14 posts from October 2009

my mother left last night for a business trip.  i fed the cats at 6, and got them inside for the night.  all except dora, who i hadn't seen since about 3 or 4.  i felt terrible, but when he hadn't come back by 7, i had to go home.

joel came over yesterday. he's one of the few humans willing to set foot in our apartment, and it's only so that jeff will fix his computer.  smudge started out with his usual intimidation tactics, but joel doesn't take shit from a cat.  for the most part, he would ignore smudge, and keep a water bottle nearby just in case.  so over YEARS, smudge has gotten slightly more tolerant of the fact that this human has entered his domain and still draws breath. i think the last time joel was here, smudge gave a few half-hearted chatters, and then stalked off to stare at him from a distance.

and this time...smudge flopped down on joel's feet and rubbed himself all over his sneakers.

of course, the honeymoon was over when joel left, then realized he forgot something and came back in. smudge was a hissing ball of fury, throwing himself at the very same sneakers he had loved earlier in a frenzied attack. a cat has his limits, i guess.

last night, jeff and i re-made the bed, so of course smudge came barreling in to take position under the sheet as it floated down over him. i love how he thinks he's such a freaking invisible ninja under there, attacking through the sheet. so we pulled the sheet back and tucked him in properly.

you know how smudge jumps up on my desk and tries biting me, and i push him away, and he jumps onto jeff's chair and lays on his back, grabs one arm, and frantically rubs his face on the arm?  you know it's just the standard cat-tactic, where he's trying to be aggressively cute so that i am forced to reach out and touch his belleh and he can then sink his fangs into my wrist.  but i realized that after a few minutes of the squirming, he just lays there, totally still, staring off into the middle distance...he's playing dead. i think he's trying to make me think he's dead, and therefore completely harmless, so of course i'll try to touch him and then he can bite me. (you know, it might work a little better if he isn't so excited that his tail keeps thrashing around while he's playing possum, but still, you have to admire his ingenuity.)
can i just point out the fat-belly cleavage above? can you see it there, below the "vest button"?
and to close this post, a little contrast.  i get the crazy "i'll pretend to be roadkill so i can bite BITE BITE her!" smudge, and jeff gets the "i just wuv you so much, daddy" smudge.

no matter how much we try, we never can keep squeak inside for more than a few hours. he just loves it outside too much.  and of course, if you don't let him out when he asks, he pees on you.

today i watched minnie swiftly and efficiently kill a cricket that had wandered into our office.  being a proper lady, she had the good manners to stand aside and look sheepish while mom swept the remains outside.

then i had to run to the hillbillies' house on the corner and tell them their 2 dogs had escaped their yard AGAIN and please come get your barking rats out of our yard. (how on earth they have the balls to look me right in the eye and say they have no idea how the dogs keep getting out is beyond me - since there are several clearly visible gaps in the fence where wood has rotted away. like i said -- hillbillies.)

right now, i'm typing this with only my right hand because i'm using my left to try and hold minnie back from attacking the pages of a contract i'm scanning as they pass into the output tray.

just another day at the office.

in honor of halloween, i present photographic proof that ghosts DO exist!

and in case you haven't seen it before, this is how the apparition first appeared to us on my mother's deck:

she sure grew up pretty...  but she still frowns at us.

i was spinning him around in jeff's chair, and trying to get pictures of what he looks like when the chair stops spinning. most of the time, he sees me pick up the camera and this is what i get:

i did manage to get one quick shot. you can almost see the dizzy/crazy in his eyes.

when jeff is home, smudge spends most of the day sleeping on the desk next to him, sprawled out amongst the cables and gadgets and other geekerie.  now, jeff may tell you i'm obsessed with smudge, constantly drooling over his cuteness, but I am not the one who took about 317 pictures of him the other day while he slept there.  and then couldn't wait to show me when i got home -- "look, paws! look! ear hair!"
yeah, i'm definitely the one too involved with my cat.

poor lardbutt smudgie -- he's having trouble jumping onto counters.  i've seen him try for the kitchen sink and fall short quite a few times lately.  and this morning, he tried twice to jump up to the bathroom sink for his morning drink, and he just couldn't make it.  he sat there looking up at the counter with the saddest look, so i heaved him up onto the counter.  and i'm telling you, it was quite a lot of cat to pick up.

i'm going to have to cut back on his pounce treats.

i made this collage in picasa for a twitter background. kind of a visual interpretation of my surroundings.

this morning, i took a radioactive iodine pill for a scan i'm having, and this makes me very slightly dangerous.  i mainly have to stay away from pregnant women and small children, because there's a possibility it can harm still-developing thyroids. 

i asked the tech if there was any issue with cats, and she looked at me like i was insane. "well, no, they're just cats." like it's ok to give a cat radiation poisoning because it's "just" a cat? i happen to think some cats are more worthwhile than some children (wow, the crazy cat lady in me is really surfacing this week).

it has to be common sense that a tiny dose of radiation in someone my size isn't so insignificant in a fellow mammal who weighs seven pounds, no matter how well developed its thyroid. so to be safe, i'm trying to keep minnie off me until next week.  which is really difficult, what with the claws and the climbing and the mewling.

she stormed off in a huff earlier and i haven't seen her since. i feel so bad...but it would really crimp her hunting style if she glowed in the dark.

that little asshole is teflon, i swear.  at 9:30, my mother called me to tell me she saw ghost sitting on the deck, so she went to let her in, and squeak just STROLLED into the house.  other than being majorly hungry, he seems to be fine.

four days. FOUR DAYS he was gone.

teflon.