I am a Minion

Cats seem to know who their minions are. They find their minion, and attach themselves to that person. For life, sometimes. Apparently, I am a minion.

There is no doubt that Pounce is my cat. She sleeps on me. She calls for me. When I am upstairs, she is right there next to me. If I go into the bathroom and shut the door, she wants to be in there, and will meow loudly outside the door until I let her in. If she is perfectly happy where she is, and I get up and go into another room, she will grumpily move herself over to where I went.

She is actually sitting on the printer next to me while I type this, with her tail curled around her feet, giving me lots of kitty kisses(that's where they look at you, then slowly close their eyes). After she does this for five or ten minutes, she will begin her hourly bath. Yes, I said hourly. Remember how I said that she was nuts a couple of posts ago?

Pounce is the only cat in the house that does this. Morris is usually saving up all his energy for nap time, and Zena is downstairs being a hyperactive kitten. It's kind of nice to have a cat sitting next to you, giving you kitty kisses. Pounce's just sitting here next to me, not scratching, not yowling, not demanding anything.

I like that. It is rather comforting. Definitely a stress reliever.

Do your pets help you unwind at the end of the day?

I Am A Cat Enabler

I have a calico cat named Pounce. Pounce came to us straight from a box; she was the last kitten in a box that an 8th grader had brought to school, and my husband is a sucker for a cute face. He brought her home about a month after we got married, and she has been living with us ever since.

And she is insane. Crazy with Cheez-Whiz. Cuckoo for Cocoa-Puffs.

Did I mention that she's crazy?

Pounce didn't start out insane. For a long time, she was just your average cat, but a bit more skittish than the others in the house. She wasn't all that keen about the outdoors, but she would head out there in the mornings with the other cats to eat some grass and check out the world.

Then something happened that was more than Pounce's brain could process.

She stopped coming downstairs at all. For two years.

She hissed at everyone and everything.

She spent days under the bed in our room, and only came out to eat and use the litter box.

Apparently Pounce's normal self is just plain crazy. We got used to it.

She still hisses at my son, Zane, like he's new to the house. Every day. Zane hisses back(I'm so proud), and Pounce runs and hides under the bed for several hours.

Pounce hisses, stalks, and chases Zena, our kitten. She randomly whacks Morris, my 16 year old cat, in the head. While she will come downstairs now, if there's any sort of strangeness, like a toy that wasn't there before, she will head back upstairs to hide.

And she will no longer go out onto the patio to eat grass. She will stand in front of the door and meow, but when I open the door for her, she just stands there, her pupils wide open with fear.

So what do I do, as a good kitty-mama? Do I get coax her outside with treats and reward her for her bravery? No.

I go outside and pick blades of grass and bring them back into the house. Then I hold them in my hand so Pounce can pretend that she is outside eating grass.

Yep. I am buying into her crazy.

Christmas Game Planning

My husband, who is Mr."We Must Go Overboard On Everything Related to Christmas", spends a lot of time planning the events of Christmas morning so as to achieve maximum impact. In fact, he has been planning the presentation of Christmas for the last month. He's driving me just plain batshit crazy.

"Maybe we should move the couch over there so we can arrange Zane's presents more in a semicircle?"

"Do you think that we should have the presents wrapped and under the tree now, or should we wait until Christmas day?"

"What if we move the tree over to that side, so when Zane comes downstairs the first thing he sees are the presents?"

"We are going to have to go out and buy some more presents. The arrangement is lopsided."

"Where do you think we could find some foam board, so I can make some life-sized pictures?"

"Should we have the presents from Santa wrapped? If so, we are going to need a really big boz."

And so it goes. On Christmas Eve, Larry will stay up late, fussing, arranging the presents just so, posing everything to optimal effect, so that when Zane comes down the stairs on Christmas morning, he will have the 3 year old equivalent of an OMG moment.

And I love him for that. Even though he's driving me nuts. I'm not kidding about that part.