This Cat is Freaking Evil!

I said at the end of the last blog that I would tell you what happened when Freaky Cat met a little white fluff ball named Brandi. But I thought maybe I should introduce Freaky Cat a bit more first.

Like I said, the kids had named her Arwen, but except for the pointy ears, she bore little resemblance to her elf-queen namesake. I called her ‘Freaky Cat’ and she reigned in our home for about three years. 

There are some things that cats do that annoy their owners, but these are just the nature of the beast. If you take a cat into your home, you need to be aware of normal cat behaviour, and if you don’t think you can put up with it – don’t get a cat!

Freaky Cat was a normal kitten. She and her siblings (Aragorn, Legolas, Sarafina, and Bob - the kids let me name the last one) would chase each other around the house, and sometimes they would knock things over. We let them get away with that, because kittens are cute. Besides, most of our breakable ornaments were broken by the first few cats we had. 

Normally, kittens settle down when they are about a year old. We get them ‘fixed’, and they become fat, lazy housecats who love to snuggle, and that is a good thing.

But when Freaky Cat was two, and we had long since given away the other kittens from that litter, she was still acting like a kitten. A kitten on steroids.She didn’t just scratch the furniture. She devoured it.

It seemed at the time that she had a personal vendetta on me. Other cats would get off the table as soon as I started to reach for the water spray bottle. Not Freaky Cat. She would just sit down on the table, scrunch up her face while being squirted, and then lick herself.

 I tried adding lemon juice to the water, and then vinegar. She would just scrunch her face a little more, and wait for me to get up. If it took me awhile to get up, she would sit on the table and lick her butt. Evil, pure evil, I say! As soon as I was up, she would run away.

Freaky Cat was also the most destructive cat we ever had. Her favourite game was to knock things off shelves. Especially breakable things. I think she enjoyed the satisfying crash when things hit the floor. When she wanted me to get up in the morning to feed her, she would jump up on the dresser, and just start batting at things while maintaining eye contact with me. 

We have one of those tall lamps with three glass shelves in the living room. I had a pretty little porcelain vase on the top shelf. I don’t know what I was thinking, silly me! She knocked it onto the floor. It made a lovely crashing sound on the laminate flooring. Later, I put a cute little wooden vase on the top shelf. She knocked it down. On the way to the floor, it hit the bottom glass shelf and shattered it.

She also stole socks. Seriously. My socks are in the top drawer. She would open the bottom drawer with her paws, and jump into it.  From there, she could open the top drawer, grab a pair of socks in her mouth, and run off to hide them. She would never perform this trick with a camera rolling.

Do you believe me now, that this cat was evil? She was just lucky that she was so cute, and that Hubby and I are such softies when it comes to cats.

Weird Cats

My family has had a lot of cats. A whole lot of cats. Around 40, I think.  We can figure out what year an event or change took place by which cat or cats we had at the time. The word ‘cat’ can function as a unit of time for us.  A typical conversation at our house might go something like: “Hey, when did we buy this couch?” “I don’t know - maybe three or four cats ago...”  

I don’t know if our home attracted weird cats, or if living in our home brought out the weirdness factor in our pets. (The kids are weird too, but that’s a whole other blog.)  We had one cat who would chew my hair to wake me up, and another who would ring the doorbell when she wanted to come in. Our cats had odd parenting habits, and always found strange places to sleep, like this kitten who fell asleep on a branch of the Christmas tree.

Our first cat, Squirt loved to play with mice. We were living in a house trailer on an acreage in the country at the time, so she had lots of little mousy playmates. Squirt was a generous pet. She would bring her new friends into our bed at night so that we could play, too. We gave her to a family with an upholstery shop. I'm sure she found lots of playmates there.

Here is a picture of one of Squirt’s friends. Sorry the picture is a bit blurry; I think I was jumping up and down because my hubby was holding a MOUSE!!!

We kept one of Squirt’s kittens, a beautiful fluffy haired beauty named Muffin. Kalene was born during this cat’s reign. Kalene loved that cat, visa versa – not so much.

Muffin apparently had a standing appointment to do something outside somewhere at 5:30 am. She would wake me up by chewing on my hair. Whatever it was that she needed to do outside every morning at 5:30 didn't take very long to accomplish. Five or ten minutes later she would be howling to get back in. 

Mittens had some very strange parenting tactics. When she was weaning a litter, she would get a wet dishcloth, bring it back to her kittens, drop it beside them, and leave. I have no idea what she expected the kittens to do with the dishcloth. After we gave away her kittens, she would run around the house with a dishcloth in her mouth, mewing pitifully. I felt so sad for her. We took her to the vet so she wouldn't have to go through that experience twice a year anymore. We still kept finding dishcloths under beds and couches for a while, though.              

Sasha would ring the doorbell when she wanted back in. The first time she did this, I was sure that the neighbour children must have been playing a trick on me. I answered the door, and saw only our cat sitting on the step. After a few more times, the scratches on the door frame confirmed that our doorbell ringer was definitely feline. Hubby moved the doorbell higher up, and the scratches in the door frame got deeper. 

You could always tell what TV show the kids were into when a litter of kittens was born. We kept one of Sasha’s kittens. The kids named her Arwen, but she was nothing like her elf-queen namesake. Neither ladylike nor genteel, she preferred rather to run like thunder around the house, leaving cat scratches on the furniture, railings and on whoever she chose to use as a feline launch pad. I called her Freaky Cat. One of Freaky Cat's favourite things to do was to jump up onto a shelf, look back at you, and then, while maintaining eye contact, she would reach out a paw and knock something breakable onto the floor. I was not overly fond of Freaky Cat.

In my next blog, I will tell you about what happened when Freaky Cat met a little white fluff ball named Brandi...

I Still Don't Like Dogs

Okay - I still don't like dogs. And this puppy is doing all the things that I said I don't like about dogs. She licks my face, she leaves puppy puddles and other puppy excretions all over the house. It's true what they say about puppy training: it's more about training the humans than the puppy. And those promises from the girls:  "Oh, Mom, we will take her out for walks everyday!" Imagine my surprise when they didn't! I have threatened that the puppy is going back if they don't take some responsibility. But then - just look at that face...

She overturns the trash cans, chews up used Kleenex (eeeewuuuuue!!!), and gets into everything within her reach. But then she looks at you with those big brown eyes, and rolls over for a tummy rub.

How can anyone resist this?