cats

Disrupted and Disgruntled

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
In the basket--that lasted about 10 minutes.

In the basket–that lasted about 10 minutes.

No one likes to have their routine disrupted. And no one hates it more than a cat.

I recently took the bean bag chair out of my office. The cat was the only one who sat on it there, and the build-up of cat hair on it was triggering my allergies.

I cleaned off the hair and put it in the living room, where we’ve been enjoying it.

Well, everyone except the cat.

In the recycling box--a bit small for him.

In the recycling box–a bit small for him.

He used to spend all day sleeping in the chair in my office. Now he doesn’t quite know what to do. I’ve provided him a basket in the office, but he doesn’t want anything to do with it. He also won’t sleep on the bean bag chair in the living room. Instead, he prowls from one spot to another, spending no more than a few minutes in each spot. In between naps, he sits at my feet and howls his indignation at me, punctuating his howls with vicious bites (it’s a good thing I wear jeans).

He’ll get over it, eventually, as we all do when change happens. At some point, we’ll get tired of the bean bag chair in the living room (it takes up an awful lot of space in there), and it will move back to my office. Then the cat will be pissed off at me for putting the bean bag chair into the office, and we’ll have to deal with his disruption all over again.

Change is tough.

Outwitting the Cat

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment
Exhausted after a hard night's hunting.

So cute and innocent…not.

It has been five years since I slept through the night. It’s no coincidence that it’s been five years since we got our cat.

Don Gato is a talker. He meows to come in, he meows to go out, he meows to be fed, he meows to be petted, he meows to be played with, he meows purely to piss us off.

In the middle of the night, he appears at my bedroom window and howls to come in. If I let him in, he waits until I’ve just managed to fall asleep again, then comes into the bedroom and howls to go out.

I’ve learned to sleep through the meowing at the window, but if I don’t let him in when he howls at the window, he hurls himself at the front door, rattling the door handle and loudly shaking the entire door. Repeatedly. For up to four hours (that’s the longest I’ve been able to stand it, though I’m confident he would have carried on as long as it took to get me out of bed).

When I tried to cure this behaviour by spraying him with water, rather than letting him in when he threw himself at the door, he learned to simply hit the door, then run out of range of the spray bottle.

A few nights, I’ve accidentally locked him into my office for the night, but doing that regularly would most certainly result in the total destruction of the office.

Last night I tried a new tactic. I affixed a string handle to a small plastic tub, filled the tub to the brim with water, and hung it on the front doorknob. If the cat tried to jump at the door, he would tip the water on himself (relieving me from the need to get up and spray him, and making the jump and run technique ineffective).

I slept all night last night.

Let’s hope the defences hold for tonight—I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

A Cat and His God

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-22 20.32.46 smI’m so thrilled.

It has rained and rained and rained the past couple of days.

There is a puddle in the little slough out front.

It is cold and windy.

Sleet pings on the window.

The rain barrel is full.

The ground squishes when I walk.

Fire crackles in the log burner.

The cat purrs on the alter of his god.

The seasons are back in their rightful places (at least for now).

One of the Herd

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
He wants to be a goat and a writer...

He wants to be a goat and a writer…

My daughter and I have been feeding the new goats by hand every afternoon, to help them become more friendly.

But it seems everyone wants to get in on it now.

Of course, Artemis, my remaining Saanen, is quite jealous of the attention ‘the boys’ get, and feels the need to eat the majority of the food, or at least keep the other goats from getting it. She alternates between gobbling up as much as possible, and beating the stuffing out of the others.

That’s no surprise, really. Artemis is a goat, after all.

But today, the cat decided he needed to get in on the feeding, too. He meowed from outside the paddock for a few minutes, and when we didn’t come out, he came in.

He and Artemis have always had an adversarial relationship—she’s been known to tear after him if he gets in her way as she’s going to the milking stand. But the new goats, after a few rather curious sniffs and head-butt feints, seemed to accept him as just another goat, albeit a rather odd one.

 

Daylight Savings Cat

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments
None the worse for wear.

None the worse for wear.

The cat has been particularly annoying lately. Usually he meows at my bedroom window around five am to be let in.

But when we came off daylight savings time last week, he refused to change his schedule. And out of spite, he even started meowing earlier, which means he’s been waking me up before four am for a week.

Ignoring him only makes it worse. If I don’t get up and start my day when the cat calls, he hurls himself at the front door until I do.

I can ignore a meowing cat, and even fall back asleep if I try. I can’t ignore seven kilos of fury rattling the front door for an hour.

So this morning when my eyes opened at 4.30 am I was surprised it was so late. All was quiet, and for ten minutes I lay blissfully thinking the cat had finally gotten the message about daylight savings time. I was just drifting back to sleep when I remembered…

About 4.30 pm yesterday, I was balanced on the top of a ladder, hanging a sack of pumpkins on a rafter in the shed. The cat was slinking around in the shed, and the wind blew the door shut. I remember seeing his tail slip in, just before the bang.

I never let him out.

Darn cat. Even locked in a shed forty metres from the house, he was able to get me out of bed early.

Because, once you realise your daughter’s cat has been locked in a shed for twelve hours, you can’t lounge around in bed enjoying the quiet.

Cat Games

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
Exhausted after a hard night's hunting.

Exhausted after a hard night’s hunting.

The routine is the same every morning. About 5 am, the cat starts howling at the bedroom window. I eventually roll out of bed, grumbling at him, but knowing I need to get up anyway. On my way through the house to the bathroom, I let him in. He has a snack while I get ready to milk the goats. He comes back outside when I go out.

I set up grain and milk pail at the milking stand, then head out to let the chickens out for the day and feed them.

The cat is there, in the tall grass half way to the chicken coop. His black and white body stands out stark on even the darkest morning. He crouches as I go past on the way to the chickens. When I come back, he pounces. I can almost hear him saying,

“Boo! HAHAHA! Gotcha!”

I head to the paddock to bring out the first goat. As the goat trots up the hill toward the milking stand, the cat bounds across the goat’s path, back arched, leaping menacingly as he goes, as though he is going to bring down an animal ten times his size.

Or he might lie in wait for the goat’s return to the paddock, leaping out from behind the corner of the shed.

Sometimes, he gets more than he bargains for. If it’s Artemis he threatens, it goes badly for him. She has a vendetta against the cat, and lunges at him every chance she gets. If I’m not right there, ready to grab her collar and hold her back, she’ll chase the cat all over the yard to show him who’s boss.

In truth, I think the cat enjoys being chased by the goat. He enjoys pretending to attack me in the dark as I feed the other animals and do the milking.

By the time I’m finished with the milking, the cat is done playing. He trots back indoors with me, has another snack, then finds a cosy place to curl up and sleep for the day.

Garden Companion

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

DSC_0033 smI was tying up tomatoes this morning.

I plant most of my tomatoes along one long edge of the vegetable garden. That edge is made of 1.8 metre deer fencing (a remnant from a previous owner who ran greyhounds and divided the property into six long narrow runs for the dogs). On the fence, I’ve run black wind block cloth to give the tomatoes a little sheltered heat island. I train the plants right up the fence.

So, anyway, I was tying up tomatoes when I heard a rustling on the other side of the fence. I assumed a chicken had gotten out, as one of them has developed an annoying habit of getting out of the chicken paddock to eat raspberries.

But then a furry white paw shot through a hole in the wind block cloth to snatch at my fingers.

It was the cat, intrigued by the rustling on the other side of the fence.

When he got bored of attacking me across the fence, he lay against it for a while. When I finished the tomatoes, he followed me to another part of the garden, and lay down in the path to watch me while I worked.

I don’t know why the cat sometimes does this—acts more like a dog than a cat. Most of the time he ignores me in the garden, but now and again, he follows me around as though he doesn’t want to be out of sight.

Must be my annual staff performance review…

Java Cat

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

drinkingcatIt’s another Throwback Thursday…

I ran across this photo of our cat, back when he was still cute, having a little taste from my coffee cup.

I don’t think he liked what he tasted; nowadays, he sniffs tentatively from a few inches away, then turns away in disgust. It’s what he does to most of our food. How a family of vegetarians ended up with a strictly carnivorous pet, I don’t know, but the positive result is that the cat rarely jumps onto the kitchen counters or tries snatch food from unattended plates. His only kitchen crime is sitting on the dining table in order to look out the window.

That does not mean he is well-behaved–oh, no–the Malevolent Beast from Hell has many evil habits, but at least stealing food isn’t one of them.