minnie is so sweet. every day, when she comes to my office for cuddle time, she walks up to me and asks permission to jump up. she'll give little meeps, and rub on my shins, and grab at my thighs (which look like a pincushion now) or just reach all the way up with her front paws as high as she can, asking "pick me up!"
but she won't jump up until i say "come on, minnie" and either snap my fingers over my lap, or tap my desk. she waits for the invitation, and then she curls up on my desk, cuddling against me.
it's sweet enough to put you into a diabetic coma.
when smudge decides to attack me, it's very hard to fend him off. if i'm able to get to the spray bottle, i have to spritz him a good six or seven times before he backs off (and licks up the water from his fur). but there's not much else that will get him off me...until now. jeff has shared a trick with me, and it seems to be foolproof.
i hold a throw pillow up to his face. doesn't even matter which one, what material or size. i just have to put it between the two of us, and block his face with it. he immediately backs off and walks away. and i don't even have to touch him with it -- that's the important part, as you'll learn in the next paragraph. i just present it to him, a few inches away from his head, and sort of move it a little closer.
it's kind of horrible, because jeff said when he would be "wrestling" with smudge and smudge got carried away, the only way to get him unhooked from jeff's arm was to use a pillow and push his face away. i think maybe smudge kind of semi-smothered or something, so now if you put a pillow in front of his face, he wants no part of it.
i feel terrible about that, but hey, it works.
i heard once that the way to tell if pearls are real is to run them against your teeth.
UPDATE: i guess minnie likes the taste of plastic pearls. cronch, cronch, cronch:
i have written before, several times, about smudge's drinking habits. especially how we turn on the bathroom sink and he sticks his head under the water to drink from the puddle around the drain. and how the killer part is when he picks his head up and catches the drops with his tongue as they roll down his face and off the tip of his nose. how the intense, cross-eyed expression on his face as he tries to see the water droplets is just hysterical. and how i'm frustrated that i never remember to have a camera with me, or that when i do, smudge refuses to perform.
so now it's after 1:30 in the morning and of course i'm sitting here browsing through fark's video links, and i see this one.
we just unpacked our beatles rockband, and we are having so much fun! except i think smudge doesn't like my singing. i have the mic in one hand, and the spray bottle in the other, because he keeps biting my ankles.
right now, minnie is curled up on my desk between me and my keyboard, sleeping with her head resting on my tummy. she's purring just a little, the tip of her pink little tongue is sticking out, and her front paws are making the teensiest, weensiest little biscuits ever.
so you've read my previous post about the giant prehistoric thing smudge helped us kill last night. what i didn't already tell you is that this has been a very active season for these crawlies, and we've had more interlopers than usual. it seems like every other night there's a new one.
a few nights ago, we were on the couch and there was one on the ceiling over our heads. jeff wanted to get the bug-grabber, and i wanted to get the hell out of there, but that would mean nobody was watching the bug. (if you don't keep an eye on it, it scurries away behind something and the next time you see it will be two hours later when it's three inches from your foot and approaching fast.) so jeff showed it to smudge, who somehow had noticed the commotion but not the cause. smudge kept track of it for us until the grabber was armed with paper towel and ready for deployment. jeff killed it, but left a smear on the ceiling. (yes, fine, i'll clean it, just not when it's so fresh.) so for half an hour afterwards, smudge sat on the couch and stared up at the bug's remains. he kept tipping his head from side to side, like he was trying to check and see if it was moving.
so after that one, and the one a few nights before it, and now the giant one last night, smudge is on high alert. we are at homeland security terror-watch level red, people! every three minutes, smudge scans the ceilings and high parts of the walls. it's really adorable, except it is FREAKING ME THE HELL OUT. every time i look over at him, he is staring at a spot in the corner or on the ceiling, and i jump out of my skin. i barely slept last night, because he was looking way too closely at an area right next to the bed. (turns out, i left his treats on a rickety little table there, and he was trying to figure out the best way to get them without tipping the table and waking me.) see how soundly you sleep when it's 4am, and you turn over and open your eyes and there is your cat sitting on your night table, pointedly staring at a spot right by your hand.
when we left this morning, workmen were setting up on the fire escape outside our bedroom window, making an unholy ruckus. between that and the bugs, we're going to come home tonight and find smudge a jumpy, twitching mess.
smudge is my HERO. jeff and i just got home, and smudge greeted us at the door, as usual, and then walked ahead of us into the bedroom, as usual, but instead of jumping onto the bed and rolling around with bunny feet to get attention, he sat in front of the armoire, staring at one of jeff's shirts, which was hanging from the door handle.
he kept looking at the shirt, looking back at me, and then at the shirt again. so as jeff and i undressed, we were joking around. i kept asking smudge, "what is it smudgie? is something wrong with the shirt? oooh, is there a bug on the shirt?" and jeff basically mocked me for talking to a cat. he said cats look at things sometimes, who knows what they see?
ha ha, very funny, smudgie is staring at the shirt. ha. hahaaaOH MY GOD! THERE! ON THE WALL! BEHIND THE ARMOIRE! IT'S THE SIZE OF A DOG!!!! JEFF!!! KILL IT!! and with that, i grabbed my pants and ran out of the room. because that thing was so monstrously large, i was afraid it would tell me to leave my apartment and i would have to go.
jeff managed to grab it with his bug-grabbing stick and flush it down the toilet. i say "managed" not because it was so difficult to get a hold of it, but because it must have taken a lot for him to focus, what with me shrieking at the top of my lungs non-stop.
and of course, this is all because of smudge. because he made sure that when we came home, the first thing to do was alert us of the intruder so it could be dealt with properly. so thank you, smudge. thank you. (i praised him and scritched him and gave him lots of treats and i threw them all over the apartment so he could chase them and catch them and pretend they were bugs.)
so today i look out onto the deck and shakes comes up to the same spot that he gulped down his bird-tail snack, with a cicada in his mouth. that one spot on the deck must be his favorite death-and-dismemberment place.
so he's got the cicada... actually, he's holding one wing in his mouth. the bug is dangling there, and it's still alive, and it's probably half the size of shakes' head, and it's fluttering like crazy, trying to get away. shakes is very calmly sitting there, neck craned a bit so the cicada doesn't smack into him too much, and he is waiting. he knows if he lets go now, his catch will fly away, so he just holds onto it and waits for it to get too tired to escape. meanwhile, ghost and minnie see this and circle in ever closer, eyes on the prize hanging from shakes' mouth, as if they were stalking prey that wasn't already caught and done for.
at that point, i ran horrified from the room. the deck is starting to look like the prop room for a horror movie -- lots of severed limbs (i saw a giant bug leg out there today) and feathers, and wings (both insect and avian), and the occasional disemboweled slug. (technically i think you can't disembowel a slug, but you get the picture.)
here's the serial killer with his sister as a baby. they all look so innocent when they're young. and then they grow up to be the harbinger of death to all the creatures in my mother's backyard.
shakes is the least socialized of my mother's semi-ferals; he spends most of the time outside and rarely comes in with the others to eat or sleep. (except for that one night last week, when she was awakened by loud purring next to her and found shakes trying to burrow in under squeak's chin for a good cuddle.)
this morning i saw something on the deck, which looked like a bird's tail. i only saw feathers, but they were long and aligned together, like they were still a piece of something. of course, i didn't look too closely and forgot about it.
just now, i went upstairs and looked outside. shakes was sitting there, looking at me, with those long feathers hanging out of his mouth. he paused for a moment, then took a big gulp, spit out the feathers, and sauntered off.
i've seen all of the kitties chasing squirrels and leaping after birds, but shakes is the only one i've ever seen actually eat anything.
