What Makes Me Laugh

When I arrived home from work last week Doug told me to “check the camera” for Cocoa’s daily adventure. High larious! I think the photos tell the story pretty well.

Cocoa thinking about her next adventure in the kitty jungle

Peaches looks on as Cocoa starts her ascent

Can you find Cocoa in the Green Ash?

I spy six magpies

If they would only get a little closer I might catch one!

Going down is the hardest part.

It was 2 a.m. and after four hours of telling Doug that I would turn off my reading lamp, “in a minute” I was finally asleep. Just barely. I was in that dream state where the concepts of flying, friends from high school, the color purple, and cows all seem to come together in a drama that involved me running around my house from a purple cow. I had just escaped from the cow when I woke up

What was that noise? I knew that I heard something. It sounded like spoons falling in the sink. Were there spoons falling in the sink in my dream? I searched my memory. No, just purple cows. I lifted my head off the pillow, listening intently through the sound of my noise machine for further noises.

I didn’t a.) turn off my sound machine, or b.) wake up Doug because if there really was an intruder in the house I don’t know want him to know I’m awake.Why? Well, first there is the element of surprise. If you can crawl out of bed and hide behind the door with a golf club you may have a chance for a crushing blow to the head when he opens the door. This is my Hollywood strategy.

Second, there is the element of escape. This is my anti-Hollywood strategy, where you do the thing that no self-respecting hero would actually do, but might save your own skin.

But I couldn’t abandon my husband and two cats to an intruder, nor did I have a golf club anywhere nearby so I continued to lie in bed, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, listening for more spoons falling in sinks. Was that a footstep? Our house creaks all the time. It’s old, and it makes noises of its own that I don’t even notice during the day but I do at night.

I wondered whether I could crawl over Doug and reach the bear spray. We have three cans for self-defense against grizzly bears, but in the entire time we’ve owned them we’ve only ever sprayed ourselves. This is why we don’t own any guns.  Pepper spray is very painful, so  Doug likes to keep one next to the bed “just in case.” This would be a good idea if he was the light sleeper in the relationship. Instead, it was me who was lying there, wondering if I could slip the safety off without alerting the intruder to the fact that I was awake and armed with pepper spray.

At that exact moment, the bedroom door swung open and my entire body levitated above the bed in shock. I was too paralyzed to scream, but it also dawned on me that there was no head in the doorway  so either our intruder was a little-person or my cat had decided to come in for a midnight snuggle. My breathing started to return to normal, and Peaches jumped up on the bed and curled up next to me.

I’ve been thinking lately that Pavlov had a cat. Prior to his saliva-inducing, bell-ringing dog research, Pavlov’s cats were ringing his bell, making him get up in the middle of the night to tend to their every want and need and that’s what gave him the idea for his research in the first place (sixth grade students, please take note, this is not something worth plagiarizing for your report).

At four in the morning, when Pavlov’s cat jostled his academic regalia against the door to wake him, he got up to pee and he thought, “By jove, I’ve got it!” Or actually, something that translates to “By jove” in Russian. But anyway, my cats have perfected the art of negative stimuli on me and I no longer sleep all the way through the night.

Somewhere around 4 a.m. one of them will climb on top of my bedstand and knock my shades against the window, creating instant anxiety that she will rip a hole in it with her paw and I am up and she jumps down. At this point I realize I need to use the facilities. They follow me out of the bedroom to the bathroom and I close the door soundly on them in the living room before returning to sleep.

At 6 a.m. they start to meow outside of the bedroom door. I own a sound machine, and the meows cut through it and earplugs. If by some miracle the sound doesn’t rouse me they rattle the doorknob or twang the doorjamb until I can’t stand it any longer and get up to feed them. If I was a morning person, this would get me up for good, but I’m not so I go back to sleep for the fifteen minutes it takes them to eat.

After breakfast, they meow loudly to be let out and I dutifully rise again, open the door, tell them to be good and watch them run down the steps to the backyard to play. I toddle back to bed and reset the alarm to 7:30, have the craziest dream of my life, and rise to open the door for them to come back in at 7:30. This goes on every morning.

Yes, I have tried spraying them in the face with water, but then I’m already up so what good does it do that I’m spraying them in the face? Yes, I have thought about locking them out of the bedroom, but this is a small house and there is no corner where I cannot here them yowl. So, I’ve done what any good dog would do. I go to bed early.

So, the two armchairs that are new-to-us have been claimed by the cats. We had envisioned long winter nights reading next to the one air vent that blows hot air in our living room, but have been vanquished to the cold part of the living room by two animals that simply rule by cuteness. How could anyone disturb this?

Peaches is currently unhappy with me. I’ve been traveling a lot. Out of town for a wedding, for work, and now for a family get-together, she’s been lucky to get any quality time out of me this month. Doug has had to fill in, waving cat toys in front of her and Cocoa uselessly, getting the grooming brush swatted out of his hand, and opening the door for the special meow that means, “I want out! Now!”

After two nights away she starts to wander far afield from our house, looking for me. I feel guilty, especially when I get back and I get the old “Do I know you?” routine from her. Cocoa is more forgiving. She purrs and purrs and during the night she’ll lie on my chest as if to say, “Don’t ever leave again, ok?” It takes a few days for Peaches to come around. When we left today she was wrapped in a ball in a corner, obviously upset at the thought of prolonged absence from her two favorite slaves. But, we have a great cat sitter, and she can sleep all day in the clothes hamper if she wants. And a few days after we arrive home she’ll decide that I’m back in her good graces and will climb on my side while I’m sleeping and stretch out like the Sphinx to make sure I know that I was missed.

I hate paying the bills.

I’d much rather hide in the sock drawer.

Or climb up to high places.

Hunt in the snow…

Or snuggle with my sister.

It’s hard work paying the bills.

It makes me sleepy.

And a little grouchy. How ’bout you?

Frankly, I would rather have a root canal than take my cats to the vet. My cats would rather I have a root canal then go to the vet. They are not like my friend Leah’s dog who acts as if the vet’s office is the best doggy cocktail party he’s ever been to.

Pant pant pant, “Hi! Hi! Hey, what are you here for? Hi! Hi!” Lick, nuzzle, lick, “Oh yeah? Wow, radical cut dude. Were you in the backcountry when you got that injury? Good luck with that. I’m just here for the shots. Nothing epic. Hi! Hi! Slobber. Slobber. Slobber. Woof!”

Whereas, cats really focus their attention on the pain and displeasure. It starts in the car on the trip over.

Most pitiful meow. “Take me back, please? Please? Please?”

Pause for effect.

“You said you loved me this morning. You said I was a good cat. Meow. Then you pushed me into a tiny box and now you’re letting a stranger drag me out to squeeze my bladder. How would you like to have your bladder squeezed?  Meow. Maybe I’ll walk on you in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping and put a front paw on your bladder. Then you’ll know how I feel. Meow.”

By the time I arrive at the vet’s office, I usually look like a sweaty hairball who feels almost as tortured as my cat from having to run around the house with a towel, grab a squirming animal, and then stuffing it into a carrier without hurting it.

I don’t think it’s just me, one time I overheard a woman explain,

“I’m sorry I’m late. My husband had to vaccuum underneath the bed to get her out.”

This morning Doug had vet duty, and I was quite relieved. I can weep at the vet’s office at the first sign of a diagnosis.

“It’s herpes?” I sob. “Really? My cats aren’t even sexually active!”

Then I bawl the entire way home. “I’m so sorry you have allergies Cocoa. So sorry!”

Who knows why, but I am always so close to complete emotional breakdown at the veterinary clinic that I now insist that Doug goes with me.

I was nervous when he called with an update this morning.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“She has a urinary tract infection,” he said. “The vet said her bladder was small and she wasn’t constipated. I can’t believe he can tell all that just by feel. I told him I wish I could tell that by feel, and he said that when he first learned how to do it in vet school he thought it was so cool that he’d walk around just feeling cat’s bladders.”

And that made me laugh.

I’m resolving to do better with my blogging timeliness. Been a little behind, sorry about that. To illustrate my laziness, my cats agreed to pose so that you can see what a lazy bed head really looks like around our house.

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The other morning I stuck my head out of the back door to call in the cats before I left for work and got a whiff of eau de skunk. Uh. Oh.

I scanned the yard and since it was daylight I figured the skunk had just left us a little scent tag to say hi.

After work we discussed the eau de skunk with our neighbor who confirmed the odor had made it past our fence onto her property. Doug said, “Huh. I wonder if it’s our compost? It has been kind of ripe lately.”

Sure enough. At 10 p.m. that night I opened the back door to call the cats in again and there was the skunk, sniffing and pawing its way through the compost pile, its huge tail straight in the air and its rearend facing toward me about 10 feet away. I quickly closed the door.

‘Um,” I said to Doug. “Skunk. Backyard. Compost.”

“Are the cats in?”

“Nope,” I said, now faced with a different problem looming. How do I get the cats to come in without them encountering Mr. Pepé and getting his eau de skunk all over them and me?

I cautiously opened the door again and made a throaty whispered sound, “Peaches! Cocoa!” The skunk didn’t seem to mind my whisper and kept on rooting around in leftover potato peels. Fortunately, when Peaches rounded the corner she didn’t even notice him and popped right through the door. Phew! I thought. One down, one more to go.

I walked to the front door to call Cocoa when I heard Doug at the back door scream, “Cocoa, no! NO! GET AWAY FROM THERE COCOA!”

I ran to the back door afraid of what I was going to find when I got there.

Doug looked a little pale. “I chased her off,” he said. “But she was heading right for him.”

“How close did she get?”

“Five feet – she just missed him. You better get her in!”

This is actually no easy task, which is why it is left up to me. Cocoa pretends to have a hearing problem when she hears me calling her. In other words, outside she’s deaf. Inside she jumps when a pin drops. So, I went to the front door to call for her again and got out the big guns. The can of wet cat food. A few taps with the fingernails and the  ripping sound of the tin can opening at a novel time of day did it. Bingo! She slipped inside.

Now that the cats were safely away from the skunk, we tried to decide what to do with the skunk. We love animals (Doug even takes out spiders in a jar to release them outside) so no trapping or killing for this pretty little skunk, but we didn’t want him to hang out in our backyard. It was our fault for not covering up the compost, but that would have to wait for morning. Right then we didn’t want him to stay snuffing around all night around the tomatoes.

I suggested a faint mist of bear spray. Doug was concerned that it would kill him. He suggested clapping and yelling. I concurred. So there we were, at 10 p.m. yelling at a skunk in the backyard, who promptly runs to the front porch and sticks his head in the hole under the porch (where are cats go to find shelter). At this point it’s lucky that the neighbors didn’t call the cops because Doug is loudly jumping up and down on the porch to try and discourage the skunk from hiding underneath it.

Doug yells to me to go inside and peek out the window to see if the skunk is headed for other cover. So I do, and soon I see the bushy tail trot off to the lilac bush where he stayed while Doug tried to cover up the hole in the porch and the compost.

He was a nice little fella, really. He could have sprayed all of us if he had felt like it. Plus, I’d never seen a skunk up close. They are quite beautiful. Doug said he heard they made good pets. I said you’d probably have to remove the scent glands. He said he’d hold the skunk while I removed the scent glands. I said that’s ok.

It’s been a few nights since we covered the compost and the skunk seems to have found more fertile feeding grounds. To tell you the truth, I kind of miss the smelly bugger and I think the cats might too.

It just might eat you! My mom sent me this photo. It makes me laugh every time I look at it. It’s of a Maine Coon, the same breed as my cats, but obviously has a larger frame. My first thought when I saw it was, “This cat needs its own bed. No sharing.”