Linus is Awesome

Did you ever notice how Linus usually has the political ideas?  How old is this kid supposed to be?  Six or seven?  He’s wonderful.

Bad Cat

I have a confession to make.  One of my cats is less than perfect.  “But isn’t that the point of cats?” you ask, “that they all have their own personalities?  Didn’t you just say that?”  Why yes, yes I did.  But the cutest 9 lbs. of calico I’ve ever seen has a massive problem: she pees on things.  Important things, like the bed.  Or my clothes.  Or Seth’s clothes.  Or Seth’s blankets.  Or Seth’s anything, really — she’s not picky.  As long as it gets our attention long enough for us to clean the litterbox, she’ll pee on it.

The thing is, she only pees on stuff when the litterbox is unacceptably dirty — and it doesn’t take much to make the box too dirty.  My sister bought us one of those automatic litterboxes, and it was great.  We found the solution to the peeing problem!  Until the box broke.  The sensor stopped sensing when a cat used the litterbox, so we’d have to manually flip the switch.  But by the time we remembered to make the box do its magic, the box would be so full (read: 2 days’ worth) of poop that we’d have to scoop it anyway or risk breaking the thing.  So we just fell back onto Plan B: scooping the litterbox all the time.

How exactly does one end up with a renegade cat full of urine?  The answer: The Humane Society.  We adopted Sadie almost three years ago because I foolishly fell in love with her on a friend’s birthday trip to the local shelter.  We planned on getting our original cat, Kairi, a friend eventually, so we just adopted Sadie.  “Oh, her previous owner’s son had allergies,” the people at the shelter told us.  Allergies.  Suuure.

Unfortunately, Sadie has her claws so deep into me that I can’t bear to think about giving her up, even when she does pee on things.  But I almost made an exception last night.

I had a migraine.  It wasn’t bad, as far as migraines go, but it was getting there.  Sadie had been annoying all day — she follows me, you know.  Meowing.  Around the house.  And she was doing it last night.  And if there’s anything that bothers me when I have a migraine, it’s high-pitched and repetitive noises.  I don’t mean “bothers” in the general sense, like Winnie the Pooh.  I mean “bothers” in the “if you do that again I swear I will bash your head into a wall” sense.  So I was annoyed.

I thought I knew the reason for Sadie’s meows, and picked up the laser pointer to play with her for a few minutes before I tried to sleep the migraine away.  Instead of hopping onto the bed like usual, Sadie started pawing at the blanket.  That’s when I discovered that the litter box just wasn’t clean enough.

If you’re curious, a migraineur with a cat pee problem on the night of a migraine goes berserk.  I throw things.  Yell obscenities.  Seriously contemplate hiring a hit-man for my cat.  Thankfully, I’m over it now.  Is there even a moral to this story?  I guess it would be to keep the litterbox clean.

Wacky Wedding, Part 3

I’m a castle fan.  Well, what bride isn’t?  Most of the brides I’ve talked to have thought at least a little about getting married in a castle.  Maybe it’s just my group of friends.  Maybe not, but Seth and I found a castle that’s in our price range that does weddings.  The pictures on the website make the castle look nice — or at least, suitable for a wedding of our size.  Last night, we went to look at it.

We had an appointment for 7:00 p.m. and we arrived at 6:53.  Pretty good timing, eh? As we pulled into the parking lot, we noticed a whole bunch of odd-looking outbuildings in the woods by the castle.  Some looked like they belonged to the castle — made out of stone and all.  Some looked they were built without taking aesthetics into consideration.  One almost touched the back corner of the castle.

We approached the castle cautiously because it looked like some people were in there practicing for something.  They all stared at us as we walked in.  “We’re looking for Tammy?” Seth said (name changed to protect the innocent-ish).  They directed us to the caretaker’s house around back.

“Around back” took us to the building almost touching the castle.  If two men stood holding hands, they could stretch out and one could touch the wall of the castle, with the other touching the wall of the house.  It was gray and modern looking, and there was light on in the far back.  I knocked.  We waited.  I rang the doorbell.  We waited some more.  Seth knocked louder.  No one came to the door.

“Well, let’s just look around the grounds a minute,” I suggested, and we headed for the deck surrounding the castle.  On the opposite side of the castle, we looked across a vast expanse of green lawn.  There were a few picnic tables and, oddly enough, a large bronze statue of a buck in the middle of the field.  It was pretty nice, until we turned the corner and the strange outbuildings came into view.  They don’t show those on the website, I noticed.

“One more time?” Seth and I asked each other, and set off to knock on the caretaker’s door again.  As we approached, the light by the door clicked on.  Then someone came out.  She looked like she had just woken up, or maybe just got out of the shower.  I could see Seth gearing up to introduce himself and ask if she was the lady he had spoken to on the phone.  If you’ve seen it enough times, you know that Seth, or any person really, has a way of introducing himself.  It was coming, and I could see it.  The caretaker, unfortunately, couldn’t.

“Wanna see inside?” She said, and walked right into the back door of the castle without a word of welcome or anything.  Um… okay.

We followed her in.  The website pictures make the inside of the castle look bigger than it really is, but Seth and I agreed that we could probably fit everything in.  Tammy didn’t say much, just “We can fit up to 100 on the first floor, and more on the balcony above.  They way it’s set up now is kind of spread out.”

I asked to see the upstairs, and Tammy took us up the back way.  The walls were pale mauve.  “Mauvelous,” I told Seth, and laughed hysterically.  Seth didn’t think it was funny.  Tammy didn’t hear, mainly because as soon as we were upstairs, she leaned over the balcony railing and started talking to someone downstairs.  In fact, she talked so long that Seth and I were able to figure out that the castle was not the place for us, what with the mauve walls, the cheap flooring, and poor quality of the help.  We were debating if Tammy would notice if we just walked out when I had enough and walked over to Tammy and said, “sorry to interrupt, but I think we’re all set.”

“Yeah, sorry about the mess,” she said, and resumed talking immediately.  We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Follow my progress as I chronicle the weird things that happen around this wedding with the Wacky Wedding series: part 1, part 2

Animal Wonder

Sometimes I wonder about animals.  We have two cats, and there are days where I just stop and watch Sadie.  It amazes me that her brain is the size of a lime, and yet she’s complex and emotional and has a personality all her own.

I used to work at an animal shelter in the feline department.  Every day, I cleaned up after and socialized anywhere from 70 to 120 cats.  I saw them in all stages of life, from the kittens who were born while I was in the room to the cat who was so old that his owner was going to put him down but then he escaped and came to us, and the owner who claimed him changed his mind about euthanizing him.  I used to hand wash kittens covered in fleas and ticks because they were too young to be sprayed with Frontline (if you ever have to do this, make sure to pull the ticks out from between their toes.  It’s easy to miss those).  It’s hard not to care about a creature whose life depends on you, like a sopping wet 5 week old kitten with no mother.

My boss’s cat is dying, and my boss and I talk about it more than we should.  I had hoped to end this post with some sort of story about animals in our families and cat intelligence and love, but I can’t bring myself to do it.  Once I start talking about cats in animal shelters, I can’t stop:

There was this cat named Libby at my old animal shelter.  She was about 4 years old, and long-haired, and black and white.  I have to say, she kept her coat in perfect shape; she was so beautiful and silky-looking that you couldn’t not try to pet her.  Unfortunately, Libby hated being indoors.  She was grumpy all the time, and she would take a swipe at you if your hand came too close.  Since she showed such negative behavior, she was never let out of her cage into the cat social rooms where she could at least have some room to run around.  She was at the shelter for ten months, stuck in her little cage (for comparison, most of the other cats were adopted out by their third month in the shelter).

One day, one of the other cat workers decided that Libby might like to spend some time outdoors in the “cat house,” a donated wooden shed with big screened-in windows and lots of perches.  Libby was ecstatic about it.  The very first day she was out there, she twined around our legs and let us pet her.  As time went on, it was like she was another cat when she was outside.  She would chatter at the birds and sleep in the sun, and sometimes even let us hold her.  We graduated Libby to the cat social room from her small cage, and  we thought it was the beginning of the end for Libby; she would probably be adopted soon.

It turns out, it was the beginning of the end, but in a different way.  Libby became listless and started throwing up after every meal.  We moved her to a cage in the vet’s office, much to her chagrin, where we found out she had liver failure.  There was no hope for Libby.  One quiet Sunday, we euthanized her.

If you’re going to take a moral from this story, don’t let it be, “I’m glad I didn’t adopt that cat because she would’ve just died anyway.”  Humor me a little, and think about going to a shelter and saying to the workers, “which of these cats is least likely to be adopted?  I’ll take that one.”  Chances are, they have a cat that’s super shy, or one overlooked for so long by everyone else that the shelter people can’t remember when the cat came in, or an old cat whose human died and the cat never lived with anyone else.  These are the cats that no one adopts, and yet when you get them home and live with them, they are loving and happy like any other cat.  Why don’t more people know this?  These are the things I wonder about animals.

Biggest DUH ever

Poll shows gap between blacks and whites over racial discrimination.  Uh, hello?  Where have you been, AP?  I guess it’s not their fault — they just report on stuff.