Category: #kittyproblems
Crafting with cats.
Not WITH THEM with them, just their pictures. See, I got some of my instagram pics printed out, and I was planning to transfer them to canvas for some DIY art pieces.
Only it turns out that you’re supposed to use pictures printed on regular paper from a laser printer. Not photo paper. Good going, me.
So I’m going to attempt to modpodge them to the canvases and get it done that way. I’m so stubborn. We’ll see how this turns out. Especially with my “helpers” – i.e. the furry ones who get really curious particularly about anything I don’t want them around.
I have big plans. We’ll see how this goes.
As you can see, Taco is already being very helpful by playing with the bags of supplies I picked up this morning.
Little helper, my ass.
I think I would have been better off going to the beach.
Update: all of the square canvases I bought are 1/4th of an inch bigger than the damn pictures. “Measure twice, cut once” is awfully good advice, but I suck horribly at following it. In fact, I’m more like “Vaguely measure, make it fit.” This is probably why I’m not rich and famous for my handmade goods.
I’ve been neglecting you.
I’ve been really sucking on the “writing new posts” thing lately. I don’t think this is because my cats have magically become well-behaved and wonderful. They have not. But I’ve been busy working and when I’m not, I’ve been too tired to use my brain.
My brain’s not working that well today, either, so I’ll just take you through pictorials of my Caturday.
I tried to sleep in, but my kitty alarm clock (that’s Taco) had other ideas. Moosh, bless his little heart, just stood on my laptop that was on the dresser and creepily watched us sleep.
Oh hai. Don’t mind me.
Then I ran errands. I put back a crapload at Ulta, as it was, I spent a fortune on just the things I went there to buy. WHY ARE GOOD PRODUCTS SO EXPENSIVE?
Made a stop at the dollar store. Saw some really interesting things.
This is just weird. It looks like the cat is trying to escape the bag.
Why anyone would feed their cats food from the dollar store is beyond me. For that matter, the human food didn’t look much more appetizing.
Clam strips. Heh. I could make a juvenile joke here.
Then I spent the rest of my day sitting on my ass with the boyfriend, who also sat on his ass. Bitching about the things we SHOULD have been doing. To my credit, I DID at least start the laundry, mainly because I have a lovely white sweatshirt with cat puke on it. Taco is such a joy.
What were the cats doing through all of this?
He’s so effin’ cute.
Sleeping, of course. God forbid they miss THEIR beauty rest.
We’d lock Taco out of the bedroom at night but he’d just claw at it, which is really more disturbing than the “wake-up-feed-me” meow. I wish someone made a white noise machine that counteracted bratty felines.
This is why we can’t have anything nice.
As I’ve mentioned before, I love Pinterest. I also love HGTV. I don’t own my own house and I have very little to no sense when it comes to decorating, but I like to pretend I do by looking at pretty pictures and imagining I could do that.
Then I had an epiphany.
I can’t.
Because I have cats.
Pure effin’ evil.
As I sat there looking at the 834579348st picture of a well-decorated room with vases holding large feather-like things perched precariously atop a tall, thin “table,” I realized that THESE PEOPLE DON’T HAVE FUCKING CATS.
I can’t even buy a LAMP without thinking “Ok. Will the cats knock this over?” I mean, I found this fabulous one where the lampshade was hanging sequins but after I got over my initial “OOOOHHHHHHH WANT THAT” I immediately thought “Nope. Cat toys.”
THEY RUIN EVERYTHING.
So much to knock over here! AND IT’S ON WHEELS! Movable destruction.
All of my design choices are based on THEM. I have no plants in my house. I have herbs on my front porch so they don’t eat them, but some other animal does and then I forget to water them because they’re outside and I’m not constantly reminded.
If the boyfriend thoughtfully buys me flowers for any sort of occasion, I have to either take them to work with me or proudly display them in my bathroom.
Yup. These are in my bathroom. Right next to my toothbrush.
NOTHING is off limits to them. NOTHING.
I’m annoyed.
My cats are being assholes today.
Sure, he LOOKS cute.
Taco slept on my stomach like an angel, up until about 5am when he puked on the bed. Then I woke up again at 7am because I heard him eating plastic. I don’t even know where he gets this crap. Discovered the puke on the bed also contained plastic. Thanks.
Moosh Moosh has been meowing all morning. Except since he doesn’t really meow, it’s more like whiny chirping. I’m trying to work at my desk for once (instead of on the bed with the laptop) because I really don’t feel like working and I have to work because I need to finish this work before tomorrow and finish it early today because I’m going to see Jim Jeffries tonight. (I am SO SO SUPER EXCITED about this! And even more excited because it’s a 6pm show, perfect for an ol’ lady who has to work in the morning. He’s really funny, and also really offensive, so if you don’t like offensive Aussies, don’t bother looking him up. I happen to love everything as offensive as it can possibly be.) But Moosh is jumping up on my desk in my face and getting cat hair in my eyes and dander in my nose and I’m already allergy-crazy today. Dick.
Have also caught Taco on the counter today, trying to get into the box of Cheerios. I can’t possibly imagine that he thought this was a good idea.
Shortly after, he was caught on the wire shelving we have in the kitchen. This is quite tricky, as he doesn’t have good footing there. Again, not sure what he thought he was going to get out of this.
He’s no angel either.
And I still don’t feel like working. BAH.
The road to the vet is not a quiet one.
Yesterday was Taco vet day. Just a yearly checkup thing. He’s been fairly healthy. Annoying, but that’s not a health issue. Only in regards to my mental state.
Getting Taco to the vet is a two-person job. I knew he wasn’t going to go quietly, so I asked the boyfriend to do the prep work and have him ready to go. However, the little MFer immediately ran under the bed when the carrier came out, at which point it required both of us to tag team the effort. Upon getting him in the carrier, he immediately began thrashing about. Not even out of the house yet. Then the meowing started. Then the meowing didn’t stop.
It’s a 15-minute drive. Of loud.
Big Mouth in action.
Of course, I then began embarking on the futile effort of soothing him with calming words. And I continued to despite the fact that it did absolutely nothing. Although I did discover that he answered me in different tones here and there, which amused me. It seemed that saying his name resulted in a slightly lower volume, but only the 1st two meows. The 3rd went back to gutteral. We continued like this all the way into the vet, where he announced himself loudly upon being carried in.
Thus begins part 3 of the vet experience. The shakes. For all of Taco’s bravado, he’s a big freaking baby. He scrunches into one corner of his carrier and shivers. With an occasional loud meow, attracting all onlookers to comment on what an adorable cat he is, which at this point, doesn’t even fill me with mommy pride because now everyone can see what a wussy cat I’ve raised.
Part 4. The exam room.
Here he is on the exam table, refusing to look at me.
Still uncooperative. Still meowing. The vet and the vet assistant have trouble holding him. He is really quite a talented squirmer. I will give him credit for not lashing out with claws. Except that would kinda be less wussy. Despite his best efforts (and a loud, random meow on the scale), I learned that he was healthy, that he gained an ounce (this I don’t understand, he eats everything) and that he runs hot at the vet from all the shaking and flustering. Oh, then the vet noticed one pupil was larger than the other and suggested I take him to an animal ophthalmist (however the hell you spell that. I’m not looking it up.). I’m not overly concerned about this. My eyes do that too. My eye doc said it’s unlikely I have a brain tumor because I’d know it by now. But nonetheless, we threw on FeLV and FIV testing into the bloodwork just in case, because he’s only been tested for those once.
Then I paid the bill. Now I’m broke. That’s a whole other story for another post (although I will add that I wasn’t OVERcharged, he’s just expensive). And Taco still hasn’t gotten a job to pay his way. I’m not taking him to a cat eye doc until he earns his damn keep.
There was, however, this lovely view from the exam room. That cat looks quiet. Jealous.
Cat career hopes.
I’m 31. I’ve never really figured out what to do with my life, I thought that at some point it would just dawn on me. It hasn’t. Except maybe it has, but maybe it’s too late.
I’ve written about this before, but my desire has reawakened watching the new season of My Cat From Hell. I’d make an awesome cat behaviorist. I KNOW cats. This seems to be my only choice as far as cat-related careers. I don’t have the patience nor the desire to be a groomer, my heart hurts too much to work at a rescue organization, and there is NO FREAKING WAY I could do anything vet-related because I would cry. All the time.
Oh, behave.
Cat behavior? I can do that. It’s about the human element anyway, and who loves telling people what do to more than I do? I’m passionate, I’m intuitive, and I’d be helping kitties. And make bank (one cat behaviorist charges $250 for a phone consultation).
But I’m super stuck on how to do this. I googled my ass off. It seems my only options are 1) go to school for vet stuff (there’s no degree for cat behavior) or 2) start emailing every single cat behaviorist I can find to find an apprenticeship. Except there don’t seem to be any around here.
So what happens when you think you’ve found your life’s calling but can’t make it work? The only other thing that I think I’d love to do is be an NTSB investigator. I’m obsessed with aircraft crashes. I have been as long as I can remember. And I love flying. My dad’s a pilot. I’ve been flying since I was in the womb. I have some hours under my belt. I’m fascinated with how accidents happen. But it seems that is a little out of my reach as well. I’d have to finish getting my pilot’s license, probably get some degrees in aeronautics, you know, easy stuff.
Anyone have any advice? I’m a smart girl, but I have little drive, probably because I rely on my brain to skate through. Maybe it’s time I get my hands dirty. But how?
Can you teach old cats new tricks?
My mom is redoing her bathroom. While that may sound very fancy, please keep in mind that it is actually her ONLY bathroom, and has never been updated the entire time she’s lived there, save for some well-meaning wall painting I once started and never finished. And it’s rather small. Despite the fact that it’s rather small, she also shares it with the kitties’ shitbox and food dishes. I’m not sure at what point we decided this was a good place for these (I was 16 and living at home then so I have to assume part of the blame), or how much smaller the bathroom must have felt sharing it with two cats and a teenager, but this is where it has remained for two cats and 15 years.
Fatty making the stinkface.
Now, Fatty is, well, fat. And gettin’ up there in years. He also has longish hair and he’s too fat to lick his butt. Little is just weird. One of them is peeing/pooping outside the box at random intervals. Clean box, no less. This is, of course, frustrating, but I think it’s a frequent occurrence
What’s my dearly beloved madre planning to do, she says?
Have a cat door built in the back door so that they have free access to the sun porch and put the box out there.
This, on the surface, seems like a splendid idea. Fatty always runs (he’s pretty freaking fast for his size) out the back door when it’s open and chills out there. It’s totally enclosed, and other than not being insulated or air conditioned, it ensures the kitties remain indoor ones (as they all should be).
But. The ages of these cats. I don’t know that you can just pick up and move a litterbox that’s been in one place for as long as they’ve been alive. And while I can see Fatty venturing out through this new door, Little spends all his time hiding. He’s really not very adventurous. I’ve been trying to think about what Jackson Galaxy would say, and all I can think of is that he would say something like humans live around cats, not the other way around, so don’t stress them out by moving everything around. However, he HAS had people on the show move boxes around. And wouldn’t the kitties feel better doing their business without a human doing THEIR business staring at them?
So what do you think? Are they too old to move the crapboxes around? Or will they adapt? Will they like the cat door? What happens if only one of them likes the cat door? How big is the cat door going to have to be to accommodate Fatty?
Lookit this giant fleshy mound of fur.
This is the first time I’ve ever had (yeah, they’re still mine even though I don’t live with them anymore) a cat this old, so I don’t know how set in their ways they are. I rely on you, dear readers, with your multitudes of cats and experiences. Don’t let me down.
Lick it. Lick it good.
Taco is a lot of things. King Brat. Adorable snuggler. Unwanted alarm clock. Needy pain in the ass. Loud.
What he is not: graceful.
Sure, he may look like he’s got his shit together here, but It’s only because he’s asleep.
This is unheard of for a cat, right?
This occurred to me tonight as I watched my cats eat. If you think this is weird, you’ve never done it. It’s really quite fascinating. Why did I ever do this? Well, Taco is also Jabba the Effin’ Hut, and if I don’t stand over them watching, he’ll take over Moosh’s food. Somehow (I’m not entirely sure how this works) my hovering presence keeps Moosh comfortably eating and Taco in his own dish.
Anyway, I water down their food, because Moosh barely eats any wet food and because Taco needs to get more water to ensure he stays crystal blockage-free. So the first couple of minutes of them eating is really drinking meat water.
Have you ever watched ANY cat drink water? It’s practically an art. This comes from an article in the Washington Post:
“While a dog curls its tongue like a ladle to collect the water and then pull up what it can, a cat curves its tongue under and slightly back, leaving the top surface of the tip of the tongue to lightly touch the liquid. The cat then raises its tongue rapidly, creating an upward mini-stream of water. The cat snaps its mouth shut and the water is captured before the countervailing force of gravity pulls it down.
An average house cat, the team found, can make four of these mini-streams per second.
‘What we found is that the cat uses fluid dynamics and physics in a way to absolutely optimize tongue lapping and water collection,’ said Jeffrey Aristoff, now at Princeton University but who was one of the four researchers who began the study out of curiosity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
This is actually a fairly recent study, from 2010. Kinda crazy it took that long to get around to cats drinking water, considering Darwin studied MOTHS and shit. Forever ago. God, I love science. The mechanics of EVERYTHING is so interesting. And of course, cats are interesting anyway. And of course, I do find it amusing that cats beat dogs in the lapping game. One more reason for them to be arrogant assholes, I suppose.
Back to Taco. He is, quite literally, retarded at drinking. Watching Moosh smoothly lap up his meat juice with a rhythm you could practically set a watch to…and then compare with Taco, who laps more like an irregular heart beat. It’s almost painful to watch. In my dreams, I can NEVER run at full speed or throw a punch with all my power. It’s always like I’m running through quicksand. I don’t know what this means, nor do I particularly care, but this is what Taco’s lapping reminds me of.
This was just the catalyst that opened my eyes to how ungraceful Taco really is overall.
1. Moosh perches on my shoulders with ease.
Moosh has this down.
So long as I give him the foothold, he’ll stand up there with very little wobbling and no claws. Taco, on the other hand, is like a Weeble Wobble, but he’ll sure as hell fall down, and he’ll take my skin down with him.
2. Taco still plays like a kitten.
Might wanna look at the target, dummy.
You know how cute kittens are when they grab at stuff? Just kinda uncoordinated and grabby, no real skill at hunting. Taco’s 3. He’s not even remotely a kitten. But his paws are.
3. He falls off shit all the time. No spatial reasoning. He’ll roll over…and right off the bed.
4. When he’s jumping for a toy, he sprawls in the air and can’t hand for shit. It’s like watching Cirque De Soleil if the performers were hammer drunk. Nor does he have any consideration for what he lands on, like my foot. Or the side table.
I will give him this: There is one arena in which Taco has no equal in fluidity. And that is grabbing treats out of your hand with both paws while standing on his hind legs, checking to make sure the treat is within his greedy little paws before calmly lowering his upper half to the floor and his paws to his fat face to eat. I don’t even understand how he’s the same cat, sometimes.
Then again…like mother, like son, I suppose. I am quite possibly the most ungraceful human to walk this planet (except when I dance, and that is probably debatable, although not with me, because I think I’m bout it bout it). I’m injured every other minute. I currently have inflamed rib cartilage (not something you ever want to do, by the way, but I hear better than actually breaking one, so you REALLY never want to do that), a giant, painful bruise on my wrist I have no recollection of achieving, and I’m vaguely sure I re-sprained my thumb the other night pulling my pants down to pee. I know. Sad. But I’ve learned to laugh about it, except not right now because laughing is no bueno with the ol’ ribs.
The birth of the bathroom cat.
I’m no stranger to cats who like bathrooms. Our last kitten Jager used to sit on the toilet seat while I showered (creepy or no?). But recently Moosh has gotten a wild hair and become a creature of the bathroom. I keep my bathroom door closed because my counters are cluttered with makeup that I don’t feel like picking up off the floor every day (but I do anyway because I don’t have enough counter space for all my crap, way to give the boyfriend the bathroom with the giant counter, dumbass) so I suppose it’s kind of foreign land to him. But he’s been here for almost 5 years. The mystery should be over. The boyfriend’s bathroom, in our bedroom, is always open because there’s a shitbox in it. One Moosh never uses. The downstairs half bath, we keep that closed off too, because I would run into the door probably twice a day, and who wants guests to stare at your toilet?
So this new thing with Moosh. I realized it had become a permanent trend last night as I was in the downstairs bathroom doing my business, and I see a paw snake through the crack of the door, a black blur runs in and immediately jumps onto the counter. I sat there taking pictures (after I finished my business, of course, sorry for the mental picture, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case please stop reading my blog, you’re a weirdo) as he explored the countertop chock full of magical wonders. Like a sink. WTF.
SO EXCITING, ISN’T IT???
Oh, and the flash of the camera REALLY got him interested, because his other weird quirk is loving moving light.
Oh, is that MEEEEE? I’m so HANDSOME!
He’s also taken to jumping in my tub, although not while I’m in it. I’ll be doin’ up my face (what, you think I’m this gorgeous without help? I am, really. I just cover the wrinkles.) when I feel a slight rush of air on my calves. I don’t hear him, I don’t see him, but all of a sudden he’s in the tub. Just poking around.
And he always looks like he’s ready to take a dump, which he has never (to my knowledge) attempted. Can you say “photogenic”?
He won’t come out until I come out of the bathroom.
Every once in awhile, when he can’t be found, he’s in the boyfriend’s tub. No apparent reason. Not sleeping. Again, just poking around. Not even licking the water. Just, you know, wanting to see what’s up.
This is all fairly new. Is he having some sort of midlife crisis? I would worry if it seemed sick-like but he just seems to be curious. He’s always been a curious cat, including some seared whiskers when he got too curious with a candle, but I would think his kitten curiosity would have worn off by now.
My only conclusion is that I have a very, very weird cat. Maybe HE needs to be on that strange addiction show.
Funny thing about cats. They don’t get daylight savings times. Neither do I.
Moosh reaching for all the sun he could get (it was a cloudy day, sunshine was in short supply)
I LOVE longer days. I don’t mind driving to work in the darkness, and I don’t even mind when a half an hour into work at 7am, the power goes out and it’s completely dark (well, except for the emergency floodlights). I DID kind of mind the power going out, because I was only a half hour into an 8-hour day of 16 hours of work. Yeah, don’t try to do the math on that, because it will never add up. But anyway, it came back on in like, 5 minutes.
I’m not a night person. I’m a morning person. By morning, I mean 8am or so, I’m not like, up at the crack of dawn. Except when I have to for work or because the cats are a-holes. So I love when the sun doesn’t go down until 8 or so. It’s Florida, what can I say?
Of course, losing an hour means that this past Monday was sucky. Because as much as you mean to go to bed earlier the night before, your clock is still off. As for the kitties, my alarm was even too early for THEM. Taco was asleep on my feet and refused to get up. Every time I attempted to force myself out of bed and rustle him off, he’d just lay back down on me wherever I rustled him and adjust back to sleepytime. This does not help one wake up. Meowing in my face helps me wake up. Not furballs draped over me, being so comfortable when I have to get up and all I really want to do is be a sleeping, comfortable furball too. Even the nighttime feedings are off. They’re usually up my ass at 7pm to get food to stuff in their fat mouths.
This was Taco 30 minutes ago.
I couldn’t even get Moosh off the cat tree for food, so Taco ate it ALL. This resulted in Moosh being STARVED and sad looking in front of his food bowl at 8. I’m pretty sure this is an act. No cat looks that pathetic that’s as well-fed (except for Taco stealing food) and well-loved as dear Moosh Moosh looks when he’s decided he wants to be hungry and sits in front of the food bowl. It’s positively sad.
Of course, now they’re making a liar out of me because since I’ve started this post, they both woke up and started swarming around me. Guess their schedules are more easily adjusted than mine. I’m not feeding them yet. Brats.
MEOW hear this! 