Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Hell of Small Cats


Our cats, despite being spoiled rotten, are actually not terribly-behaved. They shred the couch and our bedframe, but have left the antique-y furnishings alone. They will not go up on the dining room table, save to explore new things left there. And they will eat just about everything, from raw meat to the most exquisite canned food. Their favorite is raw beef--God help us if Shadow ever tastes lobster.

There is, in fact, only one thing they do that we absolutely cannot abide: skittering through the apartment at 5 in the morning. Every. Morning.

We theorize that Noodle, who sleeps in the living room, gets hungry at around 5 (which is expected), and thus goes to the bedroom to whinge at his humans to feed him. Alas for him, the bedroom is deep girl-country, the domain of Shadow (under the bed, windowsill) and the Tweeb (top of the bed), so she chases him out, to the living room, which is his part of the apartment (having staked out some kind of presence on all of the sleeping surfaces there). Then he chases her back, and we have kitty-ping-pong, at five in the morning. Usually this is resolved when I close the living room door.

For the most part, the Tweeb is left out of this civil strife. She has staked her own claim on her humans, and barks commands for food, attention, and turning on the heater independently of the other two. However, this morning, she decided to be somewhat more imperious than usual, and took to jumping on the bed and yelling at us.

So I banished her from the bedroom.

Banished from the bedroom, barred from the other kitties, locked in purgatory between an empty kitchen and the empty bedroom--the cat who can make stones weep blood when she cries for me when I leave to get groceries. Hell can be many things, but for the Tweeb, I would imagine that this might just come close to hers.

Never fear, though: the Tweeb exacts her vengeance in many ways--some of them stinky. At the bottom of our pantry this morning, next to the potato sack, a tidy lump of Tweeb-turd.

6 comments:

  1. That comment captured her cry so well.....
    -sheila

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  2. Normally she yells and we jump and serve her every whim. At 5 am? Not so much :-/

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  3. how did such a scrappy cat turn into such a princess?!

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  4. Not sure, exactly. I think it happened when Karel learned that by giving her exactly what she wanted she'd shut up :-)

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  5. @ Stu: don't be fooled! that's how she got Karel!

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