So Smart, She's Dumb

Further to "cats marching to different drummers..." My foster cat Pris (I guess it's one ess; who knew?) totally does this. She doesn't look at all like the cat pictured, but she does this all right. Sometimes she uses her beautifully designed cat's tongue to scoop water out of the dish. Often, however, she dips her paw in the water and licks it off.

Some people would probably reckon this is a sign that Pris is smarter than the average cat. I'd say this falls rather under the heading of "sharp enough to cut herself."

Shall we talk about the results of this super-smart feline drinking behavior? Yes, let's.

1. The water dish becomes filthy every day. When I refill it every morning, I have to rinse out a layer of dirt, fuzz, and who knows what other crud off the bottom of the dish. This is totally new in all my experience with three previous cats (including one still with us, Sinead - who, by the way, still doesn't get along with Pris, after almost a month and a half together). I used to get away with only giving the cats' water dish a scrubbing once or twice a week, as the build up of cat spit started to make the water yucky. But that oily, yellowish, slow-building yuckiness was far preferable to this continually refreshing layer of filth.

2. Pris drinks a lot - if I fill the water dish twice a day, she will empty it twice a day; and this is a dish that ever used to run out of water when I had Tyrone and Sinead drinking out of it, and I never refilled it more than once a day. Because of this vast intake of water, combined with her tendency to drink with her paws, Pris tracks wet footprints everywhere she goes - including, apparently, the litter box. As a consequence, clay from the litter box sticks to her paws and also gets tracked everywhere. And that means clayey smears on things that didn't used to get clayey smears on them. I may have mentioned in my previous "cats" post that one of Pris's favorite places to walk and lie down is on my pillows; I mean the ones I lay my head on. Do you see where I'm going with this? I am forever noticing clayey smears on the pillowcases where I lay my head. This is, in a word, gross.

3. And then there's the peeing. Oy vay, the peeing! Since Pris moved in, the daily size, heft, and number of the clumps in the litter box have broken all in-house records. As I mentioned in a previous post, they're positioned where they're hard to scoop out of the box - down at the bottom and against a side, or even in a corner of the box, where it sticks to the inner surface of the tray. Worse, almost every day during the last week or more, there has been an accident in which a cat - I can't be certain which - hits the edge of the box with a urine stream, which then either forms a puddle that runs across the stupidly non-level floor of the kitty litter room, or (again, something that never used to happen) somehow gets under the litter box and forms a loathesome mud puddle there, with the aid of kicked-out-of-the-box fragments of clay. YUCK. In mile-high letters of spew!

3.5. It might also bear noting that I'm going through kitty litter faster than I ever did before.

4. I don't know if there's a connection, but I have a theory that Pris is suffering from some kind of medical condition, either as a result of her over-drinking, or causing her to do so. As my theory develops, it begins to connect this feline water intoxication with the cat's skin problems, which also beat anything I have seen in 15 years of living with other cats. She sheds more dandruff than I've ever noticed coming off one of my cats; and mind, Tyrone was a dark-colored cat, so I would have noticed if he was flaking. At times, she also shows patches of dry, white, scaly looking skin. I mean to say, do cats get leprosy? Or maybe this is kitty eczema or psoriasis? Could dipsomania be a co-occurring condition? I'm open to advice. Besides the obvious - "Take this cat to a vet!" - which I will be doing anyway.

But apart from the cat being a dipso, let's get back to that scooping-water-with-the-paws thing. Yes, it's adorable and shows, once again, a smart cat who marches to her own drummer. On the other hand, its results are so altogether unsatisfactory that I reckon she would be smarter if she cut it out.

Cats Marching to a Different Drummer

My senior cat Sinead, 10 this year, and I are fostering another cat named Priss, 6 or so, who belongs to the lady whose house I plan to move into next month. (The lady herself is in an assisted-living facility.) And boy, am I noticing some things about Priss, a.k.a. Prissy, a.k.a. Priscilla, that are unlike my experiences with Sinead and the late, lamented Tyrone and Lionel, my original duo of cats. This cat definitely marches to a different drummer.

For example, I've noticed a more marked tendency of the clumps in the litter box to adhere to the sides of the tub, especially at the short ends, and to be buried down at the bottom of the tub as well. I'm pretty sure this is the new cat's doing. It drives me crazy, for two reasons. For one, this tendency to stick to the sides, and down into the bottom corner, makes the daily cleaning of the litter boxes extra difficult. For another, the stream of cat pee occasionally hits the rim of the tub, or misses it entirely, resulting in a smelly puddle that I have to clean up. Yuck!

On a more touchy-feely, cuddly level, Priss shows affection differently than all my cats until now. Lionel did occasionally climb up on the back of a chair I was sitting in, or even the back of my seat in the U-haul van in which we moved together from Arizona to Missouri in 2005, but his goal was to cuddle against my shoulders or the back of my neck. All of my cats, including Lionel, mostly approached me for cuddling by climbing onto my torso while I was reclining in bed or reading on the couch. Apparently there was a pecking-order for doing this, too, because Tyrone rarely cuddled this way until after Lionel died in 2007; and while Sinead has always been an in-your-face cuddler, she mostly did so when Tyrone was out of the room, until he started to decline last year and she became the dominant cat. Since Tyrone has been gone, she's been extremely adorable, often lying on her side on my chest with her face inches from mine.

Priss, meantime, prefers to climb atop the pillow behind my head and lie purring against the crown of my head. Or, noticing a feline vacancy on my chest, she will sometimes step down over my shoulder and lie against my cheek, facing the foot of the couch or bed, rather than face-to-face with me. Only a couple times in the just-under-a-month we've lived together has she taken the face-to-face cuddling position.

She also purrs and vocalizes in a different way from any of my own cats. I'm still trying to figure out what she means by "Meow," whereas that always seemed fairly obvious with Lionel, Sinead, and especially Tyrone. Priss also has an extremely loud, somewhat abrasive purr - the kind I have read described as a "demanding" purr, or a "manipulative" one, and whose absence from my household has always seemed a blessing. Luckily, she mostly uses the purr to signal, "Pet me, dammit." It just gets confusing when I start to do so, and she meows in a way that I can't help thinking means something like, "Not like that, idiot," or maybe, "I'm not in the mood right now." And then continues purring. For the life of me, I can't make out what signal she's trying to send me.

Sadly, the signal the cats are sending each other comes through loud and clear. After just a bit short of a month, they are still hissing, spitting, yowling, growling, and (when they come with in reach of each other) swinging at one another. It makes those moments when Sinead is hiked up on my chest, close enough for her whiskers to tickle my face, and Priss is pressed against the crown of my head, purring like a boat motor, rather tense. I keep making calming, shushing noises and trying to pet whichever cat seems a little uneasy, and hoping I don't get disemboweled when they go into fight-or-flight mode. All this feline brinkmanship makes it hard for me to enjoy doing what I generally settle on the couch to do - read a book. Which hand do I hold the book in while I'm trying to soothe two neurotic cats who are ticking like emotional time-bombs?

I'm not sure which cat is really to blame for this ongoing hostility. They're both old enough to be set in their ways. I wonder, though, which way the balance will tip once we move into the house where Priss reigned unchallenged until I took her in at the beginning of the month. I hope the house will be big enough for the three of us!

Uplight, Downlight

I've been fostering, and may possibly end up adopting, an adult cat that belonged to a neighbor who had to enter an assisted-care facility. Her name, for what it's worth, is either Priss or Prissy, short for Priscilla (not my choice, but oh well), and she is extremely black.

I'll tell you later how she's getting along with my senior cat Sinead, and what I think about having two cats in the house again, after finally realizing after 14 solid years of two-cattedness that one is the ideal number of cats to live with. But that's not what this post is about.

The late Tyrone was often mistaken for a black cat, though I always hastened to make it clear he was really dark gray - in fact, he was a couple different shades of dark gray, with tabby markings that only showed up under certain lighting conditions. Priss, however, is truly, madly, deeply black - so black, with kind of a matte finish, that even with a light shining directly on her at close range (for example, from the lamp on my bedside table while I'm combing her coat on the bed), it is sometimes difficult to see her in any detail beyond a cat-shaped shadow.

This bizarre phenomenon made me realize that our language has a crying need for two words that, to my knowledge, I am about to coin for the first time right now: "uplight" and "downlight." The conditions in which I can look at Priss and have trouble seeing anything but a black blob, even when I'm right beside her and there's a bright light aimed at us from a few feet away, are what I would describe as "uplight" - i.e., the cat is between me in the light; I'm looking at her uplight, with the angle of light casting hear near side at least partly in shadow.

The problem goes away when I'm viewing the cat downlight, when the angle of light is such that the cat isn't mostly between me and the light source. Then, particularly after being combed and petted and perhaps treated with a little kitty conditioner, her fur gleams and the light brings out her features.

On a related topic of perhaps paradoxical sensory discoveries, I tried an experiment for lunch yesterday: on one sandwich, I put a little ham, a little bologna, two generously proportioned strips of extra-sharp cheddar, and a couple of those individually-wrapped squares of floppy orange "American cheese," all between two pieces of Italian-style bread with not-quite-mayo salad dressing. And what do you suppose was the flavor that cut through everything and dominated the taste of that sandwich? It wasn't the salty, smoked ham. It wasn't the tangy salad dressing. It wasn't even the sharp, aged cheddar. It was, believe it or not, that bland, pedestrian, "imitation American flavor pasteurized process cheese food" that drowned out everything else.

It reminded me of that time, years ago, when I put a drop or two of sesame oil in a bowl of hot chili-flavored ramen-noodle soup - the kind of soup base that makes sweat pour down your face and that leaves the membranes from your lips downward on fire with a stinging sensation. Guess what? The soup totally left my membranes on fire and my face covered in sweat, but the only thing I could taste was the nice, mild, nutty flavor of sesame oil. It drove home the fact that a flavor can be perceived as mild, or even bland, yet at the same time be an incredibly strong flavor, while one that comes across as sharp, pungent, or even painfully spicy, might actually be very weak in terms of pure taste.

Another thing to learn from two slices of American cheese is that something can be all but disgustingly smooth, while at the same time not being slippery at all. There is something about the unnaturally smooth consistency of American cheese singles that gives me a slight shiver, yet at the same time, you can't rub two slices of them together without the pieces immediately sticking to each other. You can't run a slice of this stuff across a clean plate without the friction grabbing it and practically welding it to the plate's surface. It's like one of those transparent plastic decals that looks like it should be smooth, but that will cling to a glass window until you scrape it off with a razor-blade. The smoothness is all in the consistency of the thing, its internal order; the friction exists, apparently, on a microscopic order on the object's surface.

All these little paradoxes of everyday science leave a body as curious as a cat. Hopefully the curiosity won't, like, kill me.

R.I.P. Tyrone

This buddy of mine, age 14, was euthanized today. He was apparently suffering some kind of thyroid condition. He drank a lot of water, had patches of scaly skin and weird growths on his body, was losing muscle tone and bladder control, and was acting increasingly weird. After more than a week of having to mop urine puddles off the floor near his litter box at least once a day, I took him to the vet and said goodbye.

The last time I lost a pet was in the early days of this blog, in October 2007, when Tyrone's pal Lionel, then 5, met his maker. Lionel's malady was a type of cancer that produced a large mass visible under the fur on his side, possibly a side-effect of a certain rabies vaccine he received early in his life.

I adopted both Tyrone and Lionel in August 2002 from the Yuma County Humane Society in Yuma, Ariz. Tyrone came home first, but I quickly decided I wanted a playmate for him and went back for Lionel.

Actually I visited the humane society three times. The first time, when I wasn't sure whether I wanted a dog or a cat, I looked at some of each. It was only when I saw a little charcoal-gray kitten with big green eyes, and I knew he was going to break my heart someday, because he had it. He wasn't old enough to be adopted that day. I noted down the date when he would become eligible for adoption, and was waiting outside the humane society when it opened on that date, to make sure nobody else got him before I did. I already knew his name was going to be Tyrone, because it was the first name that made me laugh when I was thinking about what to call him.

I think I saw Lionel on that second visit, or a cat just like him - an orange tabby who got his name pretty much the same way. As when I had Lionel put down, I stayed with Tyrone until the end. Unlike with Lionel, I haven't cried yet. I guess the "never again" factor hasn't really hit me yet.

The never-agains are significant, though. Tyrone was a very affectionate feline friend. He used to greet me at the door every day when I came home from work, climbing up on the nearest piece of furniture and stretching to put his paws on my chest and his nose to my lips in what was either a kitty kiss, or a surreptitious attempt to smell what I'd had for lunch. He was the cat who gave me face-bumps, who would let me pick him up and hold him, who would snuggle close and purr and grip my shoulder with his forepaws, who was infinitely patient with my funny little way of playing with his tail (which I always thought was one of his best features), who would throw himself down against my leg with a whap and press hard against me.

He was also a fun, playful pet. As a kitten, I thought he resembled a little monkey, scampering around, leaping and dancing under the type of toy that I would dangle over him on a stick or a length of wire, and chasing balls with jingle-bells in them like a professional soccer player. He always wanted to shoot the balls under pieces of furniture from which I could only extract them by shoving a broomstick after them. Sometimes he would play attack forward around me while I tried to defend the goal.

He was a cat who appreciated music. When I played the piano, he was always right there, spending three-fourths of the time sitting next to me on the bench, watching my fingers press the keys, and only one-fourth of the time walking on the console between my eyes and the musical score.

He was a cat with a marvelous repertoire of vocalizations, from the throaty click that meant, "Hey, bird outside the window! I want to have you for lunch!" to the chirps and trills that seemed to mean "Alley-oop!" or "Uff da!" as he jumped on and off pieces of furniture. He had a tone of meow that I learned to recognize as "Give me a treat right now!" and that was not to be denied if I valued my sanity.

Tyrone was a linguistic researcher. He once used his meow to explore the acoustics of the inside of a Kleenex box, in which his head became stuck. I think one of his meows, translated by my subconscious mind during a recent early-morning dream, may have been the reason I awoke thinking I had heard a voice in the next room calling my first name. Some of his meows have, at times, actually sounded like he was trying to say "Robin." Usually, those seemed to be the meows of a cat looking at his food dish and saying to himself, "Is this really all there is?" At other times, I thought he and Sinead (Lionel's longhair calico successor) were meowing at each other in complete sentences, apparently having a conversation, albeit in no language I understood. These exchanges usually ended with a snarling, pushing, punching fight.

Tyrone was a helpful cat. I will miss having his assistance changing the sheets on my bed - an occasion on which, throughout the last 14 years, I have invariably told him, "How would I do this without your help?" Unless Sinead steps up, I'm about to find out. Tyrone was also a gas during laundry sorting.

He was a good cat for sensing my feelings and responding to them. When I felt really down, he became especially cuddly, or would look at me with concerned eyes.

Everyone who met him, up to the last year of his life, commented on what a beautiful cat he was. He had a fine glossy coat, a well-shaped physique, a handsome face, and a very faint pattern of tabby markings that only showed up in certain lighting. His whiskers, his ears, his eyes, his grippy forepaws, and his tail (which I always secretly envied) are going to be missed.

Toward the end of his life, Tyrone hardly ever moved off the top of the piano, except to eat, use the litter box, or snuggle with me on the couch. It was as if he had an aversion to the paw-feel of the living room floor. His sphere of activity grew smaller and his activities themselves became more repetitive and annoying. I started to entertain thoughts about kitty dementia. I knew the end was near when he actually peed on me one evening. But the decision actually came over Labor Day Weekend, by which time the cat-pee-missing-the-litter-box thing had upgraded from "occasionally" to "daily."

I don't plan on adopting another kitten to replace Tyrone, as I did after Lionel died. I realized something I had forgotten when I adopted Sinead - that I don't really enjoy living with a kitten. I remember now telling Tyrone and Lionel that I thought they were great, but I couldn't wait until they were grown-up cats and we could enjoy each other's adult company. But that knowledge seems to have hidden itself during my grief for Lionel, with the result that I went through the ordeal of needle-like claws, and having to keep two cats away from each other's food dishes, and all the other mischief whereof a kitten is the fuzzy yet excruciatingly definite embodiment.

Until recently, I never felt as close to Sinead as I had felt toward Lionel and Tyrone. Lately, as if by instinct, she has begun to compensate for the distance growing between me and Tyrone. During the last several weeks, Sinead has hardly left my bed at night, always moving to whichever side I am facing and cuddling against my chest. She's going to be a good comfort, I think. And if her health remains good, I could expect to enjoy her company for another decade or so. By that point I'll probably be grown-up enough to be responsible for a dog, if I want to keep having pets.

It's nice not to live alone. I had no one at home from the time I graduated from the seminary until I found Tyrone. I met him very shortly after the beginning of his life, and I enjoyed knowing him until the very end. I don't expect to meet him again; I have no illusions about that. But I am thankful for the company he has been, and I am glad that his discomfort is over.

Stuffy Nose Causes Sprained Ankle

Last night was not very restful for me. After trying without success to fall asleep for a couple hours, I decided my problem was nasal congestion. Having already taken a decongestant, I felt my only other course was to use a squeezable bottle of saline fluid for nasal irrigation. So I ran as much of this fluid through my head as I could stand, and then promptly had a brief but furious nosebleed.

I was sitting on the lid of the toilet, nursing my nosebleed with wads of facial tissue when my cat Tyrone, 13, hopped on the bathroom vanity and started toying with the soiled Kleenex. I didn't think that was a good idea, so I brushed him off the counter the same way I have done countless times. Only this time, he caught his right front paw in a drawer handle. The drawer came open, the cat fell awkwardly to the floor and when he got up to walk away, it was with a profound limp.

Ouch.

I was unsure whether he had broken the leg or sprained it. I didn't want to irritate him too much by handling it; and after all, I'm no veterinarian. So I let him sulk overnight, then took him to the vet first thing this morning. The doctor examined the paw, felt it all over, X-rayed it, and after a long anxious wait in an unnecessarily warm examination room I finally received the good news that it was only a sprain. Tyrone got an injection of an anti-inflammatory drug that should keep him comfortable for about 36 hours, and I got a bill for $109.

Because of a stuffy nose. It can only happen to me.

Also, after spending half the night awake while every sinus in my skull was filled with a stinging itch, I woke up to a constant flow of mucus that has not stopped yet. So I'm well punished, as usual.

Cats 1 - Dog 0

I've been staying with my parents since earlier this month. They have a dog, a frisky but sweet-tempered miniature schnauzer named Rudy. I, as you know very well, have two cats. So far, we haven't let them mix very much.

Rudy is inquisitive and susceptible to boredom. He tends to get into places, and then into things, where his moist nose doesn't belong. One has to be careful to keep the bathroom doors firmly shut against him, or else he will shred the toilet paper.

My cats, it turns out, do not. As surprising to me as to anyone else, they can be trusted with a full roll of TP on the roller, right in paw's reach. I learned this by accident when we decided to keep the cats closed up in the downstairs guest bedroom, which has its own bathroom. Their litter box, food and water dishes are in the bathroom. And I only realized after several days of kitteh access to the TP that all my years of keeping the rolled paper closed up in a cupboard, or on top of a lighting fixture, were wasted. Maybe the culprit I was protecting it from was the late Lionel, who hasn't been with us these past seven years. Oh, how well my cats have trained me!

Rudy also menaces other innocent pieces of paper that he may find within reach when no one is minding him. Because he tends to act out when bored, it never pays not to be minding him. My parents keep a childproof gate across the entrance to the "nice" living room, which they keep set up as a chapel in case church services fall through at their regular location. When allowed in there unsupervised, Rudy has been known to tear up pages of Dad's sermon and even (gasp! horror!) chew on the Altar Book.

So, we try not to let Rudy out of our sight for long. The saying applies equally well to Rudy the schnauzer as to many toddlers: When everything goes quiet, be very afraid.

The dog and the cats had barely seen each other until yesterday. Once or twice Rudy had darted into their bedroom when he happened to be by when the door was opened. All that had happened then was a bit of hissing and some tense and tentative sniffing, mostly between Rudy and my junior cat Sinead. I didn't think it was unpromising. My cats Sinead and Tyrone had started out that way, and look what a lovely friendship they have now. (Discounting the hissing, spitting, boxing, and chasing all over the room that sometimes breaks out.) So yesterday, when I got home from work, I decided to give Rudy and the cats a chance to get to know each other better.

I was the first one to get home after work. My Dad had something to keep him from home for another hour or two. My stepmom was out of town for the week. I needed to change out of my work clothes. And I needed to watch the dog. So I did the sensible thing: I combined the two tasks into one. Rudy came with me into my bedroom.

And there was hissing. And there was tense and tentative sniffing between Rudy and Sinead. All as expected, up to the point where previous visits had been terminated.

And then Sinead puffed herself up like a blowfish—an effect of which a longhair calico may become the world's premiere master. And then she backed Rudy into the bathroom, spitting and growling as only a cat on the edge of dogicide can. And then I heard the sound that made me drop the clothing I was trying to put on and run to the rescue.

Rudy, backed against the hallway door, had begun to cry.

I guess I had underestimated how scared of cats the poor pup is. Dad tells me he has been tormented by the neighbor's cats.

Now I know Sinead is a bully. I know Rudy is a coward. And I also know that Tyrone enjoyed the whole show, watching from curled-up on top of the bed with a look on his face that said, "Well, this might be interesting."

The Cat Who Said, "What Up, Dog?"

My feline friend Sinead is stretched out on the couch. When I look in her direction, and she is looking back in mine, she sometimes says, "Meow," in an especially funny way.

It's not like the "When are you going to feed me?" meow, or like the "Gosh darn it, it's treat time!" meow, or (least of all) like the "Kowabunga!" yell she gives on the rare occasions when she tries to dart past me in the doorway to the vestibule of the apartment building. Nor is it like the plaintive, "Won't you cuddle me?" plea she makes when she comes over to me and asks to be admitted to my lap.

Rather, it's a unique meow, accompanied by a beckoning motion of her head, while the cat stays right where she is. It's as if she's ordering me to come to her and bring a bunch of loving with me. Or perhaps it's just a cat's cocky way of saying, "Yo. What up, dawg?"

The Cat Who Used Figures of Speech

My 11-ish cat Tyrone demonstrated, at four o'clock this morning, that he knows how to use a figure of speech.

We have worked out a little vocabulary between us, mostly in body language. For example, when I'm reading on the couch with a blanket over me, or sleeping in bed likewise, he may climb up on my chest and paw at the hem of the blanket, purring loudly. This means he wants me to lift the hem and let him crawl under the blanket with me. Adorable cuddling ensues.

Sometimes he does this when I'm not under a blanket. Instead, he paws at the neck-line of my T-shirt. I generally take this to mean Drunk Kitty has forgotten the difference between a blanket and a shirt, and wants to snuggle up inside my shirt. This usually proves to be awkward, because there really isn't room for him to crawl down the neck of my shirt while I'm wearing it. Sometimes he tries crawling up from the lower hem, but usually stops halfway to play the "attack the hand through the fabric" game, favored by cats worldwide.

This morning, however, Tyrone found me sprawled in bed with neither a blanket nor a shirt covering my hairy mountain of flab. Nothing dismayed, the cat stood on my chest, purred, and pawed at my collarbone until I woke up. I correctly interpreted this gesture as a request to pull the sheet and blanket over us both. A minute later, Tyrone was curled up next to my knee, snoring. And I was wide awake, thinking: "My cat just used a figure of speech to communicate with me. Metonymy, to be exact. The bare chest for the blanket that covers it..."

New Camera

Here are some shots I took while playing with my new digital camera, figuring out how it works. Out of over 40 snaps I've taken over the past few days, just a handful really struck me as keepers. I guess I have a lot more to learn!

Here is Tyrone, the cat who has been my main dawg for over nine years now. He's still looking good, don't you think? And in this picture, slightly touched up by a bit of Photoshop magic, he looks like he's saying to me, "Dude, you gone."

This rust-colored classic is parked across the street from my office in the rustic burg of Defiance, Missouri. I thought it went nicely with the shed next to it, but I masked in the background foliage (from another photo I took yesterday) to conceal a rather ordinary house on the neighboring lot.

Here is the nice-looking bed-and-breakfast next to the building where I work in Defiance, Missouri. The painting and woodwork actually still need a little work, but overall it doesn't look half bad!

Here is a fancy birdbath on the grounds of the B&B pictured above. I'm mostly proud of the fact that I kept my hand still enough to get a good shot with the optical zoom cranked up most of the way. Also, I like the slightly wild, antique-looking settings. But I wish I had taken a picture of the gargoyle on the building next door! Ah, next week....

And here is a glimpse of the space I work in every day, fulfilling orders for a Christian doctrinal journal that has been published in some twenty languages and read around the world. While bulk shipments and single-copy subscriptions are shipped from other facilities, all your day-to-day back-issue orders, new subscriptions, and donations cross this desk and the packaging/mailing work bench next to it!

From Your Cats...

Top ten reasons we, your cats, require our water dish to be cleaned every day:

1. Leave water standing anywhere for a night and a day, and it will be gross.
2. You try drinking water by licking it out of a bowl, and see if you don't slobber in it.
3. You try picking up pieces of food with your lips, teeth, and tongue, and see if you don't spray crumbs all over the place. Some of it will get in your water dish!
   
4. If you have hair on your head and/or face, wear a dark shirt some time and see if it doesn't collect little hairs, bits of dead skin & other crud. Now try not getting some of that in your water dish!
   
5. There's a lot of traffic by here. Don't pretend you've never kicked any dirt into our water dish.
6. OK, so we sneezed in it. Happy?
7. If you're going to drop straw wrappers, receipts, milk carton rings, shreds of shrink-wrap and fragments of the plastic seal around the lid of a bottle or jar, don't blame us for taking an interest in their floating and/or absorbent qualities.
8. You've got two cats, dude. Why do you always assume I'm the bad one?
9. This is still yesterday's water, and we're pissed.
10. We've been meaning to ask you whether we couldn't have a paw-washing station next to the litter box. It wouldn't be an issue if you hadn't declawed us. Ordinarily we would use our claws to keep our paws off the clay. But now...?
    

The Cat Who Said Kowabunga

Yesterday, I had just opened the front door of my apartment to start loading laundry into the car for the weekend's laundromat run, when Tyrone the cat--he of the "dart out into the hallway and roll on the upstairs neighbor's welcome mat" game--shot through the opening like a projectile.

As he flew past me, Tyrone gave the feline equivalent of a rebel yell. It was a full-throated, multisyllabic meow that bemused me just long enough to enable him to squeeze past my ineffective guard. I might have successfully fended him off if it hadn't been for that vocalization. Without having any consonants & not so many distinct vowels, his meow really did sound a lot like "Kowabunga!"

The Hallway Game

My cat Tyrone and I have a little game. Whenever I open the front or back door of the apartment, he tries to shoot past me and get out in the hallway. My job is to play defense, either with my legs or with anything I might be carrying with me, to block him.

He isn't really trying to escape. Most of the time he stops just a couple of feet past the door and looks up at me, as if to say "Gotcha!" Or he rolls on his back on the carpet, as if laughing. Now and then, either to score extra points or just to rub my nose in his victory, he runs up the stairs to the next landing and rolls on the neighbor's welcome mat. He is very docile when picked up and carried back inside the apartment, even allowing me to manhandle him down the stairs without struggling, biting, or scratching. It's kind of fun... unless I'm in a real hurry.

Last week there was a day when Tyrone played this little game and scored one point (stopping in the front hallway). While I was gathering him up to put him back in the apartment, disaster struck. My other cat Sinead, usually too nervous about strange new things (such as the whole world outside our apartment) to play Tyrone's game, chose this moment to sneak out the door--for maybe the third time ever.

This was not good. Sinead does NOT like to be chased, or grabbed, or carried. She is a past master of eluding capture and, failing that, fighting to the last tooth and/or claw to escape again. I knew that if she ran up the stairs, I was apt to have a bad day before 6:00 in the morning.

Luckily, I had a book in my hand. I nearly always do, you know. I can hardly bring myself to leave the apartment without one, for fear that boredom will overtake me while waiting for food to be served, or my car's oil to be changed, or the doctor to see me, or the movie to start, etc. So what did I do? I threw the book at Sinead.

To be more precise, I threw the book over Sinead's head. The tip of her tail brushed it before it slammed into the next stair riser above and behind where she had paused to look at whoever might have called her name just then. The impact panicked her, and she bolted--straight through the door into the apartment.

The door I had left open for just this chance.

The door through which Tyrone then spotted a second opportunity to score points in his game. And this time, he went for the extra point...

Whew. After running up the stairs and carrying my well-fed cat back down, I was a bit puffed. Plus, you have to admit that your day is off to an amazing start when three out of two cats make a run for it before you leave for work...

Feline Foot Massage

Tyrone and Sinead joined me in bed last night. They spent the whole night curled up together next to my leg.

For a while it was really interesting because both cats were purring like sawing logs, only with the kind of saw that has a handle at both ends. One cat sawed "up" while the other sawed "down," and then the reverse. It was kind of like musical polyphony, only atonal and more felt than heard. I could have gone all night with that sensation, but for some reason I dropped off to sleep.

Happy New Year, y'all!

My Computer Has Ears

...at least, it looks like it does. Cat's ears. This is because Tyrone, my feline life partner of the past 8 years, likes to watch me use the computer. Typically, after trying several times to walk across the keyboard and getting picked off the desk and set on the floor, he takes up a perch on top of the CPU, which lies flat on the desk, and behind the flat-screen monitor that sits on top of the CPU. So, more and more often, I've been noticing the shape of cat ears sticking up from behind the monitor. It's a sight to make me laugh.

Tyrone likes being the focus of my attention. But after being denied four or five times in a row, he tends to settle for just keeping me company. When I'm in bed, he will often push his nose into my face and "ask" to be let under the covers, only to come right out again, over and over until I throw him off the bed. And then he'll jump back on and "ask" under the covers again, and get thrown off the bed again, and jump back on, etc. After several reps of this exercise, he will frequently curl up next to my leg, on top of the covers, and lie there very contended-like for a long time.

He has lived with a piano as long as we've been together, but until recently he hasn't done much practicing on the instrument. Lately, Tyrone has started playing duets with me. I'll be playing the piano and he'll jump up and walk across the keyboard, stepping over and between my hands, and maybe turn around and walk back the other way. [EDIT: Actually he has only done this a few times. More often, he walks to and fro in front of my sheet music, forcing me to "vamp until ready."] Luckily for him, this makes me laugh. I just keep playing regardless, and after he tries two or three times to drag my attention away from the piano, he may just join me on the bench and watch my performance with wide, interested eyes.

Tyrone's favorite places to be petted are around his muzzle and all the way down his tail. Sometimes he encourages me so firmly to pet the top and sides of his muzzle that I worry about getting my fingers stuck up his nose. I have never known a cat who was so keen on having his tail touched. I'm glad, though. It's a lovely tail, and it feels very fine in the hand. I treat it with respect because I know that this cat's tolerance of being petted there is a rare and precious thing, an artifact of his trust in me.

Alarm Clock with Paws

Even when I'm half-awake, I can't help but notice a certain pattern in my cat's behavior.

Every morning, at around 0510 Central, my alarm clock goes off. Now and then, when I'm feeling particularly unrested, I hit the snooze button in hopes of getting another 9 minutes of shut-eye. But if I do this, within the next minute or two my 8-year-old feline friend Tyrone jumps on my bed. He paws at the top of the covers, asking to be let in. Once let in, he immediately asks to be let out; then he asks in again.

If, rather than letting him in, I elbow him off the bed, he jumps right back on. If I elbow him off a second time, he not only jumps back on the bed, but he walks right across my body, poking various parts of me as uncomfortably as a 12-pound cat balanced on four dainty paws can manage. Sometimes he gets into my face with his cold nose and his tickly whiskers. Sometimes he pounces on parts of my body that happen to move under the covers. Sometimes he meows.

There is no arguing with this cat. It is pointless to try to sleep in. Even when I feel tempted to call in and ask for a late start, my cat won't let me. If I really mean it, I have to throw him out of the room and close the door. But by then I'm up out of bed and there's no going back again--unless I'm actually sick.

So, I can thank my cat Tyrone, in part, for keeping me honest about getting to work on time every day.

The few mornings each month when I am actually free to sleep until "whenever," I simply have to put up with his nudgings until he settles down outside the covers to take a nap. And then, inevitably, my bladder pulls its own alarm...

Cat-gone it!

My cat Tyrone and I have been buddies, night and day, for the past eight years. I still remember the first night after I brought him home, how I cradled him beside me in bed, afraid to fall into a deep sleep lest I roll over and crush that tiny, freaked-out kitten. Most nights since then, the closest my Tyrone comes to snuggling with me in bed is to curl up, outside the covers, on the corner of the foot of the bed. Sometimes, though, he paws at the top of the covers until I let him underneath. Then he typically checks how far down toward the foot of the bed he can explore before the airless darkness gets to him, and he crawls back up to the top asking to be let out. Or, he makes himself comfortable next to my leg and then, 30 seconds later, my bladder suddenly blurts out, "Hey! I need to be emptied!"

One morning earlier this week, Tyrone asked to be let in under the covers. I gave him a little extra space by raising my knee, providing a better view of the lower end of the bed. He made his way down to my feet and threw himself against them in an unbelievably warm, soft, sleepy ball. I thought, "Wow. This feels awesome! Tyrone is warming my feet. It feels like he could stay right there for a couple of hours. And miraculously, I don't have to pee!" After about two minutes of basking in this joyful realization, I started to drift off into my best sleep in weeks...

And that's when my alarm clock rang, 5:00 a.m. on a business day.

What I Did on Holy Saturday

What did I do on Holy Saturday? I mortified the flesh, naturally!

First, my car having flunked its biannual safety and emissions inspections, and I having invested over $1200 in making the repairs necessary to pass, I took it back for its reinspection. Then, with the last piece of paper I needed to reapply for vehicle tags, I sent off the application by mail. With the blessing, this may be my easiest year ever for renewing those tags. It will probably also be the last time I renew them for this car, since by the time my new tags expire in 2012, I will be in my tenth year of driving it. Sooner or later, I'm going to have to buy a less-driven car. Till then, I'll just have to practice a bit of self-denial, by persistently driving the same crummy old car.

I brought a book along to read at Dobbs while my car was being reinspected. The book is Allison Croggon's The Crow, which has been hiding in my laptopless laptop bag (where I keep everything I need for Symphony Chorus rehearsals) with a bookmark in the same page since about January. Hopefully I'll finish it tonight, so I can blog a review of it and three other books I have finished recently. I had been reading it during most of my spare moments since Thursday night, but didn't get very far at Dobbs because I was distracted by the soft, involuntary chuckling of the elderly lady sitting next to me in the waiting room. So I abandoned the waiting room and took a walk, browsed FYE, the used music and video store across the street and, wonder of wonders, didn't buy anything! Well, there's a little mortification for you!

After I had the "Congratulations! Your vehicle passed its inspections!" certificate firmly in my grip, I rushed home and posted it with the application to renew my tags, together with two years' worth of property tax receipts, a copy of my vehicle insurance card, and a check for $52.28. This car seriously isn't worth it. But you know, I'm kind of in mourning for Jesus, so all the expense and red tape kept me in the mood.

Then I decided to put a brave face on it. I went to Ronnie's Drive-In and had a meatball sandwich and fries, then went to see a delightful animated movie: How to Train Your Dragon, featuring the voice talents of Gerard Butler, America Fererra, and Kristin Wiig, among others. It's really a top-quality film, on the same level of smart, touching, funny, and exciting adventure as The Incredibles and Up. Jay Baruchel provides the drily witty voice of Hiccup, a teenage Viking who observes about his island: "This is Berk, where it snows nine months of the year and hails the other three. The food that grows here is tough and tasteless, and the people are even more so." Though he has been brought up to believe that dragons (the local pest) always go for the kill, and a Viking's only chance is to go for it first, he befriends an injured dragon that he calls Toothless, and learns that there is a way to save his island without humans and dragons killing each other. It's a good family picture with some intense, even scary action and a tiny bit of adult humor - a Dad in the audience was the only person, besides me, who laughed when Hiccup's father explained where the boy's horned helm came from. I would give it a good chance at winning next year's animated feature Oscar.

Other than that, everything else I saw on the big screen made me glad I had brought a book and a flashlight to read it with. The commercials, one and all, were so stupid that I thought, "The whole world must be hooked on crack!" I am so at peace with all that I'm missing by not watching broadcast TV.

After the movie ended, I resisted the temptation (more self-denial!) to stay for a showing of Clash of the Titans, the new CGI remake of the 1980s stop-motion classic. Instead, I drove home, stopping only to browse the Record Exchange (another used music and video store). I saw lots of stuff that I wanted to buy, but didn't buy anything. There's something to be said for the way too many temptations can cancel each other out. Since I couldn't afford everything that caught my eye, I didn't feel so bad leaving without anything.

Now I'm back at home, submitting myself to the discipline of writing (feel the burn!) and watching my cats get high on a catnip toy I bought on clearance at Walgreen's somewhere between FYE and Dobbs. It's a silly little toy - a "Las Vegas Showgull" decorated with fake feathers that my cats love to shred, and filled with an herb that makes them act totally crazy. I watch their antics with a complacency so profound that somebody should slap me, which would also be mortifying.

It's not even 4:00 yet, and the sun it still shining on a glorious, warm, blue-sky day. I'm going to pay my rent bill, then take a walk so that I can enjoy some fresh air, sunshine, and exercise (spiritual or otherwise) before the sun goes down on the day our Lord rested in the tomb. All in all, it's been a restful day for me too. Easter triumph is right around the corner. For now, peace be to all.

Cats vs. Dogs

There has been a lot of debate on the matter of which are smarter: cats or dogs. And although I have no, er, horse in this race - seeing that I love both cats and dogs - I must admit that I think I've spotted a point in favor of cats. For, when you put cats and dogs together, isn't it the cats who teach new tricks to the dogs?

For example, my cats taught my parents' dog the trick of jumping up onto the window seat to look out the window, bask in the sun, etc. Prior to their visit, a few years ago during a cross-country trip I took with my cats, Martin the miniature schnauzer didn't realize that he could penetrate the barrier of vertical blinds that separated the window seat from the rest of the room. Nothing, however, could keep my two cats - then Lionel and Tyrone - from checking out the best seats in the house for sunning and keeping up on neighborhood gossip. After he saw them do it, Martin began to do the same. Now the woodwork of the windowseat is well-scratched by his canine claws. If my parents ever sell the place, they'll have to have that area resurfaced.

Martin's an old dog - older than my cats, by a few years. But two enterprising cats taught him a new trick which has, since then, become one of the joys of his doggy life. Now I'm sure some would argue that this shows the dog's ability to learn, while there is no evidence that my cats took anything useful away from their encounter. So, one could argue, dogs have a higher IQ than cats. On the other hand, it was the cats' superior problem-solving skills that enabled them to do, as a matter of routine, something Martin had never imagined attempting till then. Split decision, maybe, but in my opinion the match goes to the cats.

POSTSCRIPT: My stepmom says Martin sometimes finds his way onto the window seat even when the blinds are closed. The only way to know he is there is to spot him poking his head through the blinds, which, she says, makes him look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Heeeeere's Marty!

Cuddling Routine

As cooler autumn temperatures settle in, having a pair of cuddly cats becomes more and more useful. I don't know how I would survive winter's cold without Tyrone and Sinead. All right, I suppose I could bury myself under more blankets...

On sunny Saturdays or Sunday afternoons - which seem increasingly rare these days - I like to spend a few hours reading on the couch under a long, more or less south-facing living room window. I'll pile up pillows at one end, and cover myself with blankets at the other. Then the cats will queue up for a good snuggle. Tyrone's favorite spot is under the blankets, between my feet. He will signal his desire to get under the covers by scratching at the blankets at about my shoulder level. I then have to lift up the blankets so that he can see all the way down and make sure the coast is clear, before he will climb down there and curl up. He sometimes seems to take ages at it, frequently backing off and then coming back and scratching at the blankets again. The footwarmer is worth it, though.

Sinead's top cuddling spot, when I'm reading, is right on top of me. After a couple minutes of nesting behavior, she will eventually stretch out across my chest and purr like crazy. She likes to stick her face right up into my face, and sometimes responds to my petting by offering caresses of her own, reaching toward my face with one soft forepaw.

Bedtime cuddling is a little different. Sometimes Tyrone does try to get under the covers with me, but he usually won't stay there. Instead, he usually spends a good part of the night curled up on top of the covers, at the lower left corner of my bed. I have learned to be careful, even in my sleep, not to disturb him when I turn over. Less often, he may move his nesting area to the top left corner of the bed, alongside my pillow. There have been mishaps when I have accidentally punched him on the nose while turning in my sleep.

Sinead rarely joins us on the bed. If Tyrone doesn't happen to be in the room, she may try to jump on top of me. This isn't as welcome as during reading-on-the-couch time. Those nights when she persists in trying to bed down on me usually end with the bedroom door shut and two miserable cats hunkered down outside it. They're always right there when I open it, for example, to go to the bathroom.

Once in a while, however, I do wake up in the middle of the night and realize that both cats are sleeping with me. More often than not, they are curled up together, taking up between them a major portion of the bed. I think of those times as a rare treat. They are all the rarer because, in waking up enough to recognize them, I tend to shift position in a way that provokes Sinead into sniffing haughtily and jumping off the bed. Very little seems to disturb Tyrone, though. I can get out of bed and back in again without waking him up. There have even been a few times when I had trouble getting up because of the way he was lying on my covers, and me pinned beneath them.

I still see frequent demonstrations of what jumpy and frisky animals cats are. Sometimes even a very slight and gentle movement will startle them. A sound from outside the building, a cough or sneeze, a flourish of the DVD player remote, and a muscle twitch will carry one or both of them clear across the room. So I have to take it as a sign that my cats feel very safe with me, when we can rest together on the couch or in bed for upwards of a quarter of an hour, and when I can even laugh out loud (at a book I'm reading) or turn onto my other side without losing the furry footwarmer and the purring chest-massage engine.

Back from Away

I'm back from a couple days out of town. My cats are really happy to see me. It's nice to have them to come home to. It's actually getting hard for me to sleep through the night without a subtle sense that a twelve-pound cat (Tyrone, usually) is curled up near my feet on the corner of the bed.

I remember cuddling Tyrone in my bed the first night I brought him home from the Yuma County Humane Society. He was such a tiny kitten, and I kept reassuring him that we were going to be terrific pals once he grew up to be the beautiful adult cat I knew he was going to be. I slept very lightly that night, fearing that I would roll over and crush him.

The fact that he still likes to sleep near me is a gratifying reassurance that I was right. And so is the evident joy with which he greets my homecoming, rolling on his back and stretching and pawing at the air in the feline equivalent of a goofy grin.

Sinead gave me her typical welcome this morning before I went to work. While I was sitting on the couch putting my shoes on, she stood half on my lap and half on the ottoman, purring and simpering at me with her huge, innocent eyes. She rubbed against me and, in various kitty ways, demanded my attention. I'm very happy to have such affectionate and cheerful cats.