guh, guh, guh, guh, guh, HUYAAACK!
The sound of a cat getting ready to hurl its breakfast on my duvet. I bolt straight up in bed, the sudden movement terrifies the gagging cat, it departs the bed, and leaves the resulting pukage on the hall carpet.
It's Minuit, our oldest and fattest cat. She eats too fast. She maows down on her kibble like its the last food she'll ever see and then regurgitates it, usually in a place where you'll be stepping with a bare foot. For a while there, we had a golf ball we kept in her food dish, you know, to slow her eating down, but we recently had a toddler in the house who started playing with it and it disappeared. The golf ball, not the toddler. For sure I'd know if there was a lost toddler in the house. They're noisy, the little boogers. And at the very least, the toddler's mother probably would have come looking for it.
Food is a motivator for all three of our beasts. Every morning at 6:25 a.m. they meow and dance all over you until you get up to feed them. The youngest, Steve & Lola, GALLOP down the hall in some sort of Cirque du Soleil choreographed gymnastics and hurl themselves down the back stairs - trying to break the sound barrier. Minuit stumps her way down the hall and ba-doomps down the stairs (she can't move too fast or she'll just become a black, furry, stunt-cat ball). The three then mew and yowl as if they will most certainly die before you manage to fill their food bowls.
At dinner time they get more creative. Steve will start pushing shit off my desk to get my attention: pencils, cd cases, carefully stacked piles of paper. Lola usually stands on the back of David's chair and shoves at him with her cat elbows. Minuit is an Achilles Tendon nipper.
When they are NOT begging for food, they are perfectly lovely beasts. They are the beasts who warm the very cockles of my heart. They are the beasts who purr loudly as they snuggle down under the blankets, the beasts who lovingly head butt you before palpating your lap and settling in for a cat nap in front of the fire. I'm an animal person in general. A cat person in particular. Sometimes to the detriment of my health.
see http://whatthepoohdude.blogspot.ca/2012/07/dont-cuddle-feral-kittens.html
Yesterday we went to Rissa's friend's farm and I was informed that there were 12 kittens in the barn. Her friend's dad said we could take home as many kittens as we could carry!!! I looked at David with ecstatic, pleading baby blues, my eyelashes fluttering. Telepathically I promised him ANYTHING he wanted.
"No way. Nuh-unh. No more cats. You will just have to come here and play with them in the barn."
I have no problem with that.
*Waking to a toddler with the barking seal cough of croup IS worse. I know this because the last time I heard it was almost a decade ago and just the memory of it throws me right back to driving to the hospital in the dead of winter trying to keep it together so that my 2 year-old didn't see her mother panic.
I've never understood how cats got their reputation for being quiet and stealthy creatures; okay, maybe I understand the stealthy part. However, we too have had stomping kitties; others just walk heavily.
ReplyDeleteAnd when Erik, a handsome red-head, decides he wants his breakfast, or at least some attention, he starts pulling stuff off the headboard shelf of my bed. I have had to resort to very inventive defensive placement of items, and after one or two incidents, I learned that was not a good place to keep my nighttime glass of water.
Your post brings to mind an old Sylvia cartoon, where, in her endless pursuit of that one good idea that will make her rich, she thinks the alarm clock that would get even the most determined sleeper up features, you guessed it, the sound of two cats throwing up.
Love reading about your domestic adventures!
Lea
So do you sleep with headgear on, or it is mostly soft stuff on the headboard shelf now? I think someone should totally market the vomiting cat alarm!
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