International Bad Cat Day

[pameladean]

This morning I was sitting peacefully at my desk with a cup of tea that mercifully does not figure further in this anecdote, and an old Portmeirion plate with a faded image of a cactus on it that was given us by David's mother when she went into assisted living. On the plate was half a toasted bagel with peanut butter and the other half of the same bagel with chevre spread on it.

Enter Cassie, whiskers aquiver, trills spilling out of her. She is not interested in peanut butter, but goat cheese rivets her. I gave up eating and went to put my plate up on the four-drawer filing cabinet. Cats can get up there, but I have warning when they are going to try, and Cass can't really jump that high. Typically, if I put food up there, she understands that it is no longer available to her, and leaves. Unfortunately, there were a plate and a soup bowl from the night before still on the cabinet. I decided to take these dishes to the kitchen, and for some reason probably to do, now that I think of it, with not yet having drunk any of the tea that I said did not figure further in this anecdote, I balanced my bagel plate atop this short pile of dishes because I didn't want to leave it unattended in the office. I have two hands and could have just carried the bagel plate separately, but I did not.

Cassie, seeing that the goat cheese was about to leave her reach, plunged forward and planted her nose and both paws on the bagel plate, which flipped over and landed on the carpet with the other plate and the bowl on top of it. The cactus plate broke in two and the peanut butter and goat cheese mingled with the carpet. Raphael, hearing my cries, came and inquired, "Did Cassie do something?"

I asked that Cassie be removed. Her adoption page said that there wasn't a mean bone in her body, and this is true, but she had a bad kittenhood and does not like being restrained, so she kicked out and scratched Raphael's arm. Raphael put her in my bedroom and shut the door, then went to get a bandaid out of the linen cupboard for the cat wound. Saffron promptly jumped into the linen cupboard and had to be chastised.

"Is it International Bad Cat Day or something?" I asked.

"Why, yes," said Raphael, unwrapping the bandage, "December 5 is, by a huge coincidence, International Bad Cat Day. Amazingly, December 6th is also International Bad Cat Day."

"And December 4th?" I said suspiciously. "What about that?"

"Let me just check -- yes. Also International Bad Cat Day."

Just so you know.

Pamela

Comments

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness. I am so sorry to hear about the plate, the carpet, and the food.

It appears that your kitties were celebrating the day(s) in earnest.

[pameladean]

Aw, thanks. I am sad about the plate, which will be difficult if not impossible to replace. It's not a great design, really, but we like cacti. I made myself another bagel, and the carpet is horrible anyway.

P.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

If the plate just broke in two, can't you glue it together and promote it to objet d'art status?

[pameladean]

It's very old and the glaze was going -- we had decided it couldn't go in the dishwasher -- so that portions of the background are gray rather than white. And the break wasn't quite clean; there were one or two splinters as well.

P.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

You need a few of these. (The kids I read to/with at school love them.)

http://www.badkittybooks.com/

[pameladean]

Now THAT is a BAD cat.

P.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I still collect extra copies of the first one, the abecedarian. Brilliant! (A tad unlikely, with a repentant cat, but so entertaining.)

So many International Bad Cat Days does in fact explain much.

[lcohen]

i have long suspected as much!

[pameladean]

Do they give off more allergens on International Bad Cat Day too?

P.

[redbird]

Is International Bad Day like the appropriate days for eating chocolate (any day ending in a y)?

[pameladean]

Pretty much!

P.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of Humpty Dumpty's explanation to Alice of un-birthdays.

[pameladean]

I'm sure that to the cats the effect is quite similar!

P.

[carbonel]

Morwen celebrated International Bad Cat Day this morning by barfing on my bedroom carpet. I heard her, but she did it stealthily enough that I didn't locate it until my foot squished onto the yuck.

[pameladean]

URGH. Remarkably, the upstairs cats appear to be a new breed of non-barfing cat.

P.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Between This morning I was sitting peacefully at my desk with a cup of tea that mercifully does not figure further in this anecdote and the blog post title, I was laughing before I even got to the end of the first sentence. The end of the post did not disappoint. :)

If I only had the ability, I would fix your cactus plate with kintsugi and make it even more beloved. Naughty cat.

[pameladean]

8-). I blame my having just reread a bunch of Gerald Durrell's books, not to mention having read a biography that quotes him copiously.

Kintsugi looks amazing. The gold would look well with that particular plate, too.

P.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I couldn't do it with kintsugi, but if by some chance you still have the pieces, I'd like to try something else that has sprung to mind. You couldn't eat off it, but it would be worth looking at, if I did it right.

[pameladean]

Alas, we decided to be bold and resolute and quit keeping so many broken things we hadn't a hope of mending around.

I might have some other broken Portmeirion plates, but that one is gone.

P.

[eub.livejournal.com]

(Oh neat, thank you for the reference to kintsugi. I had never heard of it.)

[rolypolypony.livejournal.com]

If it cleanly broke in two it might be worth mending? This to that - http://www.thistothat.com/ - is great for glue advice. Poor plate. Naughty cats.

My Lydia has spent the week making my anxiety about her getting outside worse by lurking right near the front door in hopes of a moth entering.

[seekerval.livejournal.com]

Those Bad Cats--they take all the best days. Fortunately for our household, the Bad Dog Days haven't been officially sanctioned yet. (cough, cough)

[pameladean]

Yes, there's no point in giving them any ideas!

P.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Goodness; I do hope the aggressive tropism for cheese is not so strong as Cassie's sense of abashed. (Though if Cassie had been literally abashed by the hurtling crockery I'm sure you would have said, so it's solely a moral abashed, which is by no means certain in cats.)

Sorry about the plate. Small furry engines of destruction.

Aoife doesn't seem to have got the memo; yesterday was the day after the last of the hated, hated, hated banana antibiotic stuff and the vet confirming that lungs now fine, no sneezles, nothing else wrong, here's the scheduled booster shot, so there really could have been with some justification. She's currently curled up on her favourite pile of cardboard and looking as though all is well with the world.

[pameladean]

Oh dear, perhaps I have succumbed to American exceptionalism, and International Bad Cat Day is really an American institution jazzed up to look global.

I'm very glad Aoife is over her infection. If there is a compounding pharmacy near you, it's possible to have any medication at all made up as a fish- or chicken-flavored liquid. This is pretty expensive for long-term meds like Tapazole, but not quite so appalling for shorter-term antibiotics. Though I hope you don't have the need again at all. I never have understood why veterinarians think horrible flavored pediatric antibiotics are suitable for cats.

Cassie's focus on cheese is laser-like. She was not remotely put out by the falling and breaking dishes, and I wanted her removed lest she tread on any splinters of plate lying about, or even eat them should they be in the goat cheese.

Cass is very much put out and very sad if you scold her and put your hand over her nose as if you were her mother, but otherwise very little abashes her. She has food issues of unknown origin, and not much impresses her with regard to those.

P.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Or it just may be the case that Aoife has no interest in observing these things on any sort of fixed schedule determined by some distant feline soviet of which she is not even a member, never mind on the obsessive ritual committee as she ought to be. (Never met an obsessive ritual committee she didn't want to take over, has Aoife.)

While I'm sure there's a compounding pharmacy nearby, I am not sure what Aoife would like; this is a cat who disdains chicken, duck, tuna, turkey, eggs cooked or raw, salmon four times out of five, crab, mammal meat of any description, and indeed anything that isn't oily freshwater whitefish. (Low fat older-cat versions are Right Out.) To the point where she's quite willing to starve to death, so I'm very glad I can _get_ unadulterated cat food based on oily freshwater whitefish, but it's a worry about the future. (If she's seriously hungry fresh mackerel has been accepted as a tolerable offering.) I can't see chicken working, and fish oil, maybe but only maybe. It would have to involve pressed trout or something.

The horrible pediatric antibiotics are presumptively the cheapest available, and prior times (all both) were bubblegum which wasn't favoured but didn't lead to a cat with the top of her head pressed into the inside of my forearm, both front paws wrapped around my arm, and a whole lot of piteous noises because no, no, not that. It is at such times one really wishes one could explain things like acquired antibiotic resistance to cats.

And if there has to be a next time, I'll know about the banana aversion.

"Food issues of unknown origin" is a phrase with a freight of fraughtness, to be sure. I'm glad Cassie didn't get into the ceramic fragments. I'm also glad the scene of total and comprehensive devastation with a cat in the middle of it, happily and obliviously consuming goat cheese, isn't what actually happens. Hard to avoid picturing from the description of Cassie's character, though. :)

[pameladean]

She couldn't consume the goat cheese because it was still under the broken plate, and also because my office is extremely cramped and full of stuff, so she was still sussing out the route to the floor when Raphael picked her up.

Yes, I don't know everything that happened to her when she was a kitten, but it's amazing she's as sane and sweet as she is given what we actually do know.

Poor Aoife, it is very hard to have such strong food preferences. You can probably get unflavored liquid antibiotic made up as well, but it sounds like the bubblegum isn't so traumatic.

"(Never met an obsessive ritual committee she didn't want to take over, has Aoife.)" This utterly did me in with chortles. Yes, I recognize the personality type. Saffron has a recessive version of it, perhaps.

P.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Yay for Raphael's excellent timing!

I occasionally wish Aoife wasn't so obsessive about the ritual, and then I realize that the strong sense of propriety is a feature, even if it does sometimes lead to the disapproving mnarp noise, the stupid-stupid-monkey dance, and me being smacked in the ankles.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

As Monica Edwards pointed out in The Cats of Punchbowl Farm (which includes a cheese-loving cat who likes to feign recurrence of a "poorly paw" to get bits of cheddar), nothing else is as cheesy as cheese.

[pameladean]

That is entirely true. As someone who cannot eat cow's-milk products, I feel this very keenly.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Silly meezers!

[maiac.livejournal.com]

Ah. Just as every day is Chocolate Day.

Cassie will assure you, of course, that it's All Your Fault.

I am glad that the tea did not figure further in the anecdote.* Also sad that the plate that was broken had been a gift.

(*The "cup of tea that mercifully does not figure further in this anecdote" gives the anecdote a distinct Douglas Adams flavor.)

[pameladean]

I hadn't thought of there being an Adams influence. I did finally read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a few years ago (and very much enjoyed it while continually exclaiming, "Oh, THAT is where that came from!" as if it were Shakespeare), but that's the extent of my experience with Adams.

P.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

My first exposure to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the radio show, via a set of third-generation cassette tapes. It's my favorite version, even though it sometimes makes me think of Oxford students sitting around wherever Oxford students sit around in their college, drinking gin-and-tonics and trying to out-clever each other. I still have the tapes and they're still mostly harmless audible, but fortunately a friend gave me the show on DVD a couple of years ago.

Over the last several years I've been working my way through the original Doctor Who series. Douglas Adams was the story editor during the Fourth Doctor years, and wrote a couple of episodes. I laughed like a mad thing when the Doctor, taken prisoner by space pirates, told a fellow prisoner, "Don't panic."

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry about your plate and Raphael's arm, but this anecdote made me laugh and laugh, from start to finish. Five stars, would definitely celebrate International Bad Cat Day again.

[pameladean]

That's okay, I actually meant it to be funny, though not just funny.

Since cats are definitely going to celebrate International Bad Cat Day again, it's just as well to be on board with that.

P.

[firecat]

I would buy you a thousand cactus plates in appreciation of this anecdote.

[pameladean]

I am honored!

P.

[thinkum]

Oh, dear. I'm afraid I would never have the patience to be a cat's pet human, much as I love doting upon other people's feline owners.

[pameladean]

Whole days go by here upstairs with nothing of the sort occurring. (My current theory is that a great deal of badness is outsourced; in our case, much of it downstairs to Ninja). I suppose I should write up stories of the amazing affection and quirkiness and hilarious but harmless antics, too.

But it's good to know one's limits.

P.