Tag: cat

Stormy is 12

the last cat?

Stormy is 12. Her birthday was back in June. Apparently, I am not a good cat parent.

She received her physical in mid-July and is well for a 12-year-old feline. My wife and daughter report that, while she hates being in the cage, she didn’t fuss as much in the car. She resisted leaving the cage at the vet’s, but tilting the enclosure did the trick.

Stormy has lost about a pound since last year’s exam. The vet was slightly concerned because our other cat, Midnight, had stopped eating and started losing weight right before he died last summer. But we theorize that as Midnight ate less, Stormy ate more. So we think it’s all fine.

As I’ve noted before, she’s become much more likely to sit next to me as she is in these pictures, and she didn’t do that before when Midnight was around because he was quite possessive of me, even though he was pretty hostile to me.

Before I feed her, she can become very loud. She likes to rub her head against my leg and let me scratch her, but she also rubs her head up against the sofa, the chair leg, and a table leg. When it’s cold, she will sleep in my wife’s and my bed; when it’s warmer, she’ll sleep in the hallway.

Don’t Go Near The Water

She has the annoying habit of going into the human bathroom and drinking from the shower drippings. But she doesn’t like water on her. I wash my hands, and whatever residual water is on my fingertips, I can flick at her, and she’ll run down the stairs in about three seconds.

The vet said we shouldn’t have another cat with her because 12-year-olds tend to be quite territorial. I don’t think we’re ever gonna have another pet. We’ll probably move to a smaller place, and having an animal doesn’t seem to be a likely scenario anyway.

Cat caused chaos

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor

For about 15 minutes, there was bedlam in my house on Sunday, May 26. The cat caused chaos. Of course, it was Midnight.

My daughter was about to take a shower. Midnight had become fixated on the tub, trying to get water from the faucet. I will acknowledge that at least one person in our household, frequently finding him in the tub, would gently turn on the water. After all, he seemed to enjoy drinking the water that way. Moreover, it was a way to clean his grody feet, especially his rear paws.

But when she wanted to shower, she later said she couldn’t get him to leave. He CAN be onery.  So he stayed. Afterward, she texted me, noting that he peed on the floor and a couple of pieces of her clothes.

At the time she was leaving the bathroom, my wife had come home from a visit to her mother’s. So, simultaneously, my daughter is asking me to clean the upstairs bathroom floor AND my wife is calling me, quite insistently, to come downstairs. Plus I was scheduled to talk to my sisters on ZOOM in about five minutes.

There was water in the downstairs bathroom, leaking from the ceiling. When my daughter washed her clothes in the upstairs sink, water got into the hole that stopped the sink from overflowing. The water, I discovered, didn’t have anywhere to go except into the cabinet below and, subsequently, the downstairs bathroom ceiling.

The ceiling dripped for a couple of days, but much of the water was absorbed by the now-sagging ceiling tiles above the downstairs toilet. Ah, another home repair to deal with. When you’re the homeowner, you can’t call the landlord.

Reciprocity

Here’s something dumb that the blogger did more recently (May 30). My CDs are in a library file cabinet I bought from the Albany Public Library when they were renovating a few years ago.

For no good reason, the lowest three drawers were open. There was clutter in front of them, but still. I opened the second drawer from the top and the file cabinet, with about 2,000 CDs, started tipping over.

I called to my wife, “Help me!” She thought it involved the cats; we’d been away for two days. Then I screamed, “HELP! ME!!” as I leaned into the cabinet. She closed the upper drawer, then one of the lower ones.

If it had crashed, I feared it would put a hole in the floor. That goes in the category of things I’ll never do again.

Midnight, the demented cat

the perils of doing laundry

midnight 2022I have written before about our demented cat, Midnight. In some ways, this is not a great photo. On the other hand, it’s rather representative of his demeanor. His arm – OK, front leg – hangs off his loft as though he were Hugh Hefner holding a cigarette at the Playboy Mansion.

Notice the deformed window treatment? That’s the result of Midnight either chewing on the curtains or kneading them. And there are three or four of them in similar conditions. My wife has talked about replacing the curtains, but I said that there’s no point unless we get something made of stainless steel.

When we have people over, he goes to the basement. There are only a handful of people who he won’t harass. And when something I can’t quite ascertain sets him off, the target of his wrath is me.

Domestic chores terrorist

Back in October, I was taking a basket of laundry down to the basement. There was a bottle of TIDE detergent that was next to the doorway, so I grabbed it to take it downstairs. Midnight, sitting on a chair ten feet away, suddenly started yowling and hissing at me. I don’t know if it was the basket or the TIDE that ticked him off, but someone dubbed him a male chauvinist feline because he never bothered my wife or daughter when they transported the laundry.

For the next three days, I was his enemy. I avoided him when I could. My wife would feed him. And I started carrying around a tambourine. Why a tambourine, you may ask? Because carrying around a vacuum cleaner was too heavy. I tried to talk to him, but when he got too close and too scary, I’d rattle the instrument, and he’d run off.

Where’s the feeder guy?

But then, a few days later, he started missing me. “Where’s the one who usually feeds me?” First, he’d get proximate to me, then a little closer. I’d go downstairs to feed him, percussion in hand, and he’d be okay. Then he became desperate for my affection. “Pet me!” And “pick me up and scratch me under my chin.” He needs to be near me and hates it when I close the office door, but I can’t write and tend to him simultaneously.

And it’s all good. Well, except for the time I was walking toward the sofa, and he ran in front of me. He’s ALWAYS getting underfoot, but I usually anticipate it. This time, I must have stepped on him, although I didn’t feel him underneath. He yowled and dug his claw into my foot. But this was a short-lived irritation for him.

Still, when he’s on the sofa and someone is petting him, he’ll suddenly bite them. He did this to my wife and tried to do the same to me. He is a demented cat.

Ramblin' with Roger
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