Monkee

OMG!!1!KITTY!1!!

Not only did my mother provide me with pictures of the tee tiniest little bat creature this side of a dank cave for your viewing pleasure, but she also gave it a tee tiny name to boot.  So it is with great pleasure and much snorgling that I present to you Fitz.  So named because he is too tee tiny even to muster a hiss and instead can only manage a little fitz-fitz sound.  Don’t you just want to squeeeeeeze him!?!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No, the turtle is not real.

Eleven?

           Since both of the last two cat acquisitions have been The Husband’s doing, and especially since both were rather surprising and generally unexpected, there’s been a running joke around here about The Husband’s ability to attract stray cats willy nilly and recreationally choosing to accost our happy little home with them.  All in good fun we titter about his timing or chuckle about the unlikely circumstances of his captures, all the while comforted by the knowledge that this is, of course, merely a coincidence and not actually evidence of an alarming trend.

            Despite which, when I got the call that The Husband, through no fault of his own, was, at that very moment, holding a tiny bucket containing a tinier kitten which had been plucked just moments before from the interstate, I will admit I had a moment.  Even knowing that it couldn’t possibly be true, I had to at least address the niggling thought that he was somehow doing this on purpose.  Fighting back phrases like, “What’s wrong with you?” and “How could this happen?” or even “You’re shitting me!”  I mustered something more along the lines of  “Oh?” and waited for the blanks to be filled in.  There had been a traffic jam.  The cars were all nearly stopped.  He looked in his rearview and saw it run out.  He got out to look for it.  So did some other people.  Someone caught it.  Now it’s in his bucket.  Alrighty then and off to the vet it went.

            Later, when The Husband returned home, crisis for the moment under control, we sat down to clarify the details.

 

            “How did you end up with the kitten?”

            “I just said I’d take it.”

            “And then what?”

            “The guy handed it to me.”

            “Did you say anything to him?”

            “No…but…”

            “But what?”

            “I didn’t say anything to him, but I wasn’t really thinking and when he handed me the kitten I looked at it and I think I said something like, ‘Oh God, you’re number eleven.’”

            “Oh, um, what did the guy say?”

            “Nothing.  He just kind of looked at me funny.  I wonder what he thought.”

            “He probably thought you were making a stew.”

            “Oh.  Oops.”

 

Well, as it turns out, we decided not to make the stew after all (yet) and instead the kitten, which the vet determined to be no older than about six weeks, was deposited safely with my mother who, much to the chagrin of her half dozen other cats has fallen head over heels for his little bobble-headed ways, but who has not yet provided a picture for me to spread amongst the internets.  For now, I suppose I shall appease you all with…

 

Your baby of Zen!

 

I didn't dream of sugar plums.

9:00 PM  Decide to go lay in bed and watch TV for rest of night.

 

9:02 PM  Enter bedroom.  Attempt to walk around bed.  Find giant horrible hairball.

 

9:03 PM  Decide I’m too tired and irritable to possibly deal with horrific hairball of death.  Whine pathetically for The Husband to come and save me from it.

 

9:04 PM  Step over hairball, walk around bed, and get in.

 

9:04:01 PM  Discover second hairball in bed.

 

9:04:02 PM  Manage to levitate above bed while executing speedy retreat.  Yell for The Husband to come SAVE ME!

 

9:05 PM  The Husband walks in.  Asks why I keep yelling.

 

9:05:01 PM  Explain to The Husband that I was originally calling about the one hairball, but now there’s two and I’m so very adorable and pathetic therefore, please to help?

 

9:06:00 PM  The Husband spies hairball number one on floor.

 

9:06:30 PM  The Husband points to spot on bed, asks if this is the second hairball.

 

9:06:31 PM  Realize that it is not, as a matter of fact, the second hairball.  Tell The Husband.

 

9:07 PM  The Husband identifies mystery spot as pee.

 

9:07:01 PM  Contemplate simply walking away and leaving this life behind.  I hear Tahiti is nice.

 

9:08 PM  Start stripping blankets and sheets from bed.

 

9:09 PM  Discover THIRD hairball.  This time in on t-shirt left in bed.

 

9:10 PM  Decide to…? Stop and…? Wonder…? Sob hysterically…? Give Up…? Drink heavily.

 

And now, your baby of Zen.

 

Danger: Turn Back

As a general sort of rule, I try not to share too much in the way of bad news with anyone.  Even on this blog, which some would consider a diary, I tend to focus only on the trivialities and humor of day to day life rather than the mundane and largely depressing realities of it.  I’ve even mentioned it before, albeit a fair while ago and only in passing, that I try to make it a policy not to pass on news of the gloomy and disheartening lest I saddle someone with a few hours or days worth of melancholy and glum.  Naturally, the reason behind my reluctance is very simple:  I wouldn’t want to know either.  I tend to work very hard at avoiding exposure to all the bad things in this world.  Perhaps it’s just pessimism, though I fear it’s far more likely to simply be an unusually clear grasp of reality, but I feel that there is a tremendous amount of “badness” in the world and if I’m not careful to avoid direct knowledge of it, I won’t really be able to live a normal life.  I’ll just spiral into a puddle of misery and despair and sob quietly in a corner until I die from dehydration.  I can be a bit of a downer in that way.

It is in my never-ending quest to shun all the horrors of the real world that I refuse to even partake in the “feel good,” “happy-ending” type stories that most people seem more than happy to soak up and cheerfully wallow around in like a pig in slop.  To me, any story of a heroic LONE survivor or rescued ABUSED animal is too deeply marred by tragedy to be salvageable as uplifting.  Thus, it is with this in mind that I haven’t really focused too much in this blog on our various cat rescues and acquisitions.  Not that they haven’t all ended happily, bat rather, rescued cats have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is still full of unrescued cats.  And my knowledge of the existence of those other unrescued cats is exactly why this weekend’s acquisition of Fenchurch or Fenny or, as I like to call her, Number Ten, was so desperately depressing to me.

It was The Husband’s opportunistic trapping of the little orange kitten, now known as Fenny, this past Sunday evening as I painted my final stripes on the Pegboard that was the source of all the unpleasantness.  Stray cats tend not to be down with the whole groove of the capturing process so the event tends to be a little stressful even under the best of circumstances, but when that cat happens to be a kitten, the event happens to take place on a Sunday night when there aren’t any vets open, I happen to be in the middle of a task with time constraints, and the necessity to board the cat for the night combines with the unknown nature of it’s health and the presence of our own indoor cats, the situation can perhaps reach stress levels not unlike those you would expect from looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.  Add to that being suddenly very aware that despite the fact that this cat’s arrival has taken us to the very disturbing place of having TEN indoor only cats, that there are still easily half a dozen more in my neighborhood alone and you have a recipe for a complete freak out, mental breakdown, spiraling funslide into depression land where chocolate and tequila reign supreme.

Yesterday the vet determined that Fenny was, indeed a girl, and about sixteen weeks old.  He fixed her, gave her flea and worm medicine and a clean bill of health, and today we brought her back home where she took up residence in Sora’s old room which had, as of late, been housing Yabbi during the day in an attempt to rid us of the horrors of his vile den of iniquity, also known as his cage.  He likes to decorate with hairballs and pee.  The Husband and I have decided to look into rehab programs for our rescuing addiction and I’m going to carefully consider wearing blinders every time I leave the house to limit my ability to spot the pathetic and needy.  For now, I leave with                 your kitten of Zen.

 

 

 

 

 

Blurry but Breathtaking

Business

 

 

Casual

 

 

Business Casual

 

They're so happy when we're home.

The Price of Freshness

Living with nine indoor cats in a state where it’s only cool enough to open the windows a paltry handful of days each year, it’s only natural that The Husband and I would become air freshener connoisseurs. While most people tend to buy an air freshener or two and maybe a scented candle to get them through the shut-in season, we have adopted a full regimen. With no less than five different air fresheners, an arsenal of baking soda products, and a plan, we have effectively eliminated every olfactory trace of our feline friends and replaced it with the soothing aroma of nothingness.

The trick has always been to avoid trying to add smells and stick to meticulously eliminating them instead. Odor absorbers, odor eliminators, fabric refreshers: a violent campaign to seek and destroy every nasally assaulting molecule that deigned to waft in our general direction. On this front we have been united…until recently. After spending years perfecting our formula of products and routines till our strategies were nothing short of a science, The Husband started experimenting. First it was a new baking powder product, then a harmless plug-in, or tiny vial of scented oils. For the most part, I tried to ignore it. I brushed it off as a passing fancy, an experimental phase that would die away as subtly as it had arisen, and for the most part, I was right. After a short time, the plug in would go unfilled and the oil would dry up and The Husband would forget and move on and we could live in peace until a new revolution in scent technology hit the market.

The latest revolution came in the form of a large plastic monolith, devoid of features, with the exception of a small hole and a large blue button. Promising to release a refreshing spritz of fragrance every few minutes, it had wooed The Husband both with its heady perfume and electronic gadgetry. Here was an opportunity to fiddle with settings and replace batteries and its siren song proved too powerful to ignore. I, however, remained less impressed. Faced with a veritable graveyard of lost and forgotten air fresheners, this, the largest of the bunch, represented nothing more to me than another carcass for the pile.

How wrong I was. A day or two later, air freshener forgotten, I sat at my desk to work on something or other of little consequence to this story. It was relatively early on a weekend morning and the house was luxuriating in a rare moment of peace and silence. The cats had all settled in to their various napping spots and other than the background hum of the computers you could hear a pin drop. Suddenly and startlingly, from directly behind my head, the silence was interrupted by a high pitched, shrieking, hissing sound that very closely resembled my idea of the sound of imminent death. Reacting thusly, I promptly stroked out and began to drool and twitch uncontrollably while the cats shot out from all corners of the house in search of the nearest hiding place that allowed them to first trample something irreplaceable on the way. As I slowly began to realize that I was not being devoured feet first by a ravenous demon creature from the fiery pits of hell, as I had suspected, I ventured a glance toward The Husband. Sitting peacefully, not two feet away from me with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, he breathed deeply, oblivious to my plight, and lavishing in the refreshing lilac mist.

 

Of course, you know, this means war.

The Old Standby

Do you ever do that thing where you have such limited time and so many possible things to do with it that you can’t decide what you’re going to do and you end up doing nothing at all?  Like, I could write a post or play a video game or read a book or work on the advertising for the baby site or watch a movie or clean something or stare at a wall or count my arm hairs or slowly and meticulously tear a single sheet of paper into as many tiny pieces as I can and then sprinkle them in the air and pretend it’s snowing, but I just can’t decide.  Maybe I’ll just torment a sleeping cat for a while…

I'm surprised they let me out of the house.

There’s nothing like a day spent watching a five-hour-long version of Pride and Prejudice with The Husband and nine pushy cats.  Cats, I might add, that spent the entire time meticulously scooting me off the bed until I had no choice but to lay across a corner of the foot of the bed with my legs hanging off the side.  Damn cats.  The advantage of this position was that I was able to spot the BIGGEST FREAKING SQUIRREL I”VE EVER SEEN!  Or, at least, that’s what my brain started screaming at me when I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and so what if I fell off the bed and made a spectacle of myself over nothing more unusual than a neighborhood cat climbing a slanty tree, the point is…actually, there is no point…carry on.

Response

To:

1.  The cat who peed on my pillow.

2.  The cat who insists on sleeping on the crappy ass pillow I have left.

3.  The cat who insists on sleeping on me.

4.  The cat who can hear the sound of an eyelid closing and sees it as a sign that I want to pay attention to him.

5.  The cat who brings me a toy every ten minutes so I’ll drop what I’m doing and lavish him with praise.

6.  The cat who stands in front of me on the desk and swishes her tail in my face.

7.  The cat who insists on being in the bathroom with me.

8.  The cat that sits next to my chair and shrieks.

9.  The cat who is currently biting me on the ankle.

 

From:  Me

 

I’m starting to get the feeling that maybe you might possibly be interested in a little more of my attention, perhaps.  I’m not sure, but it occurs to me that it’s likely that you may feel slightly ignored…ish.  The thing is, you see, you all eat an awful lot and poo an awful lot and you might be surprised to know, that these two hobbies of yours can get a little expensive on our end.  Perhaps if you didn’t insist on cat food made from rare truffles and virgin tears or if you would use a kitty litter that wasn’t made from the powdered remains of crushed marble statuettes from lesser known renaissance artists and perfumed with essence of exotic orchids, we wouldn’t need to worry about the trifles of work and business to pay the bills.  Seeing, however, as you routinely attempt to bury any food that doesn’t meet your butt-licking exacting standards and we all know how finicky you tend to be about the litter issues, you’re going to have to find a way to entertain yourselves for a while longer.

 

P.S.  You know, in some places, people eat cats… I’m just saying.