Why, thank you
Ah, the fertile earth, freshly tilled, dark and friable. Waiting…waiting…waiting to receive a big fat cat turd.
Poor old Uncle B, when he looked around to see Charlotte balanced happily athwart his newly dug pea patch. I don’t know which was more precious: the look of horror on his face, or the look of bliss on hers.
And that’s the sort of day we’ve both had: a bit in the shitter. He’s picked up a really enthusiastic bit of malware and I’ve been fruitlessly chasing bureaucratic moonbeams all day. Thus, blogging will consist of this single inspirational moment, frozen in time.
The chickens? Bright spot of the day, bless their little beaks. Growing bigger and bolder all the time.
May 24, 2010 — 9:35 pm
Comments: 19
I fought the cat and the cat won…
The cat has fallen in love with my new seat cushion, so she nicks my chair every time I get up. I’ve taken to leaving Rubber Rat in my place to guard it — not because I thought she’d be afraid of him, of course. I thought he would be uncomfortable to snooze upon.
Ha! Foolish hu-man. Now she and RR are BFF’s.
(If you wonder why I don’t just pick up the damn cat, she’s the world’s stubbornest ornery shit-bag. She’d clamp that fluffy cushion tighter’n an alien face-hugger).
That’s a really splendid rat, isn’t it? Uncle B bought him for me in London. Which is weird, because somebody in the IT department at my old job in Rhode Island had one just like it. We reckon he must have been an advertisement for rat traps; he’s big, old and fierce.
Many, many years ago, when the internet still had that new car smell, I read on Usenet that 70% of all computer monitors had a rubber rat on top of them. It was surely just a silly sig line, but the thing is, at the moment I read it I totally had a rubber rat on top of my monitor.
And, until flat-screens, I made sure I had a rubber rat on my monitor forever after.
April 7, 2010 — 10:52 pm
Comments: 70
She sees…dead people?
I must tell you — although I am as psychic as a potato — Badger House doesn’t feel the least little bit haunted to me. Despite its old bones (between 399 and 421 years old, depending on whether you believe our earliest property tax bill or the plaque on the front), it feels nothing but warm and happy. This place has been added to, taken from, patched up, mutilated, renovated and redecorated so many times, all the ghosteses must have packed their bindles and hit Ye Roadde centuries ago.
But Charlotte here is kind of freaking us out.
She’s a spooky girl. She was a feral kitten and she’s been a one-weasel cat ever since, but she did pretty okay the first few days. She explored the house, she cautiously interacted with Uncle B. She was acclimating faster than I expected.
Then she stopped coming downstairs one day. She’d hide in the closet with the water heater if I left it open. I had to move her food up. She slept twenty hours a day, only came down when I carried her and scooted back up the moment I let go. It was a cold week; I put it down to that.
Then she gradually calmed down. She began coming downstairs for a few minutes on her own. Accepting skritchies from Uncle B. She’ll still startle at the least noise, but after weeks and weeks she’s getting back where she was on day three.
But for one thing: she’s fixated on a particular spot on the wall. She’ll be grooming or snoozing or playing with string, and suddenly she’ll jump like she hears something and stare at That Place (this lucky shot catches her the very moment she stopped chewing toe and started the creepy stare). No doubt about it: she’s watching something.
The spot is in the short hall between the livingroom (with the fire) and the dining room (where Granny Weasel is hung). There is a small window. There’s nothing else there. Now.
But all the old geezers in the neighborhood tell us that’s where the front door was for hundreds of years, until the major renovation of 1970-something.
wwwwoooooOOOO0000OOOoooooo!
February 11, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 26
The Taj Mahkitteh
Today’s Hair Across Weasel’s Ass: plane-legal pet carriers. A regular, take-her-to-the-vet-sized pet carrier will not do (never mind that mine is 30 years old, solid as a brick shit-house and served perfectly well to fly a bigger cat than Charlotte from Tennessee to Rhode Island). If the airline doesn’t turn the cat away, there are grievous fines on the UK end for shipping an animal in a container they consider too small.
And so, of course, they provide really precise instructions for choosing the appropriate carrier.
Ha ha! Just woofin’ you. Every document describes the requirements s-lightly differently. It should be the height of the cat standing, the height of the cat sitting or two inches above the ears of the cat standing. There has to be ventilation in all four sides, or it doesn’t matter as long as it’s 13% open to air. The animal has to be able to stand up turn around and lie down again (which makes jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton spin up on my mental Wurlitzer). The problem is the confluence of airline regs, US government regs and UK government regs.
I particularly liked this instruction from DEFRA:
Containers for cats should have litter trays which are either heavy enough not to move around or fixed to stop them moving.
Litter trays! Holy pooperscooper! Charlotte needs at least a five foot radius to operate a box properly. She’s a sweet girl, but stupid. She stands with all four feet inside, hangs her ass over the side and pees on the floor.
Whatevs. I bought her the biggest carrier that’ll fit in the Weaselmobile. And it occurs to me I never told you what needs to be done to bring a dog, cat or ferret into the UK. It’s a hell of a deal, but I won’t complain — they don’t have to go through six months of kennel quarantine on the British side now. They essentially allowing the pet to serve out quarantine at home. Zo! In this precise order:
■ Spay and microchip. (Very important — that microchip is checked before every stage of the process. Some people drop a couple hundred bucks for their own chip reader, just to be sure).
■ Vaccinate for rabies.
■ Some time later — twenty days is recommended — draw a blood sample and have your vet send it to Kansas State University.
■ They send back a document certifying presence of rabies antibodies (my documentation didn’t have the official seal, so I had to chase them to send another one).
■ Six months after this date, the travel documents can be applied for. If the rabies booster comes due before you’re ready (ours did), booster and documentation.
■ When the time comes, gather all the documentation and FedEx it to the nearest USDA veterinary office. They FedEx the docs and the stamped travel permit back. This document is good for four months.
■ Not less than 24 nor more than 48 hours before Puss gets on the plane, one last vet’s appointment. She gets de-ticked, wormed (must contain Praziquatel!) and the vet makes a final entry on the USDA and airline forms.
■ Show up at the approved airline’s freight service six hours before the flight. There are, incidentally, one or two government-approved cat-flying airlines for each city that flies to London.
■ After going through People Customs at Heathrow, hop a taxi and drive four miles (oh, the cabby’s going to love me!) to the Animal Reception Center. They say it takes 3-4 hours to process a cat through. Why? I don’t know!
And…umm…ta-dum, I guess. All for the filthy little crooked-tailed, squint-eyed, bug-eating feral Goblin Princess I trapped in my garage five years ago.
Oh, well. One good thing I’ve gotten out of this: pee pads! They’re giant Kotexes for bed-wetters. You put one in the bottom of the travel kennel to mop up accidents. I got a ten-pack of 30×36″ pee pads for six bucks at Wal*Mart.
So that right there is nine wonderful, lazy Sunday mornings I can say to myself, “nah. I don’t feel like getting up yet…”
November 18, 2008 — 1:12 pm
Comments: 36
Dude, my cat is SO HIGH
My cat is as high as a elephant’s eye. I read an article on animal pain management the other day that said opiates are still the best choice, so I’m guessing they filled her right up with smack. Her pupils were the size of dinnerplates; almost no green showing at all (I got a nice shot of this, but my SD card burped and mangled it). Yep. A Gig kitty of my very own, at last.
It’s always fun to see Charlotte act goofy. She was three months old, feral and starved nigh unto death when I trapped her with a squirrel trap baited with tuna. By the time she was strong enough to play, she was too old to learn how. I’d dangle a string in front of her, and she’d squint up at me solemnly, like, “yeah. It’s a string. Did you want something, lady?”
Now she got de rubberleg and a tongue that won’t stay in her mouth. Her pupils are back down to usual size this morning, but she’s still teh stoned. She gets a dose in her Friskies for three days, so I got liquid kitteh to play with for a while.
July 10, 2008 — 8:31 am
Comments: 47
Me-ouch
Charlotte had her annual checkup and vaccinations today (got to keep current if we’re going to get her into the UK. Damien? You got one more week, bud). They poked many holes in her. She cried all the way there and sulked all the way home.
She doesn’t know the half of it. She goes back in two weeks to have all her teeth pulled.
She’s got a bad case of the Feline Odontoclastic Resorptive Lesions, which is a dreadful disease to try to write a blues song about. It’s when the cells that are designed to resorb calcium into the bloodstream work faster than the ones that lay down new calcium. Basically, her teeth are eating themselves.
As many as a third of our domestic moggies have got some dental resorption going on — often below the gumline, so you have no idea until it’s too late. They’ve only been aware that this happens since, like, the ’70s.
I was kind of hoping to hold off until we got her over the pond (I don’t like my vet much), but I looked it up and discovered that the condition is impossibly painful. This guy says it’s so painful, a cat under general anesthesia will still react if you poke a lesion. So, ow.
I hope they leave her fangs. She’ll look stupid without. Other than that, cats don’t look funny without their teeth, on account of they don’t really have lips.
My old ginger tom Roughly had all his teeth pulled in old age. I took the day off work to look after him. As luck would have it, it was the day Hurricane Gloria landed in Rhode Island. It was wild. My apartment was in an old, drafty former boarding house and, when the wind really got going, it lifted up the carpets and made them ripple like the sea.
Old Roughly was bombed out of his tiny hairy skull and he weaved his way across a rolling, heaving floor like, “dude! I am so wasted! The floor is moving!”
June 24, 2008 — 2:24 pm
Comments: 67
Permissible dual-cat configurations
My two cats are like matter and anti-matter: they mixeth not, neither do they mingle. They will, however, appear on the same bed — now that I’ve turned the thermostat right down to save money and nurse my boiler through its last Winter. They will share a bed in two and only two configurations, as pictured above.
A single-cat configuration is always to my right, regardless of cat. Since all cats really are gray in the dark, I try to work out which one I’ve got by stroking its fur (his is coarser). Usually, I get the wrong end of whichever animal and find myself whispering sweet nothings to a cat’s bottom. They don’t seem to mind.
Cat blogging: because it doesn’t make my spleen throb like a native tom-tom.
Also: Garfield Minus Garfield as seen on Innocent Bystanders.
February 28, 2008 — 10:05 am
Comments: 31
My poor pussoes
This is the point of the trip where I start to feel guilty about my cats. I imagine them shuffling around the house going “miaowwwwww…” in forlorn voices. They always have HUGE eyes, like those paintings.
In truth, I left them a way in and out through the basement, so they’ve probably had the time of their lives. And I’ve undoubtedly been feeding their friend, the Big Black Cat Who Is Not At All Intimidated By Me. Dude eats out of their bowl even when I’m IN the house.
Damnedest thing. My two are usually territorial (especially Charlotte), but they don’t seem to mind this guy.
October 29, 2007 — 7:26 am
Comments: 4
This blog needs more death kitties
I find the spready toes irresistable. My cats know this, I think. They never waste an opportunity to drop and spread ’em. Good morning! Yoink! My bowl is empty! Yoink! I hacked up a furball in your underwear drawer! Yoink!
I’ve been holding this picture for several days, waiting an opportunity. You can thank Uncle Badger for this.
July 26, 2007 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 11
What this blog needs is more gosh-darned catblogging
Charlotte’s got that whole cowl thing going. With the pointy ears and the slitty green eyes, she looks a right Batman. In truth, she’s a sweet and stupid animal who stands with all four feet in the litterbox and somehow manages to piss all over the floor.
Damien, on the other hand, is an evil little fucker. I bet if you shaved him, he’d be covered in gang signs and six-six-sixes.
Some day, let us shave him.
Usually, when they find themselves this close together, it results in fuzzy chunks of free-floating catskin (hers, mostly) and the sound as of earth’s mighty tectonic plates grinding together. If tectonic plates were made of cats and razorblades.
Here, the dog next door has caught their several eyes and evoked a rare moment of feline solidarity.
June 20, 2007 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 45