Category Archives: Cats

Pickpocket Cat

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ImageHe was such a baby when we got him, all of three weeks old, had to be bottle fed, had to have his little bottom wiped so he’d do his stuff.  Now he can’t even fit across the top of the box of tissues and that’s one of his favorite hang outs when I’m getting dressed in the morning.  Why?  So he can steal something!

“Morgen, that’s my make up brush!  No!”

“Morgen, give me that lip gloss tube!  No!”

Running through the house…”Morgen, that’s my contact lens case!  No!”

Running through the house…”Morgen, that’s my earpiece for the phone!  No!”

Running through the house…”Morgen, that’s my (fill in the blank because if he can grab it, he’s ran off with it).  No!”

He doesn’t limit his thieving habits to me, however.  He takes great delight in sneaking into Hannah’s room or bathroom and making off with something of hers just to hear her screech and chase him down.  Little bugger!  And he goes right back to do it again!

Lately, my purse has been his playground if left unzipped.  I followed a trail of items down the hall and then realized what the contents were and the hunt and chase began….”No, Morgen, NO!”  Everyday I have to make sure I’ve zipped all the pockets on my purse entirely closed because he’s learned he can reach a paw in and feel and pull until he snags something if it’s cracked open just a little.  I have a pickpocket cat.

He’s not quite a year old and truly is a rowdy teenager at this stage.  Wrestling the dog is one of his favorite past-times and stealing anything the dog has just makes it more fun!  Mac knows he has to inhale his treats or Morgen will, quick as lightening, snatch it with his hot little paws and pop it between his teeth and then the chase is on.  It’s not that he wants to eat it always, it’s just to steal it.

He normally has a running streak every evening and when he does this he makes a deep, guttural growly meowy sound totally unlike his usual squeaky high-pitched mew that any male cat would be ashamed to own.  He takes off at one end of the house and by the time he hits high speed he’s almost airborne and rockets toward the cat flap-door into the garage where he circles around bounding from shelf to box to whatever and then shoots back through the door, sometimes running smack into whichever cat, dog or person has come to see what the noise is about.  The sound of him hitting that door at full velocity might be similar to a vehicle crashing into the house.  I still jump up and go look.

Morgen has no boundaries when it comes to the other cats and has no problem inserting himself into any situation.  There may be several cats around me but when he wants attention he walks right over them to get it.

The personality of this not so little anymore cat is most endearing and, ahem, at times maddening.  But it’s that moment when he’s draped over my shoulder, head laying flat against me, little paws around me, eyes blinking his love, that melts me.

Sam called it when he first saw him, just days after Hannah brought him home.  “You lucky little kitten.  Your life is all set now.”

And he was right.

The Bandersnatch, Feline Version

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Bandersnatch

We’re blaming it on Johnny Depp because if he hadn’t been the Mad Hatter we wouldn’t have seen Alice in Wonderland at the theater.  And if we hadn’t fallen madly in love with the ferocious Bandersnatch who, beneath his ferociousness, really had a good, kind heart, Hannah wouldn’t have chosen that name for the liveliest of the four kittens we were “socializing”.  But we had and then she did so Bandersnatch is his name, like it or not.

Bandersnatch is one of four who came in a laundry basket complete with mama cat and three siblings.  He was actually adopted by a young lady at about 12 weeks old who came back the following day for a refund – her roommate, who wasn’t allergic to all cats, was allergic to this one.  Hannah danced in circles at the time and was happy to have her “special kitty” back.  We groaned. 

Bandersnatch is indeed a special kitty but that’s not quite what she meant at the time.  Sometimes we have these kinds of cats that are a bit odd, different, nuts, whatever, and we call them special.  Bander’s mama is also a special kitty.  Mona lives in my office, hisses crazily at the others, and wants only to be in her own little space all alone.  No other cat can resist the temptation of getting near enough to send her into a hissy fit.  Bander’s sister, Chiclet, is also a special kitty.  She’s as skitterish as anything, staying just out of reach of most humans; I think I’m the only one who can actually hold her.  And then there’s Bander who wants to be the one and only cat in the whole house and that’s just not a SMART goal in this household.   He chases the others, runs over the others, lies on top of the others, walks over the others, and generally acts as if he actually is the only cat in the house.  He’s only several times acknowledged the existence of Gizmo and Ninja and that’s when he was younger.  For the most part, he reigns in the world that he lives in his little kitty-cat mind.  And he’s somewhat spastic about that. 

Yesterday he leaped off the windowsill as I was passing by and almost took me out.  I spun into the cedar chest and landed partly on the bed, partly on the cedar chest, feet dangling on the floor.  When leaping up to his food area, a high area that Mac the dog can’t reach, he’s crashed headlong into another cat making its exit.  Racing down the hall he’s crashed into the wall and flipped upwards before sliding down sideways.  He missed the cat door opening to the garage and hit the door instead, shaking his head afterward and pawing the cat door open before easing slowly through.  I watched him take a flying leap onto the counter only to go flying off the other end 0.4 seconds later.  He’s a klutz.  

Every morning I give my cat menagerie a kitty tidbit treat and I can’t count the number of times I’ve put his right in front of him and he looks at me as if waiting for me to put one down.  I have to then point it out to him and he acts like “Oh, yeah, I saw that.”   I rolled the ball with the bell in it and all the other cats came running to chase it.  Bander looked up from his perch on the end of the couch as if saying “what did I miss?” and I threw another one and his eyes widened, ears pulled back, as if I’ve thrown a snarling little yippy dog on the floor.  One of the cats carried a live locust in from the garage and in the midst of the others rushing to get in on the fun, Bander jumped high up on the china cabinet and warily viewed the proceedings; this was truly his only action that made sense to me, a human, and I would have joined him if I could have figured out how to get on top of the china cabinet.        

Bandersnatch has a complete disregard for people parts.  He finds it just as convenient to walk across my face as my belly or legs.  And if I smack him away or holler, something that stops this action from any others who dare to walk on my face, he plops down and sits where he is, not in the least fazed by the hand that is pushing him away.  Not a pretty picture. 

On the other hand, he craves human attention.  Everyone who comes over meets him because he goes right into their lap and makes himself at home.  He purrs when he sees someone and he likes to talk now and then, but not always – he does let someone else get a word in edgewise.   

Because of his gorgeous gray-blue color he looks much like a Russian Blue and his coat is silky and very fine.  He’s a good groomer so he always looks sharp. 

I’d love for him to have his own home, his own I’m the only cat who lives here kind of home.  With a name like Bandersnatch you know he has to be a little out there, but his heart is good and kind in the end.  The eerie part is his eyes are the same green as the eyes of the Bandersnatch in the movie and I can never get the picture of the eyeball on the little mouse’s sword out of my mind or that when it was given back, the Bandersnatch just popped it back into place.  Insert creepy shiver here. 

He isn’t watching me type this but when I went into the living room I found him staring at the front door with that “is it a mouse or an ax murderer” wide-eyed but otherwise blank look.  He’d probably be afraid of the mouse and I’m hoping he’d walk across the face, claws out, of the ax murderer.   Good thing we have the dog.

From the Mouths of Cats

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This is Morgen.  Don’t let his innocuous kittenish looks fool you for a second, though.  He’s a piranha.  All teeth.  All the time.  And tonight those adorably sharp little pearly whites bit right smack through my electrical cord for my blood pressure monitor! 

Unlike Mac who has eaten everything except a book – wait, he did, take that back – only a couple of our cats have ever used their teeth to make us a bit crazy.

It seems to have started with Popcorn, a solid black medium haired cat who became ours when she reached her paws through the cage at the pet shop.  One Thanksgiving when I wasn’t feeling well I had brought home a sweet potato to eat later.  Being a Southern girl, a sweet potato on Thanksgiving is not just desired but required.  It was wrapped in foil and left on the stove so I could take a nap.   When I awoke feeling both better and hungry, I wanted that sweet potato more than anything and headed straight to the kitchen where I found an entirely empty piece of foil on the stove.  Hmm.  I looked on the counter, on the floor, in the stove, in the refrigerator, in the cabinets…moved to the living room and searched under the couch, behind the couch, under the tables, and just about anywhere I could think a sweet potato may have somehow gone if it rolled out of the foil and onto the floor.  Hmm.  Retracing the steps to the car, out the door, into the car, meticulously looking all through the car, back into the house.  Where on earth would a sweet potato have gone?  And then I saw her.  Popcorn had just a little bit of the red-maroon skin of the sweet potato stuck to the bottom of her chin.  I was equally incredulous and devastated and I wanted a sweet potato.  Back then the only thing open on Thanksgiving was Circle K or Seven-Eleven and neither carried sweet potatoes – my Southern pride was indeed wounded as I was not able to have a Thanksgiving sweet potato.   I still can’t figure out how she got it off the stove, ate the whole thing, and left the foil intact.  From that moment on, no sweet potato went unguarded in my house.

Tiger, a medium to long-haired tabby with a white chest and enough white splotches around his mouth to look like he’d had a drink of milk and it stuck, couldn’t resist sinking his teeth into a piece of paper.  It was the canines he  used and every paper in the house had Tiger’s seal of approval – two perfect holes in the corner of every page.  One bite and he moved on to the next one.  No need in our house for a paper punch.  Just wave the paper around and Tiger would get up from whatever he was doing, most likely napping, and eagerly put two cat tooth-sized punches into whatever you held out to him.  This was fine for most things but occasionally a word or number was right where he had bitten, a picture was the marked object, or it was something official that shouldn’t have cat bites on it.   When we open old boxes we occasionally find something with tell-tale marks and fondly remember Tiger’s seal of approval. 

Pumpkin was a homely, short-haired tabbyish calico with a cantaloupe fetish.  It didn’t matter where she was in the house, the moment we would cut into a cantaloupe she would appear and  launch herself onto the counter and begin the process of convincing us she wanted some.   If we took precut portions from the fridge, the moment we’d unseal the bowl she’d be there, pulling on our hands to direct the bite into her own mouth.   If she wasn’t quickly given a piece she would howl-meow insistently until we gave in, and we always gave in.  

Gizmo actually chewed, like a dog, the straps off my favorite pair of dress sandals.  I had no idea that a cat would chew on shoes until I went to put them on and the strap wasn’t attached but laying separately beside the shoe.  A closer look revealed the strap wasn’t broken but actually gnawed in several places until the strap has just fallen off.  I know it was Gizmo because a few weeks later when I kicked off another pair of strappy heels he dashed over and started working on the straps right in front of me!  I learned to quickly get my shoes in the closet and away from feline fangs.  Gizmo is also known for reducing straws still in the cups that you are using to useless sieves.

We’ve had cats steal and carry our things with their teeth such as hair bands and receipts and occasionally small clothing items.  Butter stole garments straight from the laundry basket and was particularly fond of anything with lace.   Pumpkin, the same one who loved cantaloupe, consistently stole baby caps and socks, making a “mrrrrm, mrrrrm” sound as she slunk away from us with her prize. 

Midnight’s fetish for roaches is covered in “Midnight” and Sassy’s mouse hunt is covered in “Pup’s Mouse Caper”. 

Morgen is another story.  From before he could balance well he opened his mouth to bite at whatever came at him.  We’d hold him up and he’d nip at our noses and because he was cute and cuddly and an itty-bitty kitty we oohed and aahed over his trick.  Not so cute as he got older, however, and those teeth got sharper so we had to stop it.  That’s how our comforter game was started so he would have something to chase and bite.  We’ve given him toys to pounce and bite but he still prefers whatever he bites into to be something that screeches and squeals, like his sister or one of the other cats, or human, like us.  He doesn’t bite hard but just enough for us to feel some teeth.     

I’ve never, ever had a cat chew through a cord before and I guess he’s pretty lucky the current was low and I guess I’m pretty lucky I’m not driving to the emergency animal clinic with a cat with the side of his face electrically burned because I know from past experience that a trip there is about the same as a mortgage payment. 

I think my favorite thing from a kitty’s mouth, however, is what we call a kitten kiss – an oh-so-gentle nip on the nose followed by a sandpapery lick and accompanied by much purring and eye contact with slow blinking.  Popcorn was the only cat who did that and when Blaise joined us, she started it also.  In fact, after Morgen and I have our chase the hand under the comforter game, Blaise pops into bed and gives me a goodnight kiss before settling in on my pillow.  And throughout the night if she thinks of it, she reminds me how grateful she is to have a home here and that she really, truly loves me.  And when she does that too much and awakens him, Morgen plants his teeth in her tail. 

Can’t imagine a world without kitties…especially mine.