Our youngest cat, doing her impression of Grumpy Cat.
This seemed like a good idea at the time. We used to call Dushenka “Li’l Bit” when she first chose us. Now she’s more like Pudgy Bit.
Either way, she did not seem thrilled to be asked to pose for a holiday picture. Not that the Fourth of July means much to cats except begging for barbecue and hiding under the bed.
They should like it though, if only to maintain their reputation for independence.
This being Friday the 13th, black cats are on my mind. I’m not superstitious, so neither the date nor the cats bother me, but they do bother a lot of people.
A pass-along this morning said that black cats (and black dogs) in shelters tend to be overlooked and are killed disproportionately. Another common rumor is that black cats are adopted at Halloween by Satanists (or teenage wanna-be Satanists) to sacrifice in horrible rituals.
Snopes.com says the evidence is inconclusive on that last point, although they also mention people who want to “rent” black cats as party decorations. I don’t know if this actually happens, but I doubt that it actually works. Cats of any color are more likely to spend a Halloween party behind the sofa or ralphing on the snack table than posing prettily in a tableau of pumpkins. (Digression: Hairballs are pretty grody, so I guess they could be considered decorations, if you’re the horror-fan sort of party-giver.)
I don’t believe cats are bad luck, because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as an all-black cat. As far as I can tell, they are required by law to have at least ten white hairs somewhere on their bodies. Show-offs prefer the chest area.
But I have a confession: I have never owned a black cat. (Digression: My mother-in-law has. No comment.) We did once have a lovely tuxedo cat named Shaker. She had, in addition to the white chest, white whiskers and adorable little white feet. She had a lot of dignity, but then spoiled the effect when she jumped off my lap at the vet’s, made a break for it as fast as her tiny little feet would carry her, and ran headlong (bonk!) into the glass door. It was so sudden that she couldn’t realistically pull off the “I meant to do that” look. Nice try, though.
We did have a black guest cat (a foster) that I named Joliet. (Digression: Here’s the story. I had a black friend named Darryl. I couldn’t call the cat Darryl because she was female (Darryl Hannah notwithstanding). My friend Darryl came from Joliet, IL, so I named her Joliet in his honor. It didn’t matter, because everyone misheard it as Juliet and called her that.)
We might have kept Joliet, but she proved to be a brazen thief. (If she were he, we could have called him Joliet Jake. Or Darryl, I guess, except Darryl wasn’t a thief. Never mind.)
One night we were eating in front of the TV and had a large steak on a plate on the coffee table. Joliet did not choose the typical cat ploy of sniffing daintily at the edge of the steak and making the pitiful “nobody-feeds-me” face. She swooped in and grabbed the whole thing, then raced across the living room with it. From our vantage point it looked like a steak with four feet and a long black tail fleeing the scene of the crime. We recovered the steak, washed it off, and ate it anyway. We were not so well off that we could afford to waste a steak.
(Digression: Once I was cruising the cheap meat (reduced for quick sale) section at the grocery. A guy, obviously embarrassed, picked up a couple of steaks and said, “I feed these to my dog.” “Yeah?” I said, tossing some into my cart. “I feed them to my husband.”)
Anyway, we decided that Joliet and another family would be happier with each other. Looking back, we may have made the wrong call. She never brought us any bad luck. We just needed to train her to steal steak from other people and bring it back to us. Then again, trying to train a cat is difficult enough, never mind trying to train one to give away stolen meat.
My mother-in-law has two new cats and really needs help naming them.
One is a little black male cat (with the required ten white hairs), 18 mos. old, and very affectionate. He needs a name because what she calls it is archaic, but not really a good idea in modern society, if you get my drift.
The other is another male, four years old, buff-colored with blue eyes. She calls it Buffy, which makes one think of a girl who slays vampires. It follows her around, but will not yet allow petting.
In the past, she has had cats named Frisky, Dilly Sue, and Bingo (Dan and I always called Bingo “Mr. Woo,” but that’s another story.)
Also, she also used to call our cat Matches by the name “Checkers,” which we decided was his evil twin.
Just for reference, our cats have been named Matches, Bijou, Anjou, Chelsea, Shaker, Maggie, Julia, Laurel, Garcia, Louise, Jasper, Django, and Dushenka. Plus two fosters named Joliet and The Devil Kitten From the Crawlspace of Hell, but that’s another story too. (No, not all at once; just a few at a time. I’m not that crazy. Yet.)
If I had pictures of the new kits on the block, I would post them, but so far I don’t.
So here goes my experiment in crowdsourcing cat names: Please help!
I used to live in a drafty log home on a windy hill. There were plenty of odd noises, especially at night. Now I live in a regular home in a windy valley, with lots of clutter. There are still plenty of odd noises, especially at night.
It’s been my policy to blame the cats (usually from three to five of them) for any noises – rattling, thumping, skittering, whining, tapping, crashes, howls, et endless cetera.
Even if every cat in the house is occupying my lap at the time, I still try to find a way to blame it on them.
One night, however, my husband and I were peacefully sleeping, when I thought I heard a noise in the living room.
Whispering.
Whatever else they do, cats don’t whisper. For once I couldn’t blame them. It had to be burglars, discussing what they wanted to take or which house to hit next or why we had such crappy stuff and was any of it worth anything.
I didn’t want to wake my husband, because then I’d have my N.O.W. card taken away, so I tried to remember where we put the baseball bat and extended my hearing as far as it would go. I crept closer to the bedroom door, where I could hear the sounds better.
Then I realized that there was indeed whispering, but that it was in French.
Even in my fearful, groggy state, I couldn’t believe that there were actually burglars in my house, in Ohio, speaking French.
So I tiptoed into the living room. If for some unlikely reason, there were French-speaking burglars, I could astound them with my knowledge of French, threaten to call the gendarmes, or at least ask them for directions to the library.
When I tentatively poked my head into the room, however, I found that the television was on and a foreign film was playing.
Hm. My husband won’t watch foreign films because the subtitles distract him. Besides, he was asleep in bed.
Then I realized what had happened. Someone had activated the remote and selected a film channel. With the sound very low. Although I couldn’t name the culprit, it was clearly Matches or Maggie or Chelsea or Shaker, all of whom were giving me the “Who, me?” look. There was no use dusting for paw-prints. One of them had done it, or they all cooked up the plot together.
So the one time I knew it couldn’t be the cats, it was. Now I blame them for everything. Always.
I understand this is Throwback Thursday, which means that bloggers can recycle old posts. I haven’t been blogging long enough to have many old posts, but this is a contribution from Louise, one of my cats, pictured above.
Me: Louise, honey, I’m glad you love your mama, but please don’t sit/stand/lie on my throat.
Louise: Meow (translation: But I’m the Queen of Everything.)
Me: Honeycat, it’s lovely floof, but please don’t eat it. It looks much better outside you than inside.
Louise: Meow (translation: But I’m Her Royal Floofiness.)
Me: Louise, darling, you have cat food breath.
Louise: Meow (translation: Yeah, well, you have human food breath. What’s your point?)
But I Digress . . . 