shoesonwrong

And Of Course Ryan Slept Through It

I've had this bear, Snuggles, since I was just shy of three years old.

It's that bear from the Snuggles fabric softener, and the only reason my mother got it for me for Christmas was to win an ongoing argument we had as to whether or not Snuggles really had the ability to walk, talk, and fall gently into a pile of laundry while giggling. That my mother had to shell out twenty bucks to win an argument with a two year old is neither here nor there, really. The point of this story is I still have Snuggles and he is still basically intact. The stuffing is a little less stuffy and his eyes and nose are all scratched up from when I would chew on them at night to fall asleep. I also scratched out his tongue because I found the bright pink to be garish. Okay, so aside from some toddler Guantanamo treatment, Snuggles is totally fine.

When we were at my parent's house this past weekend, I found Snuggles and thought, Hey, I should bring him back with me. He can sit on the bed. It will be cute. I did not think, My cats are completely insane, view this stuffed bear as a threat to national security, and treat it as such. It's becoming increasingly clear I still have no idea what I'm doing with two cats and someone should have made me pass some basic psychological competency test before letting me out the door of the animal shelter with a kitten.

Snuggles got wedged up between two pillows on our bed while we slept. Our bed is huge and I don't think either one of us really remembered Snuggles was still up there. At least I know that I didn't until it was three in the morning and I had a sixteen pound marmalade tabby cat on my stomach and an eight pound grey tabby sitting on my forehead, working in tandem to investigate, abduct, and probably destroy the innocent childhood relic. I'm not someone who wakes up in any sane manner. Sometimes there's tears or screaming. There's always a wide-eyed terror-filled look of confusion. Waking up wearing almost twenty-five pounds of cat was... well, I'll be honest: it wasn't one of my proudest moments, considering I punched the big cat in the face. Once the first punch was thrown, the little cat clung to Snuggles. I think he knew I wouldn't hurt the bear. I pryed his grubby paws off the bear, rolled out of bed, stumbled into the closet door, opened the closet door, and then put the bear on the highest shelf.

The next morning, I woke up and rolled over to find two cats sitting on the nightstand, both looking at me with malice in their hearts.

Happy April Wicket Day

When we adopted Wicket, his age put his birthday in early April. Since he's a complete buffoon, we decided his birthday is on April Fool's Day. We adopted him because after our dog, Cassie, went to live with my parents, Momo decided he had nothing better to do than walk around the house all day screaming at the top of his lungs. That is, of course, when he wasn't wrapped around my leg and refusing to let go. Since Momo apparently has issues about being alone and I was nearly ready to kick him hard enough to turn him into my slipper, we decided we could either get another cat to keep Momo company or push Momo out the window to see if he could fly.

Enter Wicket. He didn't really interact with us the first five or six months we had him. Now he loves us, though. Well, he loves our feet. Whenever we're standing in the kitchen doing dishes or preparing food, he shoots across the apartment to flop on the kitchen floor and make trilling noises while he rolls back and forth across our feet. It would be creepy if it wasn't so cute. Or maybe it would be cute if it wasn't so creepy.

He started out as a timid little biter, but Wicket is turning into a very nice cat in just a year. I am told, however, that we have many more years of pet ownership ahead of us. See, my tearful and passionate pleas for a kitten were denied all while growing up, and as a result I know nothing about cats. We adopted two of them before Ryan said something like, "Well, it's good I like them because they're going to be here for another twenty years." And I laughed and laughed and laughed. Then I realized Ryan wasn't laughing. Apparently these cat things live for a hundred years, like tortises. Ryan is still amazed that I earned a degree in mathematics and didn't know the lifespan of a cat, but I DIDN'T MAJOR IN CATOLOGY, NOW DID I. My hope is to time it right so that my children will move out of the house at the same time the cats are getting feeble and require things like pills twice daily or anti-fungal cream rubbed at the base of their tails. The logic behind it is that children are stupid and become easily attached, so when they are standing on the porch, car packed up for college, saying sadly say how much they will miss the cats, I will push the cats into their arms and then dash inside and lock the door.

I believe in that last one, Wicket is either asking Momo to see what's stuck to his butt or attempting to fart in Momo's face. Possibly both.

So, What's New With You?

I keep getting emails from the Michigan Humane Society trying to guilt me into either giving them money or take home another pet. Uh, they spent a few months threatening to sue me and then temporarily lost my kitten. I'LL GET RIGHT ON THAT AS SOON AS I GET DONE ICE SKATING IN HELL.

(Did I ever mention that they lost Wicket? We took him into the Detroit branch (we had adopted him from the Rochester branch) to get his produce removed and then tried to pick him up the next day. Cue forty-five minutes of a bored receptionist telling me that our cat wasn't there and wasn't on file. They eventually found him -- mixed back in with the cats that were ready to adopted -- and he still had his balls. Seriously, how heartbreaking would THAT be? Drop off the family dog for a snip snip and you come back to NOTHING AT ALL, SORRY KIDS.)

Speaking of college (which we are now), two things. First, I keep getting emails and mail regarding a bill from my old university for zero dollars. Now they're just taunting me, but I can't figure out why. It's like it's not enough that I gave them the best years of my life and emerged from university a withered old crone. Second, I have nightly dreams that I'm in my last semester of college. I think I'm about to graduate, but because I skipped five weeks to play Parcheesi day and night, there's no way I can pass my finals. Because of my crippling Parcheesi addiction.

In other news: I probably need some sort of medication

The maintainance guy came around to fix our sink because it was leaking all over the cupboard floor beneath it. I discovered there was a problem when I was doing the dishes and found myself standing in a puddle. I didn't notice sooner because the only things we keep under there are cleaning products and cat food, and we hardly ever use those. Anyway, so the the maintainance guy came around ten in the morning, and I was grumpy straight off because I had to put on a bra and pants. Then he called me "ma'am" and the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees. I never know what to do when someone is in my house to fix something -- my instinct was to hover and ask him if he needed anything, but I fought back that urge. Eventually, I decided to lay on the couch and pretend to read a book while really just fidgeting with the desires to go see what he was doing and take my pants back off.

(Side note: I blame my father for the hovering. While I was growing up, he would regularly enlist me against my to "help" him do a project in order to build character. "Helping" consisted of standing beside him and handing him tools when he asked for them. Rather, it consisted of standing next to him, him asking me for a tool, me not knowing what tool he wanted, and him ending up getting the tool himself. The end result, however, is that I now feel my presence is instrumental to the completion of projects, even when I have no idea what's going on. Especially when I have no idea what's going on.)

The awkard got bumped up a notch when he started talking, loudly, to himself. It was really more like shouting to himself. Shouting at himself and the pipe under the sink. He did that thing where he wanted to swear, but instead of swearing he used strange phrases that sounded like swearing. "Dagnabit! Son of a monkey's uncle. You forgot the the extra tile, you durn idiot. Come on, break loose, you garbin mothballer farkwrank." With each round of the faux cursing, I felt more anxious. You ever have that nightmare where people are talking to you but it's all gibberish? I was living it.

By time he left, I was anxious enough to want to just rip off my pants and run into the kitchen to hand him a tool -- any tool. STAND BACK AND LET ME PASSIVELY FIX IT BY DOING NOTHING.

It's been an exciting week around here. Yesterday, I accidentally stepped on the kitten's neck reasonably hard when he dashed in front of me. Then I spent the next half hour assessing whether or not he could still move all his limbs and devising crackpot tests to gauge his neurological response. The verdict was that he was fine but couldn't tell me how many fingers I was holding up. He also wants to know if you come here often. Can he buy you a drink?

Oh Monsters, Why Did I Create You?

DEAR. LORD. Thank goodness we go to pick up Wicket later today because Momo? Has been driving me absolutely nuts. Sad crying all night. Constantly trying to sit on my shoulder like a parrot. And this morning, we started a new thing where he yells and screams at every closed door he finds until I come over and open it for him, allowing him to look in briefly and appease himself that Wicket isn't hiding in my bedroom (which the cats are closed off from becuase I don't want their disgusting litter mitter feet all over my bedding).

Other places that Wicket isn't hiding but Momo has checked:

• The refrigerator
• Under the bathroom sink
• The closet
• The other closet
• That kitchen cupboard next to the oven
• A large box of Q-Tips

Momo is too aflutter to even bother enjoying getting into places he's not allowed to normally go. The door opens, he races in and checks every corner, then he's back out again and looking for Wicket somewhere else. Why do I bother to open doors for my deranged cat, you ask? Because those three seconds of reprieve I get from him doing that cat-howl are worth it.

Balls!

TypePad ate my first version of this post, leaving me nearly apoplectic. IF I SINK ENTIRE MINUTES INTO POSTING ABOUT MY CAT'S NADS, I WANT IT TO SHOW UP.

Tomorrow, Wicket loses these:

I only post a picture of these testicles because they are, and I can say this with absolute certainty, the most troublesome testicles I have ever encountered. They are definitely the only testicles someone has ever threatened to sue me over.

To backtrack a bit: we got Wicket from the MHS (Michigan Humane Society). Part of the adoption agreement is that you will have the animal sterilized, usually within a certain amount of time (I can't remember what it is for sure, a couple months?). We signed the agreement with the full intention of getting him fixed soon. Our options were to let the MHS do it for free or our own vet to do it for super-cheap. (Truly. I have enough fingers and toes to count the number of dollars our vet charges to lop off the balls of a kitten.) After seeing how many animals are constantly shuffled through the MHS (a lot) and being treated badly by every single staff member we encountered, we decided to stick with our own vet, whom we adore.

The catch was that our vet wouldn't sterilize Wicket until he was six months old. I checked with the MHS to see if this was acceptable, and they grudgingly agreed it was. I got a letter once or twice asking if he was still fertile, and I called them both times to remind them of the plan -- both times they said it was okay. As far as I knew, everything was fine up until the time that we got a letter threatening to start legal action to remove Wicket from our care and take a bundle of money from us if he wasn't fixed yet. Luckily, his appointment to turn him into a eunuch was a week and a half away, and my vet (very kindly) offered to personally call the MHS and explain the situation to them. The MHS (again) grudgingly agreed and then huffed and puffed for awhile about checking back, oh they would be checking back -- they would check back like no one had ever checked back before, and by God, that kitten had better be ball-less.

Long story short: apparently, my cat's balls are a big deal.

(A serious sidenote: I would strongly reccommend avoiding the MHS, or at least the Rochester branch. They are hard to deal with, seem far more concerned with following rules and doing paperwork than caring for animals, and will hound you for donations until the day you die. Plus, when we adopted Wicket, we had to pay extra for several tests (including feline leukemia virus) to make sure he was healthy. That seems weird to me, that they didn't test for FeLV to begin with. The podunky little shelter we got Momo from tested for FeLV, vaccinated against it (including a whole host of other vaccinations), and cost far less to adopt from than the MHS.)

When you're running short on time, the internet loves it when you throw cats at them

We've had him for almost three months, and the kitten is just not getting any smarter, he's just getting bigger. It's a great combination, let me assure you. He's knocking stuff over and falling off things and letting his mouth hang open. Sometimes he grabs onto his own tail so hard he rolls himself over.

He does, however, keep Momo from walking around constantly moaning. Now instead, Momo spends his time alternating between bathing Wicket and hiding from Wicket in the bathtub. Sometimes, I'll see Wicket walking around and meowing, then I go into the bathroom and Momo is looking up from the tub where he's pressed to the floor and giving me a look that says, "Tell him where I'm at and I chew off your hair tonight."

That is Momo and his feather. His PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS, PRECIOUSSSSSS feather. Wicket likes whatever Momo likes, so he also loves the feather. Momo is not exactly a good sharer, so he usually pushes the feather into a pile and then sits on top of it while Wicket circles him and cries.

Ultimately, the real difference between the two cats is that Wicket spends his life trying to intimidate Momo and Momo spends his life trying to intimidate the vacuum cleaner.

Wicket

We brought this kitten home today. He weighs a mere 1.7 pounds and is 8 weeks old.

His name is Wicket, and we weren't supposed pick him up until tomorrow because his nuts should have been lopped off today. However, he has an upper respiratory infection and couldn't undergo surgery, so now we have a sneezing kitten wandering around the house a day early. Even sick, he's still very active -- so much so that it's nearly impossible to get a non-blurry photo of him. Unless, of course, you make him miserable.

Exhibit A.

Momo and Wicket aren't getting along too badly. Momo has stopped hissing, and Wicket keeps pouncing on Momo. When Momo is in a good mood, he paws back and plays. When he's in a bad mood, he pushes Wicket down and sits on him. We try to discourage this behavior.