11/15/05

Since I know you have many cat-loving readers (and you and Fred are cat experts at this point!), I was hoping that you or your readers might be able to help with a problem I’m having with my two cats, Smudge and Spooky. They are just about seven years old, both males, and have been living together with me since they were both about 8 weeks old. They aren’t litter mates, but they grew up around each other, and have always gotten along pretty well. In the last few days, though, Smudge (who has always been alpha cat) has begun to growl and hiss at Spooky with growing frequency. They’ve even had real fights – as opposed to the play fights that they used to have – that have drawn blood. They’re both indoor cats, and our apartment is set up so that I can’t really separate them without confining one to a very small space (the bathroom). Nothing has changed in our household – we’re home as much as normal, no new pets or visitors – nothing. The only thing I can think is that perhaps the neighborhood prowler, a big tomcat who likes to torment Smudge and Spooky by hanging out by “their” windows, might have begun marking the house, and the scent has somehow gotten to Smudge. But if that was the case, wouldn’t Spooky be freaked out too? I’ve ordered some Shake-Away for the perimeter of the house, just to see if it will keep the tom away. In the meantime, I’d appreciate any ideas you might have – I love both my boys, and don’t want either one of them to be stressed out like this. I’ve never had to deal with anything like that, but I’ll be interested to hear what y’all might suggest. If you have any helpful suggestions, leave ’em in the comments, eh? Thanks!

* * * So yes, I didn’t put up an entry on Friday. I didn’t ’cause it was officially a holiday and I just didn’t wanna, not because I was actually doing anything, because I wasn’t. Saturday, Fred woke me up a little after 8 (I sleep ’til 9 on the weekends, usually) and asked if I wanted to drive up into Tennessee into Amish country. I did – it was a beautiful sunny day, and I didn’t want to spend the entire day inside – and so I got up, exercised, and showered. We left a few minutes after 10, and ended up being gone for a total of 5 1/2 hours. By the time we got home, my hips were KILLING me from all the time spent sitting in the car. Fred wrote an entry about part of the trip, by the way. Make that two The entire way up into Tennessee, the entire time we were in Tennessee, and the entire trip home, Fred pointed out every fucking hawk he spotted. And yes, hawks are cool, but after you’ve seen 63,000 of them soaring in the sky, they become a little less fascinating. For most of us, anyway. Fred couldn’t possibly get enough. EVERY time he saw a hawk, he’d get as excited as if he’d just won the lottery. “Bessie, look!” he’d gasp. “Look, it’s a hawk! No, two! THREE!” “Fascinating.” Also for every minute of the trip, the sun was shining directly on me. It was glaring down on me on the way to Tennessee, and again on the way home. I’m surprised I didn’t end up with a freakin’ sunburn. As it is, my lips are painfully chapped and dry, and nothing I do to them makes them feel better at all. Grrrr. Sunday I got up and exercised and vacuumed the house and was laying on the bed bonding with one of the cats – there are so many of the goddamn things now that I don’t even remember which one it was – when Fred came upstairs and announced that he wanted to go somewhere, but didn’t know where. We brainstormed for a few minutes, and then decided we should kill a few hours shopping for a new couch and loveseat. Why, yes. Yes it HAS only been four years since we got the current set. But that set was so much smaller than the set we had before and, well, I have probably never mentioned this before, but Fred and I are floppers. Which means that when we go to sit down on the living room furniture, instead of delicately lowering our asses to the furniture, we flop down. In case you were wondering, it’s not so good on the furniture if you flop down on it, especially if you flop down on it while you’re a fat chick. Or a fat man, I suppose, but we’ve got no fat men in this house. Aaaaaaaanyway, at some point in the past few months I flopped my fat ass down on the couch and heard something make an unappealing very loud creaky noise in the depths of the couch and the back of the couch went from firm and springy to un-firm and sunken in, and I did what I usually do when I don’t want to deal with something – I shrugged and went about my business. I did mention to Fred that there was an issue with the couch, but since it didn’t really involve him (he sits on the love seat), he pretended to listen and immediately allowed the information to flow out of his other ear. Fast forward to last Wednesday, when Fred came inside after he worked out, and flopped down on the couch to hang out with the kitties. He flopped down on the middle cushion, and the couch responded by making a huge popping noise, and he went backwards and thought he was going to fall onto the floor. He told me about it, and since it doesn’t involve me – I sit on the right-hand side of the couch, not in the middle, so why should I care that there was a problem with the middle of the couch – I shrugged and went about my business. But it apparently startled him enough that he decided we needed a new living room set pretty quickly, thus the reason we went shopping on Sunday. My initial suggestion was that we go to South Huntsville to a consignment shop where we’d visited back in the Summer when we were looking for a bedside table for the spud’s room. It was a very nice little shop, and everything we looked at was reasonably priced, and though I didn’t think we’d find anything we’d really want there, it was worth a try. Fred didn’t think it would be open, but he was willing to make the drive, so off we went. He was right, the store wasn’t open, and as we turned around and headed north, we discussed where we could go next to look. I suggested that we look in the unfinished furniture store where we’d gotten our old kitchen table (the one that has since been replaced) and the spud’s tv cart. He didn’t think that place would be open, either, but as we drove by it, I pointed out that it was, in fact open. “You want me to turn around and go back?” he asked. “Only if it’s not too much of a pain in the ass,” I said. I suspected that anything they’d have in the way of living room furniture was going to be more than we wanted to pay. He got off at the next exit and turned around. “There’s another furniture place, but it’s closed,” he said. “There’s one right there, and it looks like it’s open,” I said. And it was, so we pulled into the parking lot and went in. We were greeted at the door by a man who handed us a flyer and asked if we needed a salesperson. We told him we were just going to look around, and proceeded to do so. This place was HUGE; I’ve never seen a bigger furniture store in my entire life, and everything they carried was fairly reasonably priced and didn’t appear to be crap. We wandered around for close to an hour – and the only thing this place had more than furniture was salespeople; the shoppers were outnumbered by salespeople by 2 to 1, I swear – and finally decided on a couch with recliners at each end. Upon talking to the salesman who’d been following us around, we found that the loveseat was only $20 less than the couch, so we ended up buying two couches instead of a couch and a loveseat. And they’re good solid couches, too. Hopefully I won’t break ’em with my Ass of Doom. This here is the couch we got, in that color and everything. It’s verrrrrrry comfortable, and I can’t believe we have to wait 2 to 4 weeks before they’re going to be delivered! It’ll be worth the wait, though. I guarantee it. We left the furniture store – after Fred put the smack down on the cashier, who was trying to bully him into getting the extended warrantee – and headed for Fred’s favorite use book store. It took us maybe 20 minutes to each come up with three books we wanted; I got a couple of Perri O’Shaughnessy books – I’ve never read anything by that author, so I hope I’ll like ’em – and Catch Me. Fred got a couple of Greg Iles books, and another one I can’t recall the name or author of. Used book stores rock, by the way. So all in all, it was a pretty good weekend of spending time together and shopping. I was a little pissy on Friday because we ended up not going away for the weekend (I was pushing for a trip to Gatlinburg), but I think we ended up having a better time this way. * * * Did I mention that we have too many cats? I don’t know when the last time was that I slept straight through the night. The main reason I get woken up 63,000 times a night would be due to the antics of one Sugar J. Buttocks. He loves to lay on me – LOVES IT – and is prone to climb up on my arm (I lay on my right side for most of the night, with my right hand tucked up under my pillow, and he likes to lay on the part of my arm that’s right there, making a little bed for him) and then get so overwhelmed with love for me that he purrs and kneads and farts simultaneously, and let me tell you – it’s not terribly conducive to sleeping. Sometimes he kneads on my face, and I can handle that for a few minutes, but after a while, even though I trim his claws, it starts to REALLY HURT. So I put my hand up so that he’s kneading on that, and Sugarbutt, overcome with the need to touch me in some way, will start licking my neck. This morning at around 5:00, after being awakened every ten minutes from 2:30 on, I decided I’d finally had enough, and I grabbed the can of compressed air (that conveniently sits by the bed), and I sprayed it at Sugarbutt, who had jumped down and gone off to eat or use the litter box, and was coming back for another attack on me. I ended up spraying the air in his direction no less than ten times before he gave up. Good thing for him he’s so cute, I suppose. Four of the six. Sugarbutt, sunbathing. “Who, me? I didn’t do anything! Nope, not me…” All of today’s uploaded pictures can be seen here. * * * Previously 2004: All your frog are belong to us. 2003: No entry. 2002: I am freezing to death. 2001: I think I need to get a life… 2000: In other words, Robyn is a total spaz about her eyes, comprende? 1999: On the way into work, and the whole time I worked today, I reconsidered that reconsideration.]]>