really? the weather?

No, even better: a post about the weather and *my cat*. No shit.

Steven Alexander Fluffytail demanded to be let out the front door this evening. He looked at the rain, felt the cold, turned up his nose, and sauntered back in, as one might expect. He then demanded to be let out the BACK door. The look of disgust on his face, when he realized that the weather was *exactly the same* out back, was priceless.

And then he gave me a shitty look that clearly said, "Fix this stupid weather, already, human. Don't pretend you can't." He just refuses to believe I have no control over what goes on outside the door.

memo

To: The Cats
From: The Can Opener

Stop putting your butt on me.

Get your snout out of my glass of water. You have your own water!

Don't try to put your feet in my food, either. You may use it like a hand, but I know perfectly well it's a *foot*. And it does not belong in my glass, or in my food.

No, you really do not have to lay on top of the keyboard while I'm at my desk. Really. Although putting your wee little paw on my hand while I have it on the mouse is kind of cute.

Memo to the beasts

Eldest cat: Seeing the bottom of the bowl is not a giant tragedy. Also, stop hissing at everyone. It's getting embarrassing.

Middle cat: I understand that you are clawing my calf repeatedly because you want me to the throw the ball. But, as I have said repeatedly, I cannot THROW the ball unless I HAVE the ball. Fetch means you bring the ball back to me. It does not mean "bring the ball halfway back and then hassle me until I get up and go pick it up and throw it again." Whatever game THAT is, I'm not playing.

Youngest cat: I get that you need to be brushed ALL. THE. TIME. However, there are only 24 hours in the day and I do have other responsibilities. Don't worry, even with a mere 3.6 hours of brushing per day, your coat is lovely, sleek, and stripey.

Friday Cat Blogging

A word on cat ownership.

Never turn your back on ranch dressing.

decree

HENCEFORTH, there shall be no Cats in the Closet, for it has come to my attention that someone has decided to spend his free time peeing in shoes in the closet. Until such time as I can test the pee to determine which furry hooligan has picked up this unsavory habit, the closet is now a No Cat Closet.

That is all.

Upgrading the apparatus

People, I have made what I suspect is a life-changing home appliance purchase. First, the background. PoopMaster Ferris, the 9-year-old Siamese thug, has recently been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. As one might imagine, the weeks leading up to a diagnosis of feline IBS were fragrant in the extreme. Frankly, as a person not much inclined to cleaning, I was doing a lousy job of attending to the task at hand. Plus, my gag reflex is sensitive. Anyway. The recent regimen of antibiotics and steroids seemed to be working, until midday yesterday, when something apparently distressed his delicate GI system. This weekend's "pet messes" (as the cleaning industry so delicately refers to puddles of wretched stinking poop on my oriental rug) were absolutely soaked into the fibers. I dredged from my memory the recollection of an advertisement featuring a smiling blonde hausfrau in neatly pressed khakis (aren't they always?) happily toting around a Little Green Machine which appeared to suck up huge and horrific messes in an instant.

My friends, I hied myself to the Walmart, as I live in Buttcrack, Mississippi, and the only place one can find a vacuuming or cleaning device of any sort on a Sunday is the WalMart. I was determined to spend any amount of money up to and including the $200 currently in my checking account in order to avoid spending the evening on my knees trying to clean cat poop out of the carpet. I took a deep breath, plunged in, and purchased two - TWO - kinds of cat food in an effort to find one that does not cause the Beast's Bowel to be Irritable, and then I went to the vacuum aisle. Yes! Victory! A Bissell Little Green Machine, alleged to be "Green" as in eco-friendly, even. A bottle of pet-specific Bissell fluid was $20, but did I hesitate? I did not. The self-checkout revealed the $99.98 machine to, in fact, be on sale for $79.98, which I consider a sign that this, indeed, was the appliance for me.

I will pass over in silence the tedious details of cleaning, because, dear MAUDE, cleaning is boring, but I will summarize thus: in a short amount of time, with almost no effort on my part, my task was completed. The machine sits in the utility room, locked and loaded, ready for its next task. And I, my friends, will sleep a little easier tonight.

migraine again today

Outdoor kitties plus painting in progress:



That would be Polished Silver, a Valspar color, color-matched in Benjamin Moore Aura paint, which is truly amazing and wonderful stuff, on the walls. It's low-VOC so it's not stinky, covers beautifully, and goes on like buttah. Seriously, painting with a nice creamy paint really does help. I'm in the process of painting the woodwork Cloud White, also in Aura.

The larger black cat (at right) is Nigel's littermate; the other three are Mama Kitty's younger litter. Mama Kitty kind of comes and goes, but she made sure to take off for a good long time when the babies were juuuuust young enough that I felt bad about not feeding them. Well, it was either feed them, or come home to a dead bird on the deck every day. So they line up in the window for breakfast.

budget woes

Cats! Are! Expensive!

To wit: four sets of annual shots; visit, bath, and shot for nervous cat chewing his fur off; shot and pills for itchy snorty cat; worm pills for two wormy cats; ethical healthy food for the inside cats; flea juju x4; two kinds of cat litter; cheap-ass cat food for the outside feral cats; and Feline Greenie Pill Pockets which are a freakin godsend if you need to get a pill down a cat's throat, no shit, y'all, get some if you ever need to pill a cat. I can't even bring myself to add up the total cost of all that, to tell you the truth. Cats! They're expensive! And poopy!

Plus, soon, as an added bonus, soon I'll have to trap the feral cats under the house and get them spayed/neutered, so that the colony of five doesn't turn into a colony of forty by the end of the year.

Perhaps I could call my congressperson and get added to the bailout. I'm kind of in over my head here.

Giant kitteh loves his mamma!

I know, you've seen it a dozen times. So have I. It slays me every time.



SO much better if you turn the sound down so you don't have to listen to that sappy Whitney Houston song.

can't stop laughing

Oh, Simon, you know cats so very well!

Friday Lazy Blogging

I so need a theremin.

Porch Kitty No Longer

NigelKitty has made the transition from semi-feral porch kitty to Co-Ruler of the House pretty quickly. He still doesn't like it when I actually pick him up, but he does enjoy pettins, scritchins, and lap sittin. He and Pippin get along beautifully, Bennet tolerates him, and Ferris hisses at him if he gets too close. Pretty much standard operating procedure for all three of the older boys. Nigel's about ready for de-testiculation and a new set of shots, and he is the Loudest Cat I've Ever Had. He meows all the time, and enjoys very loud toys. He also likes knocking things off of shelves and counters. I have a cup filled with pens and pencils on a bookshelf in the living room, and he knocks it over every night and I hear writing utensils skittering all over the floor. I'm about to give up and find them a new home.

Nigel has gleefully abandoned the porch for the bed:



And has discovered that the recliner? Yes, indeed, it is rather more comfortable than deck furniture:

ir/resistible

Completely irresistible:



This is Nigel when he was a porch kitty, begging at every window to be let in. No matter what room I was in, he was at the window, meowing. I resisted for two solid weeks. And then, the snow came, and I could resist no longer. He lives inside now.

Completely resistible:



The ugliest purse in the world. Spotted in the wild at TJ Maxx in Hattiesburg, MS. Dear god, what about teh kittenz? It looks like something Dolores Umbridge would keep her wicked quills in. I almost spent seven dollars on it simply to get it out of circulation.

crazy cat lady

Have I mentioned that I'm now officially a Crazy Cat Lady? A porch kitty convinced me to feed her one day. Shortly thereafter, she brought a friend. After that, two kittens. I think it's a mama-older sister-two kitties family unit, but anyway: I'm feeding them all. They present themselves at the back door - which is glass - and look alternately pathetic and pissed off at the empty state of their bowls. So now I'm feeding seven cats - three inside, four out - and I'm a crazy cat lady.

But I'm not a crazy cat lady with a piano, which is too bad, because then maybe I could make some money selling cat-playing-the-piano videos on the internet. Maybe I should get a videocamera. I wonder if people would like "cat snatching food off of mama's fork" videos?

should've named him Martha

Apparently Bennet, the middle cat, does not approve of lackadaisical housekeeping. He has taken to peeing on clothes left on the floor. One item is fine. Two items? Constitute an impromptu litterbox.

what happens at my house every morning

Where's Waldo?

Actually, this game is called, "Where's Pippin?"

I swear, he can hear the dryer door opening from all the way across the house, and is in amongst the hot, clean, NON-FREAKIN-FURRY laundry within a millisecond of the door opening. Then, of course, he snatches at every article of clothing I withdraw, for I am depleting his cushy bed of hot laundry. By the time he's one year old, I'll have to replace every single garment I own, for everything, EVERYTHING, is covered with tiny kitty-claw picks.*

Pippin recently experienced detesticulation, after he started spraying. That non-fixed-kitty-pee? STINKS. BAD. Fortunately, he's almost completely unfazed by the loss of his balls. However, they also clipped his claws pretty short (at my request), and it's bugging him. He likes to leap at me, claws extended, and hang off my clothing. Or, you know, hang off my bath-towel. Whatever. With short claws, this doesn't work so well. He's bent out of shape that he doesn't have ten little razors at his disposal at all times.

*Do people outside of the South use this term? "That cat will pick your shirt. Watch out for his claws."

From the Book of Jezebella

Jezebella's Crazy Cat Lady Rule is as follows:

If there are more than three furry pets per adult human in a household, that household is a Designated Crazy Cat Lady Zone.

If you're below the limit, you may have another kitten. If above, you may want to seriously reconsider DCCL Zoning. DCCL Zoning often results in everybody in the neighborhood bringing you strays to "find good homes for," and as we all know, the good home we find is usually our own.

I myself, am at maximum feline density prior to rezoning as a DCCL Zone.

Mmmm, lemony!

I've been wanting to paint my kitchen yellow for about three years now. I finally went to Lowe's, bought a gallon of paint, a new paint brush, and some blue tape. Total: something like $45. Is that all? Why the hell did I keep putting it off? I have no bloody idea. I'm painting like an hour a day because if I paint too long, I get bored and sloppy.

I picked a shade called "soft duckling" which was very similar to both "tulip" and "lemon" in two other paint lines. It's a sunny lemony yellow, like hollandaise sauce. It's even kind of thick and creamy like hollandaise sauce.

The cats? The cats ain't happy. The fridge was in the middle of the tiny kitchen, and this was Not Good. There was a footstool in the kitchen. The cat food was moved three feet from its usual position. Not Good. There's yellow paint in Pippin's tail. Not Good.

In conclusion: yellow kitchen, Good; the cats' opinion on home decoration: Not Good.