What Makes Me Laugh

This clever clip of two cats having a minor verbal spat is hilarious. Enjoy!

Cocoa on her harness and leash

None of my neighbors has said anything, but I’m pretty sure they think I’m crazy. And I don’t really blame them.

Imagine what you would think if you saw a woman walk out of her front door holding a pink camouflage leash with a cat attached to it. The cat bounds down the steps and then stops suddenly at a bush next to the porch. The woman stands in the middle of the yard, watching the cat sniff the bush for ten minutes, and then follows the cat to a bunch of grass, where it chews as if it had been born a cow in its first life. The entire time the woman seems to be studying the cat for signs of alien life form.

I “walk” my cat on a daily basis so that she can get a little sun and not kill herself running across the street in front of our house. “Walk” is a very loose term for what we actually do, which is why Zen is in the title of this post. Believe me, studying shrubs and grasses for minutes at a time is not normally on my to-do list. In fact, I typically try to multi-task, which means I am sometimes in my front yard holding a bowl of oatmeal in one hand and the cat leash in the other, which makes me look even crazier.

In the evening, I’ll read, standing up, while I try to hurry her through our loop around the house. If the coast is clear (meaning no cars stopped at the intersection watching me), I’ll stoop down and play her favorite game — chase the stick through the grass.

I‘ve read books about cat walking. These books have a lot in common with dieting books — they make it sound easy, and they give you instructions that are impossible to complete. After all, it’s not like walking a dog, it’s like walking a mule. The cat doesn’t just go where you want it to go. Cats prefer to leap from hiding spot to hiding spot, they don’t want to walk down the sidewalk. They want to be predators, not prey.  

One book I read advised teaching the cat to follow you by giving the leash a couple of short tugs and then letting it go slack. When the cat finally responds, you are supposed to exuberantly praise the cat by saying things like, “What a good girl! You’re such a smart kitty.” In this way, it would learn that following you produces rewards. 

I tried this. A few short tugs later and Cocoa and I had progressed approximately two inches.  I spoke in my best praising, semi-baby voice, and Cocoa just looked at me like, “You’re one plate short of a full dishwasher, my friend.”

Then I tried to treats, and a clicker. I’ll write more about clicker training later. It deserves its own post. But for now, let me just say that treats and clickers didn’t make her move any faster.

So, given my lack of patience and Zenness, the plan is for Cocoa to someday join Peaches (our oldest cat) in running freely outside while we’re at home (which means during the day, while we are gardening, etc.). When Peaches was a kitten, I walked her on a harness and taught her the boundaries of her territory (our yard) with treats and loud hand clapping to scare her back into our yard if she ventured onto the sidewalk. It worked. She never crosses the street, and she comes when she is called, unlike Cocoa

 I’ve made some early attempts to set Cocoa free already, and here’s what happens. First, she pretends to really like our yard. She runs into the backyard, eats some grass, sniffs everything, and then when I’m not looking she decides to jump over the fence into our neighbor’s yard, where a cat-killing dog lies in wait.

Fortunately, I hear the bells on her collar, run out of our gate to the neighbor’s yard, and witness in slow motion the dog’s head appear from the dog door.  Unfortunately, I freeze in emergency situations, so as the dog is running to eat my cat all I can think to do is scream the dog’s name as loud as I can. “Reading!” (which is pronounced Redding – as in the town in Massachusetts) and he stops, in fact, I’m pretty sure the whole neighborhood stopped because the scream sounded like someone was about to die and in that instant my cat jumped to the top of the fence and back over into our yard to safety.

By far the most embarrassing times are when she runs away and I try to catch her to bring her back. It’s at this point that I have to decide whether I should risk trespassing in neighborhood yards to retrieve my cat. What is the etiquette on something like that? Is it excusable because you’re trying to get an animal, or should you politely knock on the door while the cat runs to the next neighbor’s yard?

Most of the time I sit on the edges of a neighbor’s property calling, “Cocoa” in a soft, whistful, come hither, I-want-to-make-you-think- I-have-something-good-for-you-but-really-I-want-to-kill-you-tone. But sometimes, neighbors I know who won’t mind catch a glimpse of a crazed woman running through their yard chasing a small cat while shaking a bag of cat treats. The funny thing is, no one has ever commented or offered to help. Maybe I’m just too scary to mess with.

The most humiliating part  is that I never catch her. She’ll sit underneath an abandoned van or canoe in someone’s driveway looking at me like, “Can’t get me now!” while I crouch down and do my little pleading act. Or, she’ll crawl underneath our porch while I try to entice her to come out by playing the stick game or putting out treats and food as an offering. I feel like I’m worshipping some finicky ancient god.

Usually, I give up and she shows up at my door about an hour later wanting access to food and shelter on her own terms. I just sigh, open the door up wide, and walk to my stash of cat treats. “Next time,” I tell her, “you’re going on the leash.”

Cocoa the rescuer

All has been forgiven. At 3 a.m. on Sunday Cocoa woke me up again, but this time it was because I really wasn’t breathing. This is almost too bizarre to be true after writing my last post, but I developed a severe allergic reaction to a prescription this weekend and when Cocoa woke me up I was in the midst of anaphylactic shock. I know the signs and symptoms of an allergy attack because I’m severely allergic to peanuts. It causes an immediate sense of dread and anxiety, then itching, nausea and hives, and then cardiovascular collapse (if it’s not treated right away). In short it’s not recommended, and I’m not sure I would have been so lucky if Cocoa hadn’t woken me up when she did. 

Afterwards, during a trip to the emergency room, where they pack you full of adrenalin, steroids, and Benadryl to treat the shock, Doug got to watch me shake, sweat, turn red as a beet, turn white as a the sheet, and finally stumble out of there after four hours feeling like I had had a good beating. 

Turns out that wasn’t the last of it.  The medicine I took (one pill) will stay in the system for 250 hours so I had to go back for another round of steroids last night. Doug patiently watched my pulse and blood pressure rise and fall and I told him about the meditation I learned from the book, “Eat, Pray, Love” where you try to smile in your liver. It worked. I brought my heart rate down by 10 points doing it.

Anyway, I think I’m on the mend even if it will be a tough week and the only thing that I can think of to laugh about right now is western medicine. If it doesn’t cure you, it will surely kill you. Also that to a person, my family members all said, “Now you have something to write about on your blog!” 

  

 

 

Cocoa, the culprit

I wake up to the sound of glass shattering in the kitchen. It’s 3 a.m. and I know immediately that it has to do with the cats. I try to keep them off the kitchen countertops, and they are banned when I’m cooking, but it’s kind of a futile effort when I’m not looking.

The image of a bloody cat running through broken glass runs through my brain so I yell to Doug, “Hurry!” because I can’t seem to get my body to move out of bed at all at 3 a.m. 

And he hurries all right. To pee. Walking right through the area where a water glass had been bumped from the counter and shattered on the wood floor. I’m still amazed that he didn’t cut his feet.

Fortunately, there is no blood spilled by any creature, great or small. Just a scared Cocoa looking at me guiltily from the countertop. I gently moved her and Peaches to a closed room and then work on cleaning up the mess while Doug goes back to bed.  

After scouring the floor for any glinting material, I climb back in bed and try to sleep. Breathe deeply, I think and then I realize that actually my breathing isn’t going very well. My chest is starting to tighten and the bell that rings in my brain to warn me of a coming asthma attack is dinging away.

Oh, but it feels so good to be back in bed and I’m tired, and maybe if I just lay here for a minute my breathing will return to normal.

Nothing doing. I knew if I let it go I’ll only have an asthma nightmare where I can’t breathe and can’t find my inhaler and end up in a worse position.  So I stumble back out into the living room in my sneakers to find my overstuffed purse and search around blindly with my hand for the plastic object.

Found. I take two puffs and felt something foreign in my mouth. What is that? Stuck to the inside of my cheek is a pine needle that I gently pull out and stare at. Then I look inside the inhaler. Uh oh. My inhaler looks like it had made love to a national forest. Bits of leaves and other disgusting detritus are stuck all over the inside of it. I search my mouth for anything foresty and finding nothing I rinse the inhaler out and then go back to bed to begin my worrying.

What if I had inhaled some of the forest? An inhaler shoots a mist out fairly powerfully and I had just taken a big gulp of air. What if there was  a pine needle in my lungs right now?

Then I move to contemplating paranoid headlines about my death.

Woman dies in sleep from pine needle.

Cat breaks glass, causes asthma attack, woman dies from inhaling foreign material.

Pine needle stuck in lung kills woman.

Stupid cat breaks stupid glass left out by stupid woman who inhales pine needle and dies in bed. 

Spouse of woman who dies from inhaled pine needle sets up charitable foundation for pine needle victims.

I’m very worried about getting a Darwin Award for my death. You just don’t want your last act to be something so colossally dumb that people mumble for years, “I can’t believe she did that.” 

My next point of mental activity is to analyze every pain in my body and wonder whether I should wake Doug up to tell him that I was worrying so that he can tell me that everything will be fine. I don’t.

Could that stinger in my side be my lung? Wait a second. I think it’s the left side. Isn’t that the one that you should be worried will give you a heart attack? No, it’s not in my shoulder. Oh, now it’s in my back. How many lung quadrants are there again? Isn’t there some connection with the lung and back pain? Didn’t I read that in my Chinese medicine book? Shouldn’t I have made the 25 pounds of raw saltless sauerkraut it suggested would reduce dampness in my body and relieve my asthma naturally? For god’s sake, the Chinese don’t even believe in drinking cold water so if I hadn’t had that glass of cold water before I went to bed then Cocoa wouldn’t have knocked it over, and Ahh!!

Alternately, I worry about the cats. I should have vacuumed the spot instead of sweeping and wiping it over with wet towels. What if I missed something? What if they got slivers in their paws while I was sleeping? What if they bled to death in the living room while I die of a pine needle in the bedroom?

Then what would Doug do? He would be entirely alone in this world.

Except for the life insurance. At least he has the life insurance. Now back to sleep.

My mom just called to share the latest family news and some funny tidbits emerged when she asked me to, “Guess what?”

- My nephew is dating a goat tyer on his college’s rodeo team and wants to go to Las Vegas with her for spring break. The family has already checked out her profile on the school’s rodeo page. Her favorite food is sushi.

- My other nephew’s Kia was stolen this week (possibly because he left spare keys and his ipod in the car) and at age 24 his new choice of car is …. drumroll please … a station wagon. Why does he want this car? “To haul his stuff around.”

The new scratching post

- Despite his constant complaining over the cost of having pets, my father made the cats a new scratching post, which my mother described as, “a beauty” and “it’s like the twin towers.” Construction materials included: an old fence post, a garbage can lid, carpet remnants, a rope, and the metal lid off of a candy jar.

- My mother made the mistake of pointing out miniature chickens for sale to my father when they visited the hardware store in town. Now he wants to buy them to add to his current flock. My mother is opposed to the acquisition.

To quote Dave Barry, “I can’t make this stuff up. I just can’t.”

Dr.:  So, why are you here Peaches? Can I call you Peaches?

Peaches:  If I had another name I’d let you call me it. Can you believe that they gave me such a stupid name? How’d you like to be named after a fruit? How ’bout if I called you Dr. Apple, how would that be? Or Dr. Pomegranate? I’m a cat; I’m not a fruit.

Dr.: You sound very angry. Are you angry? 

Peaches: Of course I’m angry! You would be too if you knew what the other cats are saying about me. I can just tell by the way they look at me — that blank, expressionless stare. It says it all.

Dr.: What do you think they’re saying about you?

Peaches: Well, it’s hard to tell, but I don’t think it’s good.

Dr.: Everybody knows you can’t tell what cats are thinking about you by looking at them. It’s just unsettling, that’s all. What would you like to talk about today?

Peaches: I don’t know.

Dr.: Let’s start with your parents. How do you feel about your parents?

Peaches:  You don’t go into therapy unless you’re angry with your parents.

Dr.: Why are you angry with your parents?

Peaches: It’s the way they call me. They stand on the deck and call out in this high sing-songy baby voice. “Here pee pee! Come here pee pee!” They refuse to treat me with respect and it’s ruining my reputation in the neighborhood. The three cats next door snicker at me every time I walk out the front door. I can’t even keep them off my own yard.

Dr. : Sounds like you’re having trouble making friends. You know you’re not alone. A lot of cats have this problem.