in control of the situation, the poor frog had been covered with so much cat hair that we were afraid it was suffocating, and my husband had to dunk it in the birdbath as quickly as possible in order to revive it.)
Possession Is 9/10 Of The Law
When it comes to me and my relationship to technology, I would say that I am somewhere in the middle of the pack. I’m definitely not on the level of my husband and his engineering, techie friends, who routinely sit around and discuss how easy it would be for them to wire together every single electronic apparatus in the Universe, which they could then control merely by blinking their eyes and activating the computer chip embedded deep within their brain. Or something like that. I tend to tune out whenever the conversation starts to sound like this:
“…486SQLSAPRAMGB1.oGIG64XP…”
(Or whenever they decide that they simply cannot continue living unless they fire up Google Earth right now.) [Read more…] about Possession Is 9/10 Of The Law
Bumper Sticker Wisdom
Poor Me
Because we have no human children, and a lot of free time on the weekends, my husband and I have recently been allowing Tigger to explore the back deck from the safety of a cat harness and an expandable leash.
Being that it is the summertime, and we do live in the South, and we are caring and responsible (or horribly mean and abusive, it all depends on how you look at it) kitty parents, tonight we forced all the cats to endure The Application Of A Flea Control Substance.
That means that now, wherever I turn, I am faced with the highly indignant, self-righteous, and martyred (not to mention EXTREMELY grumpy) stare of animals that have been denied the privilege of having creepy crawly critters hatching in their fur all summer long. Plus the frustration stemming from the fact that I have now messed up the pristine smoothness of their coat, which they just spent the last 87 hours licking into perfection. Mixed in with the calculating stare that tells me that they are trying to decide whether or not I’m worth the effort of reaching out and whacking as I pass them by.
Life’s hard when you’re a cat.
My Crack Support Team
Do you remember those choose-your-own adventure books that were really popular back in the 1980’s? Well, today’s post is going to follow that format.
My mother-in-law, Gardener Extraordinaire, is coming for a visit this weekend to help us do some landscaping around our house.
If you are the person who runs your household, continue reading here. So of course that has meant 2 days of cleaning the entire house, doing countless loads of laundry, dumping all the trash, airing out the guest room, washing all of the bed linens, cleaning the cat boxes and moving them out of the guest room, planning meals, making sure I had all the ingredients for the meals, scrubbing the guest bathroom, making sure we have clean towels, budgeting the landscaping purchases, trading cars with my spouse so that I have the SUV for bringing said purchases home, and making sure that we have suitable entertainments planned.
If you are not the person who runs your household, continue reading here. So of course that meant we were visited by the Laundry Fairy, the Housekeeping Fairy, and the Meal Planning and Preparation Fairy who, with a simple flick of their magic wands, effortlessly and instantaneously prepared the house for her visit.
Apparently, all of my frenetic activity of the past 2 days was only made possible due to some sort of energetic Vulcan mind meld performed between me and my cats, whereby I increased my daily energy capacity by sucking away all of theirs. Because, boy, did I get a lot done. And man, were they tired.
Pip
Tigger
Bailey
If I Dream It, They Will Come
Apparently my subconscious has been carrying on a conversation with the Universe lately that I was unaware of. And the gist of this conversation seems to be, “Hey! Let’s see some more animals around here!”
So far in the last week there have appeared at or near our house a snake, a possum (who was strolling through The Corn in the middle of the day), and a red fox.
I don’t know what that is all about. It could be a desire to get more in touch with nature. Or perhaps it’s a desire to get back in touch with my roots.
My grandparents live on a farm up in Northeastern Maine, a place where it is not at all unusual for a moose to walk up to the farmhouse and attempt to stick its entire head inside the kitchen window. (My grandmother just loves that!) A place where, as my husband and I were driving to the drugstore one afternoon, we saw a very large bear galloping down the road on which my grandparents live.
It seems that I’ve been spending lots of time meditating on moose in the kitchen and bears in the backyard lately, and the Universe is starting to send some similar experiences my way. Because yesterday, as I was walking next door to attend our neighbor’s birthday party, I discovered this ambling over to my house (at the time it was un-penned and unleashed):
And if it weren’t cool enough to almost have a camel in my backyard, I also got to hold a ferret:
If you’d like to see more photos of our adventures with wild animals (and by “adventures” I mean, “going next door to the neighbor’s backyard”, and by “wild animals” I mean “animals that were completely tame, enclosed in a pen or a cage, and wearing harnesses and leashes”), you can click here
Hm…What to ask for next?
And The Universe Laughed
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Yesterday I decided that I had had enough of the muscle in my leg that had been twitching non-stop for two days. Since the “doing nothing” option really hadn’t helped it at all, I thought that maybe doing some yoga and stretching it out might. However practicing yoga always means I need a special strategy for dealing with the cats because, in addition to watching us clip our toenails, yogurt, and swaggering through the house knocking over all our trash cans, they are obsessed with my yoga equipment. I have absolutely no idea why this is; all I know is that there is a substance on earth more seductive and alluring to cats than catnip, and it is The Material That Yoga Mats Are Made Of.
But my practice yesterday was, for some reason, surprisingly cat-free. “How nice,” I thought.
“A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” That was the sound of the Universe laughing, because the Universe knew something that I did not.
Specifically it knew that my husband was about to call me, and that at the exact moment I picked up the phone to hear him tell me that his plane had landed safely in a whole other state, I would see peeking out from under the ottoman the teeny, tiny, terrified head of a lizard that my INDOOR cats had somehow found, caught, and brought inside for a play date.
Fortunately my husband has a PhD in Talking His Hysterical Wife Through Difficult Situations Over The Phone, and was able to guide me through capturing the lizard and releasing it back into the wild. Although I have to say that it pretty much undid all the good relaxation work I had just done in my yoga routine.
And you know how lizards have that defense mechanism where they can detach their tails in order to escape predators? (Important Side Note: Although I have to say, from my extensive experience over the past year, that that feature is apparently completely useless when facing cats.) Well, when I finally got the little guy back outside I noticed that he was very stubby looking, due to the fact that he was missing his entire back end. And I still haven’t found that part of him yet.
But I will definitely be needing something a little more powerful than yoga when I do.
