It’s Caturday and time for our furbabies to shine. This time, they have been working on a magazine cover. They both went and picked out their own magazine covers. Tito wanted a soothing restful theme. Miss Jenny decided that her tater wrangling was so inspired that she went in that direction.
Not that the pointy eared ones really care, but today’s post is about belated birthday wishes for them. If it wasn’t for the fact that they sleep, oh say about 17 hours each day, their parkour play moves and Klingon-style luvvin’ would make you think they’re burning the candle at both ends.
Our wish is for them to meow long and loud and for many years to come. Happy birthday, you little @$#%*&#!
In fact, if they were human, I think they might be Swedish percussionists running from the Law in the JBoDmobile (more on that later)…
“What greater gift than the love of a cat?”
– Charles Dickens
Yes, it’s Caturday, but first things first. The proper pronunciation for evil in this context is the same as in the old classic horror films. Instead of pronouncing it as in the name Evel Knievel, it should be pronounced EEeee vill . The first half should be long and drawn out and the second half rhymes with bill. Got it? Good on we go.
Evil lurks in this house, erm, apartment. It has four legs and fur. It also has beautiful baby blue eyes.
Don’t let the fart monster’s beautiful blue eyes fool you into complacency. She’s evil.
Why fear? Well, he found this! [cue the theme to Psycho’s shower scene].
No wonder Tito is scared. I’m scared too. This morning I awoke to find her nibbling on my eyebrows. Then she farted.
So that you don’t have nightmares after that last photo, I’m including an adorable English bulldog named Porter. He doesn’t like his leash. It can be found on cobrakiel’s YouTube page.
Another Caturday rolls around and it’s time for Tito and Jenny to look their best. Sometimes it’s fun to take a substandard photo and have a bit of fun with it. This is what I did today.
As a bonus, here is a owl that is so cute your head might explode.
As anyone who lives with cats knows, they are mischievous, wicked, naughty, thieving little critters. Some, will steal your food like Kitsy used to do. His preference was bacon, but he would settle for pizza. Some are paper shredders. The Boober’s favorite was the paper towel roll. We used to have to hide the rolls in the cupboard.
Tito is the shelf monster. If it’s on the shelf, it won’t be for long. He’s an expert of knocking items off one at a time. This is quite disturbing at 3am. We learned the hard way that breakable items have to be stored away.
This is what Tito is like in action. His nickname should really be Ruprecht. The important part begins at 3:55 minutes in.
Some, like Miss Jenny, love to steal various items from around the house and hide them in bed. She’s a regular pack rat. Trust me, you don’t go to bed in this apartment without going through the bedding looking for all the stray items. A ballpoint pen in the posterior is not my idea of fun.
This is just a small sample of the items found in our bed.
The kitties were about to have their moment in the sun yesterday when we learned of the passing of Neil Armstrong. As the commander of Apollo 11 and the first man to set foot on the moon, we just had to honor him instead.
Now it’s time for the kitties to shine.
Who let the dogs out?
And now we leave you with a singing cockatiel.
Another Caturday has rolled around and it’s time for the furkids to shine a bit. Things are settling down since the loss of Kitsy. Tito and Miss Nightshade Jenny are slowly adjusting. They miss him and it shows, but they’re taking a lot of comfort in each other. I still haven’t been able to write a fitting memorial for my little clown, so it’s going to wait for a while. In the meantime, here are our sweet furballs.
Here is Miss Nightshade Jenny snoozing on a crochet pad. The pad and the ball were a gift from our lovely friend StateOfGrace.
The Olympics are over for another couple of years, but I thought I would leave you with this great vid by klusmanp at YouTube.
“And they call it kitty love…”
That’s where the cuteness ends: Jenny starts by kissing on Tito, they exchange a few licks, and settle down for a minute, maybe a few seconds.
Then the wrestling begins. The headlocks and body slamming, what every Trekker recognizes as the Klingon mating ritual, somewhat different from the Vulcan mating ritual which also involves ass kicking, but of a Starship Captain.
As I type this, for instance, Jenny is still greeting me home, dancing figure eights under the chair, pawing at my leg and grabbing my arm to rub against. With purring and claws. I’m already bleeding in three spots. I got bit. Not too hard but firmly.
Must be the Tortie (Tortoiseshell) in her, the little brute. As a wrestler, she has a very solid stance: wide with hind legs bent. We saw her more than once using this position to wrap Tito in an embrace before slamming him down. Then again, he gives as good as he gets, and even has her retreating often, though never for long. Never for long.
I’m bleeding from a fourth scratch now.
Jenny will also walk on my pillow stopping just long enough to nom on my skull. If I pet her, which I always do, she farts. If my wife leans over to nose bonk her, Jenny’ll cough in her face, like Carol Beer on “Little Britain”:
Her newest trick: not a cough, but a vurp (a burp which sounds vomitous). All I can say is thank Ceiling Cat she doesn’t eat mice. Things are gross enough. Annnnd, I’ve got an eighth scratch… Well, a puncture, more like… Still, I feel like one of Jack the Ripper’s playthings.
They say that when you’re young, you know what you hate and that as you get older, you know what you love and shift your focus.
I think that’s true but I hate disease more and more, disease of any variety, which diminishes those you love until it kills them. I can’t get used to it, and I’m not certain Kitsy’s passing has sunk in even now.
Maybe it’s because he was so much larger than life, that I have trouble thinking of him as truly gone.
Everything about Kitsy was superlative and he was a hell of a model, even though he never managed to hold a pose quite long enough. One thing he liked was getting petted roughly before I blew raspberries on his gut. He’d get up, fold his big flappers of ears back and leap off.
What we had for the past couple months or so was a wasted version of him.
Lately, he had appeared to make some improvement. The weight, however was located in his gut and his spine and ribs continued to show. His muscle mass continued to diminish and he had more trouble jumping in the last few days.
What confirmed what we were afraid to know and discuss, was what the other cats did. They nestled with Kitsy to keep him warm at night, Jenny checked on him constantly, and Tito would lure me to the bathroom were I’d sit on the edge of the tub and pet him on my lap.
New behavior which I took as offers of comfort from the big cat.
As to Jenny, she accompanied Kitsy wherever he went, literally shadowing him. By then she also looked much bigger than he.
So we had him for two years, and that seems like a very short time…
The vet told us that the disease affected mostly young cats, and what a rotten thing that is.
I will miss his excesses and countless transgressions. I used to joke he was like a shark, an eating machine constantly looking for food to steal, and last night it struck me to see bacon strips on a plate in the kitchen left unmolested. Yet I can’t help thinking that even though he’s clearly not here he is not in fact gone.
I will miss our arguments, me calling him names and him probably demanding noms. He was a great outlet for my frustrations the fearless little bastard who never had a bad mood and would make Tito and I exchange disbelieving looks.
I can’t wait to dream about him.
“Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen
They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed.“
Led Zeppelin “Kashmir”
I have no clue what the pointy eared people believe, and I really have no idea whether they even believe anything. I do know that they think. The confusion, or subterfuge, is in their attitudes towards the ‘unknown’.
Like a simple, harmless, charming even… Water fountain.
In our efforts to help Mazuzu re-hydrate, we bought a pet water fountain which recirculates water and increases the oxygen content in it.The collective reaction? Avoidance. And in Tito and Jenny’s case apparently, fear.
Tito in particular, hates appliances like vacuum cleaners and fans.
Tito has always had odd habits, like pawing water to drink.
As to Jenny, she kills toys for no other reason than she thought the thing looked at her.
Both she and Tito have approached the fountain suspiciously, lifting a paw and smacking it to put it in its place, whatever that is. As to Mazuzu, the pattern on the pot to his right makes him dream of the void between the stars. That and cosmic calamari with an unpronounceable name.
So what goes on in their head as they encounter eebil majjik? What thought, what incantation do they think of..? Well. While we still have no clue what it means, I did have a sort of revelation ( yeah, deeper than an epiphany) when we hiked an old battery on the approach to the Golden Gate bridge.
What their mantra is, their conjuration, appears here:
That is all. Keep calm and carry on. Just remember the words…
