Feline foils bid to make honest cat of him
29 January 2003
by KIM WOODHAM

Be warned – a feline is scouring Spotswood's streets and taking whatever it fancies.

Dandelion (3), the kleptomaniac cat, first started collecting when he was a year old and in two years has stolen more than 700 items, according to his owner Sara Peacock.

"I own a cat burglar, he goes into peoples' homes and steals things," Miss Peacock said. "It's an anxiety thing. He wants to please me by bringing me home presents."

Read the rest of this hysterically funny story.

posted at 11:41 AM

 
I made the mistake of playing "catch the mousie" with Nefreet and not
being a fast enough mouse. She was lying on a large sofa pillow, so I
stuck my hand underneath it and made scratching noises. This is a
game Randy and I often play with her. She loves going after the
"mouse". Except this time she was too damn fast and I now have a
long, painful slice on the entire side of my palm from the second
knuckle of my thumb downwards. Yowtch!

posted at 8:15 PM

 
You know you're in trouble when cats invade your dreams.

I dreamt I was in a large cityscape, following an endless line of
hundreds of cats. The cats were following one after another
single-file, winding through block after block of city streets. I had
Owl, Artemis and Tribble with me, along with possibly one or two other
of my cats. Somehow I knew that the purpose of this was to find
water. This procession continued until I finally realized that the
orange cat at the head of the line had no idea where it was going or
how to find water.

I went inside a store (rather like a drugstore or large convenience
store) where I got several bowls, filled them with water and put them
out for all the cats. The people working the checkouts were friendly,
so they didn't mind letting me do this. Then I set out catching my
own cats and putting them into carriers so they wouldn't run off and
get lost.

Even in my dreams, I'm herding cats.

posted at 11:31 AM

 
Every Sunday, Unicom and Nefreet get their rubdown with the
anti-allergy liquid, the one thing that allows them to live in the
house with Randy.

And every week, without exception, a few hours later Nefreet responds
by leaving us a big, disgusting hairball. This has come to be known
as "The Sunday Surprise". We've been waiting for The Sunday Surprise
all afternoon. She finally delivered while we were having dinner.

Such is the perversity of cats.

posted at 8:32 PM

 
The Master of the Mist was out on the hunt again last night. The mist
that enshrouded us created an eerie stillness in which I could hear
the pitter, pitter, pitter of water drops falling from the trees.
Perhaps the stillness helps Unicom find the gophers. At any rate, in
short order, he nabbed two of them. His fur was wet with mist, but he
didn't care. It was gopher-slaying time.

Of course, I had the great fun of cleaning up the organs and snouts
from the back deck this morning.

posted at 12:09 PM

 
The double dose of Prednisone turned Uni into a Creature of the Night.
He just wanted to be outside and hunt. None of this hanging around
with the humans for petting nonsense. When I stepped outside to go to
my office, our hill was enshrouded in mist so thick, I could see it
streaming right past me. Uni must have used it to his advantage,
though we didn't know that until we found gopher guts on the back deck
this morning.

Puck spent half the day on the roof of my office. He went zooming up
a big oak tree and from there onto the roof, then wouldn't come down.
I've only finally managed to get him inside a couple of hours after
the time I usually would.

I tried taking photos of the cats as they hung around outside the
office with me. Puck kept shaking his wet paws from the branch of the
tree and raining droplets of water down onto my face as I tried to
take shots of him. None of my cats want to cooperate with the camera.
They either run off, or want to be right next to me. Owl glued
himself to my legs, which made it impossible to get shots of him. I
wanted to get shots of Diva racing around, but she's so blasted fast,
I never could get off a shot in time.

Tribble's running around bouncing off the walls again, except he missed one of his bounces. Instead of landing on the cat bridge, he rebounded down onto a cardboard box. Fortunately, he's made of rubber and never seems to hurt himself. You'd never know he was a 15 year old cat.

posted at 3:01 PM

 
Tribble is on a roll. He caught another gopher and chowed it down.

I had a chat with my vet. Querida is badly congested and has been for
months. She has something akin to a chronic cold. Poor girl is
blowing bubbles out her nose and having trouble breathing. I was
hoping getting the thyroid under control and having her teeth taken
care of would help her improve, but no such luck. So she is now on
Prednisone to see if we can get the inflammation to clear up.

I also chatted with her about Uni and how bad is left elbow is. We're
increasing his Prednisone, too, since he's such a big cat. But there
really isn't much else she can do. Randy did some net research and
discovered that UC Davis has a department that will do arthroscopy on
small animals. We're going to investigate the possibilities, at
least, though I suspect it's beyond what we can afford at the moment.
Not to mention being about a 3 hour drive from here.

Nefreet's bite wound is healing up just fine. No problems there.

Owl is showing some improvement, with most of the fur growing in on
his back. I have to be more disciplined about giving him two
anti-histamines a day, though. When I got slack and only gave him
one, he began denuding himself again. He's too smart for the
pill-inside-the-treat trick (which continues to work great for Querida
and Tribble). Owl quickly learned to eat everything but the pill.
Now it's a matter of insert pill down throat, then give treat. He
likes the treats enough that this is working fairly well.

posted at 3:32 PM

 
Randy and I huffed up the hill from our late afternoon walk yesterday
to find a new gopher hole perilously close to some flowers and bushes
we're trying to save from the pernicious monsters. We have gophers
like the sky has stars. We brought Unicom over to the hole and
entreated him to catch the gopher. He wandered off looking bored.

But by Bast, an hour later when I came up from my office, there was a
headless gopher lying at the bottom of the back stairs, laid out like
a gift. All Hail Unicom! The Mighty Gopher Slayer!

To which I must add, All Hail Tribble! The Other Mighty Gopher Slayer!
He just brought a big gopher into my office where he tossed it around
like a basketball for a while. Now he's into the crunching part. I'm
trying to pretend I can't hear it. Crunch. Crunch.

posted at 11:27 AM

 
Randy was rubbing Nefreet's belly when he felt something odd. We did
a close inspection and finally found a rather nasty bite wound just
below her left front leg. It starts as a bite, then elongates to a
tear as though the tooth caught in the skin.

We then had the fun of tending to it, which required shaving the fur
away from the bite, cleaning it, and putting on some anti-biotic.
Nefreet was a pretty good girl for most of it, but she didn't like the
hydrogen peroxide part at all.

It's not bad enough for a trip to the vet, but we'll have to keep
cleaning and checking it for another few days.

Now we're wondering who she got into such a serious fight with to get
bitten on her belly.

posted at 6:01 PM

 
We got home late at night after being gone on a business trip for a
couple of days. Unicom was desperate to go outside, but we didn't
dare let him out then as all we wanted to do was crawl into bed and
collapse.

To make up for it, Randy let Uni and Nefreet out first thing this
morning. In not time at all, Uni trotted onto the deck with a large
gopher in his mouth. We praised him highly. He wanted to bring it
inside, of course. We said no, of course. He had his gopher
breakfast and has refused to come inside all day. He's been a happy
boy, sleeping in the sun with a belly full of rodent.

The other moggies were equally happy to get outside again, so I let
them stay out a bit later in the afternoon than usual.

posted at 5:23 PM

 
Puck decided to have another bout of Catch The Cursor. He gave it
about two full minutes this time, before deciding it wasn't worth the
frustration.

He moved on to hang over the edge of the desk and bat at something. I
was concentrating on the screen, so I didn't pay attention at first.
A tiny corner of the back of my mind, however, was going, "Aw, he's
batting at something. How cute. Wait...what's there? Oh, the power
cords and phone cords and...uh oh."

But the "uh oh" part arrived a split-second too late. In the instant
I turned that way, the phone went crashing onto the floor and began
madly beeping its home base in what could only be the cordless phone
equivalent of S.O.S. Puck, of course, fled the scene.

posted at 9:27 PM

 
When Tribble wants attention, he wants it *now*. I gave him a small
bit of petting, but it wasn't enough. When I knelt down to give Puck
some attention, Tribble simply leapt up and stood on my back. Nor was
he inclined to move.

"What do you think you're doing, Tribble?"

Purrr, purrr, purrr...

And y'know what? I let him stay there, until he decided to jump onto
the desk. No, cats don't run my life, no sirree.

posted at 4:46 PM

 
Nefreet and Unicom decided to have an altercation at 3 a.m. That was
an interruption we really could have done without. Nefreet is such a
jealous little piece of work.

I was foolishly hoping that Nefreet might manage to get along with
Puck. Have a fresh start, that sort of thing. No such luck. I let
her out today, knowing Puck was right outside. They sniffed noses.
For a second, it looked promising, then Puck whacked her. I
intervened before it could get worse. I'm afraid Nefreet is destined
never to have a feline friend in this life.

Puck also needs to stop being a mischief-maker. He got bored this
afternoon, so he started harassing Tosca again.

Querida's been quite affectionate lately. She's never been a lap cat,
but recently she's been climbing into my lap. Then she just sits
there, purring loudly, not even bothering to lie down. She's an odd
old girl.

posted at 9:13 PM

 
Tosca came very close to being Tossed Cat this afternoon. I didn't
let the horde out this morning because it was raining and I had to
head into town for a few hours. I didn't want to worry about them
being outside while I was gone.

Naturally, the Horde doesn't like those days when they have to be
cooped up. When I got home and went down to the office, Tosca made a
break for it and came up against the side of my foot. She was given a
slightly airborne lift back inside. Not enough to harm her, of
course. I've developed a number of cat-blocking techniques. She was
tossed just enough to get the point across. No door rushing allowed.

Uni seems to be feeling better on his regimen of Prednisone and baby
aspirin. He still tends to eat some grass, but not like he was
before. He had a wild playful stint with a piece of string tonight,
entirely on his own. And yet he's still limping quite badly. It
could be that his elbow is too messed up with calcium deposits to get
rid of the limp, but we're managing to lessen the pain. I sure wish
he could tolerate the glucosamine.

posted at 9:24 PM

 
Right at noon, Tribble trotted inside with lunch -- a large, very live
gopher. This drove me to quickly vacate the office and head up to the
house for my own non-squealing, non-kicking lunch. Of course, I still
have to pick up the gopher head when I came back down to the office
after lunch. It's a good thing that years of living with cats have
given me an iron stomach.

We got to observe a moment between Puck and Nefreet when they both got
onto a ledge outside the kitchen window. We watched closely in case
things turned into a fight. Nefreet had her "imp from hell" look on
at first, until she heard us laughing at her. They both went through
a routine of sort-of staring, then looking away as though the other
didn't exist. Puck gave a big yawn. I wonder if that's the cat
equivalent of "Ho hum, you bore me." or "See my fangs? Don't mess
with me." After a few minutes of this, Puck decided to go elsewhere.

posted at 3:52 PM

 
I was sitting at my computer, minding my own business, trying to work
when I was startled by a loud KRASH! KAWHAM! BAM! BAM! THUD!

My office is more than just an office. It's office, library, storage
shelves and workbench area where tools and other hardware paraphernalia
lives. Because of the cats (and the abundance of cat hair), I keep
lots of small odds and ends inside plastic containers.

As near as I can tell, Blue and Puck were farting around on the top of
the adjacent shelves and Blue either fell or was forced into an
unplanned jump, landed badly and send one of the containers plummeting
to the floor at high speed where the contents rather exploded out of
it. What a mess.

Worse yet, there were TEN THOUSAND PUSHPINS amongst the debris, now
scattered far and wide on the floor with curious cats prancing over.
I had visions of dainty cat paws stepping on pushpins while I'm on
hands and knees rapidly picking them up.

Afterwards, Puck came around and did his absolute best to play Sweet
Innocent Pussycat.

posted at 9:23 PM

 
Poor Uni isn't doing very well on the new regimen. Every morning, he
comes down here by my office and starts eating grass like a lawnmower.
We found one place where he threw up, but if he's eating that much
grass, he has to be throwing up on a daily basis.

Then this morning, before he was given any pills or Glucosamine or
anything, he got about two feet from the door and threw up an enormous
pile of undigested food on the back deck. Then he went off to eat
grass. Overall, he seems to be having a bad stomach problem with one
of the medications, while not improving noticeably in his joints. His
limp was very bad.

I called the vet and discussed what's going on. She thinks the most
likely culprit is the Glucosamine. He's off that for now while we
watch to see whether or not his stomach calms down.

Other than that, Uni seems to be a happy boy and in good spirits.
He's still loving and playful, which isn't bad for a cat that must be
having a significant amount of joint pain.

posted at 11:48 AM