What Makes Me Laugh

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.

We sometimes (ahem) let our lawn grow a little long, maybe like our hair. A couple of years ago we noticed that our cat Peaches really enjoyed hiding in the tall grass so we decided to leave a little patch under the cherry tree, facing the street. 

Peaches napping in the jungle

What a hit! She naps there, and watches the birds go by, and the little kids on bikes, and the women jogging with their mondo baby strollers, and the occasional derelict (we have a few in Livingston, Montana) who crashes with a cigarette on our cement wall. Plus, the dogs walking by don’t even see her. What a bonus! 

Our next door neighbor walked over the first summer and said, “Hey, I see you grew a kitty jungle!” and the name stuck. Most recently someone said, “Hey, you’ve got a terrarium!”  I looked up terrarium, and our jungle doesn’t really fit the definition of a small, glass-enclosed natural area for frogs, but it’s pretty cute. 

The jungle in full bloom

So, it’s that time of year again when the kitty jungle is in full bloom, and the cats bed down, and once again we wish we had a hammock and better porch furniture and better mosquito repellant, but all in all, we’re pretty darn happy too.

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.”

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.