cat – Page 71

The Orange Thief & the Angry Queen

We have three heated cat beds in my office, one for each of the cats, but Scout has one she considers hers and spends much of the day sleeping in it. The other cats pay their obeisance to the queen and leave the bed for her, mostly, but Sam does occasionally go through moods where he claims it for his own. I don’t think it’s a power play, partially because that’s not his personality, partially because sometimes he tries to climb in with Scout. They are both small cats but it’s a small bed too, not a bed for a small two.

If Sam takes the bed while Scout’s away, when she returns she sits beside the bed and gives him the evil eye while he pretends not to see her. When the evil eye doesn’t work, and it never does, Scout comes over to me and starts giving me the business until I go and evict him.

When we discovered her bed was no longer heating up, I struggled with whether or not I should switch it for one of the others. Scout more than any of our cats living or past is a slave to her routine. One night I decided to try an experiment and switched her bed with one a few feet away on the desk. I knew she wouldn’t like it at first but I figured with a little time the electric warmth would overcome her objections.

How wrong I was!

I made the switch in the early evening and immediately Scout started haranguing and harassing me, sometimes vocally, sometimes by repeatedly head butting me and walking across my laptop. Hour after hour I resisted but she broke me in the wee hours of the morning and I switched the beds back. Before I could even sit down she had hopped in and curled up to sleep.

At last we both had our rest.

Captured

A long-standing but unfulfilled desire of mine is a small portable camera, an always-with-you camera, the camera that captures those quick fleeting moments that as pictures are more important than they are great, the slices that over time tell the little stories of your life. The iPhone 4 fills this roll for me at the moment, not because I think it’s well-suited to the task but because it’s what I have.

The four pictures from the previous two posts of a snuggling Sam on my lap were taken with my iPhone because I had it near at hand. My Canon 7D wasn’t that far away but out of arms reach and besides had the big lens attached, so I had to choose between getting the camera and getting the picture.

The two pictures here of a slumbering Sam were taken with the 7D. I started out photographing him with the iPhone but in this case I was able to get and setup the bigger camera, as instead of my lap he was snuggled up either in his warm bed or my chair. Much better image quality with the big camera, but the best camera is the camera you have with you, and thus I keep casting my eyes about for a small camera that strikes the right balance between portability and quality. And within the past few months a whole slew of interesting models have come to market.

I don’t know if I’ll get a smaller camera or make do with what I have, but perhaps I shouldn’t delay my decision too long. I’ve been watching this documentary that chronicles a traveling time lord who takes people on grand adventures across time and space. Maybe I’ll get to go back in time and photograph Templeton when he was a kitten!

I am beginning to despair that he will show up on my doorstep, however, as I’ve noticed that he prefers young English women as his companions, and I fail on all three counts.

Come on, Doctor!

The Irvington Democratic Society Will Come to Order

I do my best to educate the pets on affairs both present and past. After one of our study lessons covered Cleisthenes, a father of Athenian democracy, the little ones were inspired to found the Irvington Democractic Society. They meet weekly to air grievances and propose resolutions. Here, Emma takes the podium in support of one of her proposals, “All pets should only eat the food given to them and not push others out of the way and steal their food.” Emma and Scout voted in favor, Sam and Ellie against. What do we do in the event of a tie?

This is why democracies fail.

The Requirements of a Cat Cave

Requirement #1: It should be well-hidden with a secret entrance that only you can fit into.

Requirement #2: It should provide good viewing of your nemesis, Mr. Squirrel.

Requirement #3: It should have enough room for entertaining friends, but not so much that they will stay too long and impinge on your personal freedoms.

Happiness is a Hidey-hole

We have a patch of daisies in the backyard that don’t quite get as much sun as they should but I leave them where they are as they are in a good location for insect pictures. I tie them up after they bloom as otherwise they fall over searching for more sunlight, but an unusually heavy downpour this summer knocked them over despite my efforts. Since we didn’t get many insects on the daisies this year, after they fell I was going to cut them down until I realized another creature had taken up residence underneath their canopy.

Truth

In my many years and many travels, I’ve encountered only one universally accepted truth, one thing everyone agrees on, and that is this — when even Scout won’t sleep in her warm bed, it’s hot.

We had a lovely cool and wet spring here in the Northwest and escaped the summer with but a few hot days at the end. Scout is such a creature of habit that she likes to sleep in her warm bed no matter the temperature, so as the weather warms I unplug it to extend her comfort as long as possible. This picture is from one of those hot days in early September when she stepped out of the bed behind her and lay down on the cooler desk.

Recently I noticed that the bed doesn’t seem to be heating up anymore, even when plugged in, which puts us on the horn of a dilemma: do we leave it as is, knowing it won’t keep her as warm during the winter, or swap it out for a functional one but risk upsetting her routine?

For now we’re letting sleeping cats lie.

Love & Loss

After the long writeup about workflow in the previous post, one more thought about tools. This is a picture of Templeton with the 15″ Powerbook I referenced in that post, my favorite computer of all time until my current MacBook Pro.

The picture was taken in January 2006 while Templeton was recuperating from surgery to remove the sewing needle he swallowed right before we left on Christmas vacation. He had to be kept from running and jumping, and isolated from Scout, so one of us stayed with him in the guest room while the other stayed with Scout. He had to wear a plastic cone to keep him from pulling out his stitches, but we gave him supervised time with it off so he could relax and clean his fur away from the incision.

I left the room for a brief moment and came back to find him sitting at my laptop, paws on the trackpad as though he was settled in for work. What he had really done was an old Templeton standby, though.

He had stolen my spot.

Templeton and my 15″ Powerbook. I loved them both. I miss one. Important as they are, tools are just tools.

Temptations

Another change I made to the Giving of Treats is to swap out the treat I give to Scout. While she still likes the WildSide Salmon dried salmon treats, she wasn’t eating them with the same fervor so I decided to mix things up a bit. I started off with Whiskas Wild Alaskan Salmon Flavor Temptations, a little treat with a crunchy whole grain shell and a meaty treat inside. Despite the name, the first ingredient is chicken meal and the wild Alaskan salmon flavor (whatever that is) is one of the last, but Scout loves them. She’s normally a bit picky about food so it’s nice to find another treat she gets excited about.

Sam likes them too, but that’s not too surprising, Sam likes just about everything. He has gotten more tolerant of Flea Medicine Night, a monthly ritual necessitated by Scout’s flea allergy, partly with experience I suppose and partly because I started giving the cats a few treats afterward to soothe their injured souls. Now instead of hiding from me for a few hours afterward, Sam has learned it is treat time and he doesn’t even resist his treatments with the same vigor that he used to — in other words, I don’t end up bleeding anymore.

Emma is another picky eater and while she likes the wet food she gets in the mornings, and sometimes eats the dried salmon treats, I have not yet found a dried treat she will consistently eat. I picked up a couple of new Temptations flavors, Free Range Chicken and Yellow Fin Tuna, to see how they would be received. I had little doubt Sam would love them but really hoped Emma would take to them too.

On the latest flea night I assembled the three cats after their treatment, each a little irritable but each eyeing the treat bags I held in my hands. Emma didn’t like any of the treats, a disappointment but not a surprise, while Scout loved them all. The biggest surprise was Sam, who not only didn’t like the new flavors but actually spit them out!

Scout, who was learned well from her Snuggle Twin, body blocked Sam out of the way and devoured his spurned treats and Emma’s too, not a normal behavior for our gentle Queen. I guess it’s safe to say she likes these treats!

I have given her the Tuna flavor the last few days in the mornings, the first time after I handed her the last treat she swatted my empty hand with her paw. I thought it an aberration until she did it again the following morning. This morning though she just buried her head in my empty hand and rubbed her head through my fingers to capture any fleeing evanescences from the departed treats.

Queen of the Decade

Our good and gentle queen turned ten back in March. We’ve had Scout since she was a kitten so she’s been by my side the entire decade. She is a queen that rules with a soft furry fist. Her monarchy is characterized by a modified form of laissez-faire — everyone is welcome to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with what she wants.

For example, if Sam is sleeping on my lap and she wants to snuggle too, he’s welcome to stay where he is just so long as he doesn’t mind when she steps on him as she goes through her rituals of getting petted before she’ll lie down. I try to tell her that a good queen doesn’t walk all over the little people but this subtlety is lost on her.

She also considers one of the cat beds hers. The others are welcome to sleep in it as long as they get up when she wants it. When they don’t, she gives them the evil eye for a few moments. If that doesn’t work, she comes over and starts giving me the business until I evict them.

Yes, she can be a little grumpus. But she’s my little grumpus. I wouldn’t trade her for the world.

Sam vs. the Garden

One of the previous owners of the house must have really loved this one type of bulb because they are literally planted everywhere around the house. Unfortunately that includes some places where they shouldn’t be, such as in and around my favorite rose bush (which is actually a few rose bushes planted together). While the bulbs do have a pretty flower, they also are so thick they keep the roses from drying out, leaving them susceptible to the black spot fungus which has plagued our roses.

So earlier this summer I dug out as many of the bulbs as I could from underneath these roses. I tried to avoid damaging the roses but it was slow going as many of the bulbs were up tight against their roots. Also because the thorns of these old roses are both large and malevolent. The going got even slower when Sam came over to help. The stalks were still attached to many of the bulbs, as I pulled a few of them up he started playing with them. So we turned it into a game, I’d drag the stalks through the grass and he’d try to catch them and knock the seed pods off. When the stalk was sufficiently flayed, I’d toss it up and he’d somersault through the air after it.

Eventually I dug up as many bulbs as I could and all of Sam’s organic cat toys were gone. I took this picture of him after our fun and games were over.