Feline Assistance Goes Awry

[pameladean]

It is seldom in this house that anything at all is done without feline assistance.  This has been particularly true since we have had temporary cats in the formerly cat-free zone; these guys, who are wonderful cats, belong to friends who got divorced and lost their house.  Grout, one of the temporaries, helped me sort my mail yesterday, and Spackle would very, very much like to be hired to keep the tablecloth from coming off the dining-room table.  She has been persuaded to guard David's duffle bag of lighting equipment instead.  Mora has not yet seen a task worthy of her, but I am sure the time will come.  Ninja and Nuit downstairs and Saffron upstairs help make beds.  Cassie watches everybody eat and wants to clean plates.  She also helps pack suitcases, and she helps me cook by trying to clean up anything that I drop on the floor and watching the whole process narrowly.  Naomi takes on a purely supervisory role and makes a lot of suggestions.  Arwen, like Mora, has not really found many tasks that are worthy of her talents, but she will often help hold a book or magazine open or make a person rest by holding said person firmly in place.  She's also a good masseuse, having large paws and a dedicated stomping routine.

This afternoon I was sorting laundry on top of the dryer.  There were upstairs towels and downstairs towels.  Nuit leapt upon the dryer and flung herself onto the first towel that I put in the downstairs pile.  I accordingly put the other downstairs stuff on the open door of the dryer.  For some time she showed no interest in the upstairs pile, and I became careless, piling the washcloths high.  Suddenly she tried to head-butt the washcloths.  I put my hand out to stop her, and she banged her head into it with considerable force.  The towel she was sitting on slid off the dryer; it vanished between dryer and wastebasket, and Nuit landed plumb in the wastebasket, compressing several weeks' worth of dryer lint.  She levitated out again before I could even draw breath to laugh, and vanished into the back of the basement.  I put the towel back into the laundry monster, removed the rest of the towels to their destined storage places, and went to find Nuit.  She was washing her face on the edge of the uninstalled Jacuzzi.  Fortunately she didn't bear me any ill will.  I suspect that she thought she had offended the washcloths and they had shoved her off the dryer.

Ninja, who witnessed the entire thing, was more upset about it than she was and insisted on helping to wash her.

Pamela

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Poor Nuit-girl.

Arwen will occasionally, if Naomi and the kittens are busy, consent to supervise the peeing of particularly feckless visitor monkeys who might otherwise come to a tragic end if left to pee unsupervised. It is possibly beneath her talents, but she has been known to pitch in anyway if the need is particularly great. Apparently.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Barry always used to guide guests to the bathroom back in England, and sit with them while they used the facilities. I suspected him of pointing out where to find the toilet paper, where the soap. (I once used the bathroom in a very posh restaurant in London, and there was a guy stationed in there whose sole apparent task was to point to the paper towels, and accept tips in appreciation of this service. Bloody awful job, and I expect everyone tipped as generously as I did. So he probably went home loaded every night, but it was still a bloody awful job, watching men pee and then pointing.)

Baz doesn't do it here - but then, the bathroom here is not long and triangular and up two flights of stairs. His guidance is not so much needed hereabouts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have never seen the bathroom attendant job level of posh combined with the paper towel level of not-posh. Golly.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It was incredibly cringe-worthy in all its aspects. One of those memories I still flinch from. And still have no idea why they would do that, why it would seem like a good or a useful idea to make a man stand there throughout service. Tipped or otherwise. (Also, he was a black man where the vast majority of the clientele was white, and that was just ... layers upon layers, yeah.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

(So he's enjoying a well-earned retirement, snoring on the clean laundry.)

[pameladean]

Excellent Baz. Possibly he would have enjoyed the bathroom attendant's job more than any human, though the tips would have needed to be different.

P.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. "Gimme an anchovy, or I shred that hand-towel" - I can see Baz doing that, oh yes.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

That sounds great! I would totally bring anchovies to that bathroom.

[pameladean]

What a good Arwen! She has never supervised me in that way, perhaps regarding it as the upstairs cats' perogative.

P.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Mystery and Mayhem are also first-class peeing supervisors. In fact, Mystery has really taken to heart the notion that bathrooms are the most dangerous rooms in the house, and so requires all bathroom activities to be closely supervised. If this means getting damp because one must sit on the edge of the bath to properly supervise monkeys showering, then that is merely the cost of duty (and monkeys can be trained to pat cats dry, one finds). But woe betide the monkey who attempts to shave un-supervised. There will be howling until the door is opened.

Actually, when I had a broken leg, Mystery supervised my bathroom activities for my own safety so closely that I nearly broke my other leg at one point. Which just goes to show how right she was about the danger inherent in bathrooms.

Catherine

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Razors are sharp; cats never go near them. This is only good sense.

[pameladean]

Our current lot are wary of bathrooms but not overwrought about them. Mystery probably felt the broken leg required extra caution. My first cat used to get absolutely hysterical if you shut him out of the bathroom. If you let him in, he would expostulate, but at least he wouldn't yowl. He was a Siamese cat, so the difference was significant, though in either case he was louder than later cats.

He was somewhat alarmed by use of the toilet (WHERE IS YOUR LITTER?) but really hated people to shower (YOU ARE GETTING WET WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?).

P.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Your first cat sounds a lot like our Mystery! We think she might be part Siamese, too, because she is positively operatic in her wailing when she needs to make a point - you can hear her from half a block away if she is out the front yelling at you. And she is very chatty. But she may have just learned that from me...

[pameladean]

With regard to the chattiness, yes, it's hard to tell which way things go. I talk to all of my cats, and they do talk back. When we all moved in together, I started talking to all the new cats and they talked back too. Saffron actually lectures me at length, however, so I suspect that her foster people's assertion that she is part Oriental shorthair is probably true.

Operatic yowling is certainly a Siamese trait, and perhaps harder to teach by example, too!

P.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

... then again, I'm a singer, and currently studying operatic repertoire!

Mind you, I think Mystery's operatic tendencies were there from day one. Both cats tell us off at length when we have transgressed. My favourite occasion was when we were dropped off around the corner from our house after an absence of several hours, and Mystery came tearing up from the middle-distance, miaowing all the way, hopped up onto a fence post, and started telling Andrew, in particular, all about his transgressions (Andrew is *her* human - I am a poor second-best.). As we walked around the corner to our house, she would hop down from each post, run ahead of us, hop up onto the next one, and berate us again - all the way home. It was very cute.

I must say, we all talked to the cat when I was growing up, and while she was definitely sociable, she wasn't as chatty as these two.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Ah, feline domestic help. Almost as useful as dog-powered first cycle dish cleaning, and perhaps the equal of foot-warmers in the 100 plus degree heat.

[pameladean]

*snort* Yes, we too get foot warmers in hot weather, but they are probably smaller.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I dunno! These dogs are all ten pounds or under, and there are some cats around here that outsize them, heh!

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I can just see it! Thanks for the laugh.

[sovay]

Suddenly she tried to head-butt the washcloths.

They were getting to be a threat!

[pameladean]

Yes -- too high a pile, what was I thinking?

P.

[rolypolypony.livejournal.com]

Lydia's main responsibility is to ensure there are no spies lurking between the shower curtain and shower curtain liner - but only between the hours of 8pm and 9pm. After that, you are on your own and she wishes you luck.

[pameladean]

Possibly she knows their commuting hours.

P.

[rolypolypony.livejournal.com]

Ah, I didn't think of that! That does sound plausible.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

You are fortunate to have such talented and dedicated cats.

She was washing her face on the edge of the uninstalled Jacuzzi. "I meant to do that."

[pameladean]

Hee; yes, exactly, it was all her idea.

P.

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

Helpful cats are helpful.

I am glad Nuit was able to salvage her dignity. Cats always are able, it seems.

[pameladean]

Yes, they have their ways. Nuit is particularly insouciant for such a young cat.

P.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I lost count. How many feline helpers are there in your household, anyway? It sound like you're living in a Booth cartoon.

[pameladean]

We have six cats and there are three temporaries. This is not as dire as it might be -- we live in a duplex and there are four people.

P.

[naomikritzer]

I'm curious, do you ever get mice moving in?

We peaked at four cats and STILL got mice. It requires a serious dumb mouse to move into a house with four resident felines (or one carrying toxoplasmosis, which mind-controls the rodents to seek out cats so it can continue its life-cycle -- more fool it, though, because my cats would treat the mouse as a toy and play with it to death, then not eat it).

[pameladean]

We have had mice when the feline population was nearly this high -- minus the extra guest cats, that is. Most of the mice didn't last long. Lydy, I believe, was once gifted with a different dead mouse four days in a row, delivered and probably killed by Arwen. My brother was staying with us during one of these incursions, and Arwen kindly included him by dropping a dead mouse on his foot when he was the only person awake to receive it.

The clever mice set up housekeeping in the cat-free zone and feasted on a bag of cat food left there to prevent cats from opening it before its time. They had chewed a tiny hole in one bottom corner, so it took us quite a while to notice.

We also had an intra-rodent conspiracy in which a squirrel chewed a hole in the accordion of my office air conditioner but gave up being able to make a large enough one for itself. A mouse, however, got in. What it did was to bring sunflower seeds from the bird feeder into the house and eat them in the pot of a defunct plant that I had put somewhat above my eye level until I could get around to composting it. It took me a very long time to figure out where the mouse was coming from. The mouse never went further into the house than my office, so while cats were intrigued, they couldn't catch it. The pattern of droppings I cleaned up suggested that it never got more than about five feet from its escape hole.

P.

[thinkum]

My goodness, that's a lot of feline help! (Now you just need them to help empty the litter box.) :-)

[pameladean]

They are happy to do that; it's the putting things in bags and taking them out to the trash that they are a little bit hazy on.

P.

[kore]

TOO CUTE

(this is http://kore.dreamwidth.org/, I just got tired of only being able to post anon comments on LJ)

[kore]

(What the heck, LJ, I am not spam) Trying again -- this is kore from dreamwidth, I just got tired of leaving anon comments on LJ.

[pameladean]

It is so nice to see you! I need to do something so that I don't forget to read my DW page. Sometimes the beginning is all people who are still on LJ and I sort of wander off, but I tracked down your journal and caught up. I hope your sinuses are improving.

P.

[kore]

Aww, I am feeling much better! Thank you! ....now I'm going to have the opposite problem of yours, remembering to read my new LJ feed, heh. I think I'll bookmark the login page....