The other day while I was shopping I was struck with a sudden idea: why don’t I buy a toy for the pretty cats?
(I’m convinced this is caused by feline mind-rays. There is no other explanation. The impulse strikes randomly and has nothing to do with what they’ve been up to lately. It’s never “they haven’t broken any good china recently” or “they haven’t played slamlom with my prized glass floats” .)
Like many other bad ideas, this one was fairly irresistible, and once it presented itself, I had to follow through. Being cheap I bought — for $7.50 a little foldable tent. I thought “Oh, look, they can cuddle in it or something.”
This shows you how dellusional I can be. Of course, that is NOT how things worked. Once I brought the tent into the house and set it down next to my desk (“They can keep me company while I write,” I thought. HONESTLY.) I realized I had not in fact bought a cat toy. Oh no. What I had bought and brought into my house was the world’s smallest and most fiercely independent country.
This would be okay, if D’Artagnan’s possession of the crinkly red and yellow vynil didn’t inflame envy in the hearts of his neighbors. Unfortunately it does and therefore, the mighty army of the Miranda attacks:
(Yep, best entertainment I EVER bought for under ten dollars.)
According To Hoyt 
add one of the neighborhood dogs and you’ll get an enactment of…..WWIII :)
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Your photos are wonderful! Great cat action-blogging!
Alas, I have only one cat; however, sometimes when we’re playing with the string, he runs over his tent, flattening it…
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Coff…
I don’t mean to sound disparaging…
Wait, yes I do. (Yes, I’m pulling your leg, lest you get offended.)
This reminds me of when Dan and I drove by a family the other day. Young parents with toddler. And Dan said “Look, it’s so cute. They have one kid and they think they’re parents. They have no clue.”
People with one cat aren’t REALLY cat owners (And the fact I feel guilty typing owners because it doesn’t begin to describe my relationship with the bewiskered ones, tells you a lot.) They’re people who live with a cat and are very cute, but…
Look, you don’t know the full impact of life with cats till you have seven of them in a 1200 sq foot house. (We were young and stupid. Okay, very stupid. And two of the cats belonged to a friend renting our spare room) PARTICULARLY when one of them is Randy (the evil twin of the Pixel (of Sainted Memory) and Randy pair. Randy was to the other cats what Mussolini was to Italy. Like Miranda he ruled by terror. Unlike Miranda he was not just healthilly selfish. No. He was such pure unadulterated eeevile that he’d EXERT himself in order to make us uncomfortable.
I’ll never forget the morning I woke up and all my plants had been overturned; everything that was atop a flat surface had been pushed to the ground; with great effort — and it would have taken COOPERATION between cats — someone had pushed a bookcase so it had fallen against the fireplace; all chair cushions had been torn to shreds AND the dirt and plant roots were scattered AND pissed on.
Our crime? We’d had a party the night before and locked the cats away for the duration.
So, you see… having one cat is fun and cute. Having multiples is like striking a deal with an hostile tribe. It can be mutually beneficial, but you have to toe the line.
Sarah
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Re: Coff…
funnily enough I am convinced our cats suffer from Stockholm syndrome. Now they are normally the most spoiled and indulged animals since the ancient egyptians had Bastet… but every now and again disaster strikes and we have to do something they consider “nasty” – like take them for their rabies shots or when Robin had her little contremps with the olive oil bottle and had to be bathed. And suddenly, suddenly, suddenly… five minutes later when normalacy is restored… we’re not staff any more. We’re beloved kindly souls who need constant attention (try typing with that). It wears off, quite fast, but Bobbin cat is still being positively soppy and I adore you even if I gave your arms terminal punctures for daring to WET me. (I looked like a drug addict, with holes and scratches).
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You cannot resist the feline control. I — for one — welcome our Feline Overlords…and open the cabinet door for their catnip upon demand.
The other day I was opening a bottle of carbonated beverage, and a cat happened to be next to me. She didn’t care for the sound of the hiss..and glared at the bottle. I offered it to her for a sniff, and she cared even less for the smell/feel of the bubbles hitting her nose, so she glared some more at me and departed.
I love moments like that. You had to be there to appreciate the look on her body. ;-)
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One thing not captured by this whole sequence is that Miranda is about half the size and less half the weight of D’Artagnan. But she rules by sheer terror and intimidation. And her punch, btw, can make even me recoil from it. She has the most dangerous left hook in the cat kingdom. POW. You feel like you’ve been kicked by a mule.
I MUST though capture a D’Artagnan Great Pretender sequence. He has this thing where he’ll take advantage of one of us leaving the dining room table — usually me to get something out of the oven, or Eric to get water — and he will sit on our stool and pretend to be us. It’s QUITE clear from his expression he thinks he has us rolled. And when the impersonated human comes back and says “D’Artagnan, move!” he will give the other humans this look of long suffering patience. “What is the cat talking about, pray tell. Surely it knows I’m the human, right?” At the height of madness, my family starts addressing the D. as the person he’s replacing. Dan will say, “Say, Sarah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this hair all over your body problem. It’s not so much that I mind, but could you at least dye it? it’s all white save for these little patches.” And Eric will say “Mom, I need a check for art class, or whatever.” And D’Artagnan’s expression gets smugger and smugger. “That’s right. I fool them all. Mwaaaaaaaaah. The blobs on two legs have no protection against me!”
Sarah
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Oh, aye — the size of the cat does not correlate in any way to their personality. The strongest-willed cat in the house now is half the size of the largest cats. At least. She rules by intimidation too. Luckily for Kedgie and Brady, they do not share space with the troll-queen Cinder.
It’s bad enough when Buzz, who has been up to 25 pounds, clearly thinks of her as “bigger” than he is. He could easily squash her, and never even thinks of raising a paw to her.
Only her sister will give her heck. As sisters do.
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this can backfire. Secure in the knowledge that no cat would like this… we now have Batman who will kill for Salami. Duchess who eats millionaire’s shortbread, and Legolas who will get dangerous if not offered a little of the condensed milk James considers a treat.
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Well, you can forgive the salami — who wouldn’t like salami? Certainly all good carnivores in their right mind love salami.
True story: my cat Sweetie, who was a Maine Coon of particularly large tail, had the run of the land around the house (wooded, no neighbors, dead-end road, fairly safe territory). Occasionally she would stay out all night and show up hungry in the am, so no big worries when she stayed out all night — but then she didn’t return in the am. We started wondering. No Sweetie. Hours go by. My uncle was visiting us and he went for a hike with my brother, up the hill behind the house. A little while later they came running back, saying they’d heard a cat crying and had found her up a tree. We just needed a ladder and we could get her down.
She was on the lowest branches of this tree, and that was a good forty feet up in the air. My father flatly refused to let anyone go up the ladder until my mother got home, as he wanted to make sure it was safe to climb — he’d have to brace the ladder while she climbed it.
We waited all day. Finally, after a long day at work in the lab, and a horrible drive home in the summer heat with no air conditioning in her car, Mom gets home. We greet her with glad cries of joy, and then to her dismay, try to get her to climb a ladder forty feet into the tree.
She put her foot down. She needed a shower first. Finally, showered, rested and ready to sacrifice her life for the cat, she climbed the ladder. Now Sweetie was a big fan of salami, to the point of stealing it out of my sandwiches while I ate, so we sent Mom aloft with a slice of salami. She gets up there, greets the cat, offers the salami. Sweetie’s been up there a long time now, so she gratefully takes the salami and eats it. Then she starts cleaning herself. At this point, Mom has had enough. She grabs Sweetie by the scruff of the neck and hauls her down from the branch. Oddly enough, Sweetie just hung on for the ride down and purred the whole way.
I haven’t had any other cats who would steal any salami from my sandwiches, but they also haven’t been given the chance to climb any forty-foot-plus trees, either. ;-)
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TOFU
Salami I understand, really.
What I don’t get was Zebbie and tofu. He was our cat when we were very young and broke and ate a lot of it. At one point, in a fit of “We’ll save money” I decided to make my own tofu (stupid, really.) I’d just made about a pound and a half of it when the phone rang. In those days — prehistory — all phones were corded and ours was in bedroom. (It was a tiny house.) So I went to answer. It was a friend discussing plans for a meeting so it took about half an hour.
When I came back my tofu was gone and Zebbie was cleaning himself. His tummy was clearly full and if he’d been a cartoon cat, he’d have been burping gently.
So — I called our vet. Hysterical. “Dr. Bissel, Dr. Bissel, what does tofu do to cats? What do you do when your cat has eaten a pound and a half of it?”
“You shouldn’t make your cat eat tofu. It’s not good for him and–”
“I didn’t make him. He STOLE it.”
Silence for a while. Then “I see. Your cat STOLE tofu?”
When she was done rolling on the floor laughing, she told me it wouldn’t hurt him, but it was the weirdest thing she’d ever heard.
We went on to find out Zebbie also liked tomatoes and watermelon. That was one psychotic cat. Lovely but psycho.
Sarah
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Re: TOFU
Your Zebbie would have gotten along just fine with my Rusty-cat. He ate bok choy, bean sprouts, and other fine vegetables. He would have eaten tofu if he’d ever gotten near it. I could never eat melon sitting down. Ditto for dried peaches. I had to be very careful when unloading the groceries, or I’d find him halfway into the bags.
Sweetie drank tea, and trained my father to give her tea after I’d left for college. This became extended to yogurt, as she liked the curdled milk that happened when she didn’t finish her tea right away.
But a pound and a half of tofu is a great story. Zebbie must have been the most satisfied cat in the universe that day. Stripey was once that satisfied, after breaking into the bag of catnip on the countertop, and being stoned for about 24 hours. :-D
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