Let Me Tell You About My Family

Let me tell you about my extended family

Hubby has sisters to spare, but only has one brother. That brother is married, and his wife is super special. Really. Super special. Now to be fair, she’s nice. Nice in a really weird way, but nice. For example, I remember when she was worried the kids were hungry because they refused to eat their non-child approved lunch of shrimp cocktail and cucumber sandwiches (which were lovely by the way) so she gave them a package of Oreo cookies to tide them over until dinner. The Girl wasn’t on solids yet when this occurred but I made a note not to let this particular sister-in-law babysit.

Moving on, previously mentioned family member is a wee bit OCD about some things. In particular is an obsession with keeping her living room pristine. Seriously. Your stature in her eyes is obvious depending on whether she allows you to sit in her living room. Or walk in it. Most people (family especially) get hustled from the front door through the entry and directly to the family room opposite the kitchen. I’d also like to say her kitchen is always spotless, and I was a little jealous until I realized it’s because every meal comes from the microwave or a take-out bag.

Another thing she’s OCD about is pets. She doesn’t like them. It just about killed her when her daughter got a gerbil for her birthday two years ago. I believe children should have a pet. It teaches them responsibility and kindness to animals. If not children, teenagers will do. In any case, the gerbil stayed and everything went smoothly, mostly, for a year. Then the gerbil escaped. I thought she was going to have a stroke.

Okay, so OCD, insanely protective of her living room, doesn’t like pets, and has an escaped gerbil on the loose. You know where this is going, right? She tore the house apart, almost literally, looking for that damned gerbil and swearing she would find it before it did any damage. The gerbil had other ideas. We thought the gerbil won, after all, she didn’t find it and time went on.

Then she found it. I think you know that’s not a good thing, not at this point. The gerbil sort of won, at least it got the last word in on behalf of the entire family. Yes, it is now a dearly departed gerbil, and it chose her living room couch as its final resting place. Between the cushions. That no one ever went in there helped prolong the discovery.

Lesson: gerbils are evil. No, wait, that’s not it. Let people sit in the living room. Closer, but no. Life sucks sometimes is a fact, not a lesson. Oh, yeah: Foreshadowing – it isn’t just for entertainment anymore.

Cat Herders

The Girl once had so many interests she couldn’t decide on a career path. We told her it wasn’t a big deal, I mean a lot of college kids change their majors and she wasn’t even close to graduating from high school yet. Now she’s close, and she settled on Marine Biology. She wants to talk to whales. Oh, joy.

The unfortunate part about having a teenage girl with a newfound passion for whale calls, is that I have a teenage girl with a newfound passion for whale calls. Practicing them. At home. Out loud. Darth Jingles has come to grips with the oddity that her girl makes loud, strange noises while wandering around the house and yard, but Nimoy is still freaked out about it. The poor kitten just about jumps out of her skin when The Girl emulates a … I’m going to say blue whale … and she sprints to the safety of Grandma (me). Remember, if The Girl is her kitty-momma, then I’m kitty-grandma. Grandma is much safer to associate with than her mom, and I kind of see how this whole grandparent thing works now from a different perspective.

Before Marine Biology, The Girl had passions for paleontology and anthropology. She still does, in evidence is how many documentaries about mummies we watch. Yay, mummies – the well dressed zombies of the ancient world. I can say that here, but I can’t usually mentioned zombies and mummies in the same paragraph because, while The Girl likes mummies, she hates zombies and everything to do with them. That being said, we recently saw a thing about ancient Egypt and the things they put with mummies. Not just the royal ones everyone gushes over. Proper burial was a big thing back then. Do you know what they used to mummify and bury with people all the time? Not whales, thankfully. Actually no, that would be amusing. The next time Egypt goes on a mummy-making kick, someone suggest whales to ferry the dead to the afterlife, okay?

Cats. Sorry, I got a little sidetracked there. They mummified and buried cats with people. Mummified cats was such a booming business that apparently they raised cats for the purpose. Cat ranches. It stands to reason if there were cat ranches, then there were cat herders. Right?
The Girl and I just about fell on the floor laughing when the narrator mentioned cat ranches, both of us went immediately to cat herders.

For those who don’t know, ‘as difficult as herding cats’ is an idiom referring to how challenging it is to bring differently-minded people together to accomplish a goal. More to the point for the purposes of this tale is that EDS once did a commercial about cat herding. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/vTwJzTsb2QQ . It’s worth a look because this clip is why my daughter was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. I’m not sure where exactly the phrase comes from, but it doesn’t matter.

Literal cat herding - the Egyptians did it.

Kitten Milestones

Nimoy passed another milestone in her catlike growth the other night. Hubby, The Boy, and I were watching ZNation because The Girl was out with her friends. We can’t watch anything scary, startling, or involving zombies when she’s around. Just hearing it or walking into the room and seeing what’s on before we can pause it is enough to give her nightmares. Usually we watch in our room and lock the door, but she was gone so we took advantage of being able to use the bigger TV in the family room.

Anyway, The Girl was gone and we were watching TV. Jingles was outside taking advantage of the slightly warmer and dry weather. The Boy was playing with Nimoy, sort of, and suddenly Hubby remembered we’d never put tape on her paws – a grievous oversight.

Anyone who has done this knows what happens. For anyone who doesn’t: suffice it to say cats don’t like tape on their paws. I’m not sure if it over-stimulates their senses or what, but they react differently to this little problem than others they may be faced with.

Putting a harness on a cat who isn’t used to it is a similar challenge. Most cats interpret that harness (weighs all of a few ounces) as being a five hundred pound load that’s been dumped on them. They fall over, lie down and refuse to move, slink along the floor with their back ‘weighed down’ in a concave shape, or even drag themselves along using only their front legs as if their back is broken. Take the harness off and they’re fine. It’s magic!

Now tape on feet: it doesn’t hurt the cat, but I’m not convinced the cat knows that. It’s sort of like putting a harness on, disabling your loving feline. Sort of. It depends on the cat. I think of it as short-circuiting their traction control so they have to operate with a warning light irritating them.

So The Boy grabbed Nimoy in a snuggle on her back, feet accessible for Hubby. Nimoy doesn’t care for this as a rule, but for some reason she allowed it this time. Odd considering it was The Boy holding her when she doesn’t trust him at all (with good reason.) So Hubby applied and removed the tape a few times on his hand to remove adhesive so it wouldn’t be too sticky. We don’t want to be cruel after all. Then he stuck a small piece of tape covering her cute little jelly-bean toes on her back foot, then the opposite front foot.

Nimoy immediately started shaking her feet around trying to get it off. I collapsed into a chair laughing. Tape turned our kitten epileptic. The Boy set her on the floor to watch her try to walk, and she didn’t disappoint. Some cats refuse to walk with tape on their feet, others just do it weirdly. Nimoy chose the latter option. Forward progress was hindered by the incessant need to shake her feet to try to get the tape off. Then she tried to outrun the sensation, but only went five feet before she had to stop and shake again. Five foot sprint, shake those feet, five foot sprint, shake, and so on. She managed to leave the family room, so we sent The Boy to get her. It’s a tribute to this cat’s dimness that she allowed her tormenter to pick her up again and carry her back. Normal cats would hide at this point.

Hubby removed the tape and scratched her ears, and all was forgotten. It takes so little with this one.

Okay, so that was fun. Then The Girl came home. Was she outraged by our torment of her kitten? No, she demanded to see the show herself because I foolishly forgot to record it.

Round two went much the same way except The Girl saved her ‘baby’ before she ran off. Nimoy was kind enough to purr for Hubby after he removed the tape, completely forgetting he was the one who put it on there in the first place.

A couple of things struck me as odd about Nimoy’s introduction to tape. First, for a cat that’s notoriously vocal and loud, I’m surprised we didn’t get complaining whines when holding her on her back, nor was a peep of any volume, pitch, or duration uttered while she was ‘seizing.’ It’s out of character. Nimoy also doesn’t hesitate to bite and most of the time forgets to retract her claws, yet all parties involved came through uninjured. Blood should have been spilled.

Then we reminisced about when Darth Jingles was a kitten and we did this same thing to her. Jingles has a completely different outlook on life, let’s just put that reminder out there. She did the ‘broken back’ routine when she had a harness on for nearly a year, even though we started training her to walk on a leash from the day we brought her home. Nimoy, in contrast, thinks it’s attacking her and tries to bite it. Add a leash, and it becomes a toy. Try to lead her on the leash, and all hell breaks loose – as in “Oh hell no!” She lies down and you have to drag her. Or you can just wait a few minutes until she forgets the personal liberty infraction, then she hops up and you can guide her wherever.

Back to tape: when Jingles was little we did the same thing. She noticed immediately that she had something on her paws and it wasn’t the floor. The Boy set her down to walk and she froze. She took one tentative step, stopped, shook her ‘defective’ paws, took another step, stopped, shook her paws again. Then walked off. No drama. Jingles had a sort of “F--- it, this is my life now” attitude. Given the over-reaction to the harness, we expected more. We tried tape on Jingles’ paws a couple of more times, hoping for some reaction, but nothing. No more shaking the paws, she just walked away with dignity. She was not going to reward this childish behavior by acknowledging it. Even as a kitten Jingles had charisma.

Although Nimoy plays with yarn. Jingles was half-hearted on the yarn thing, and only if you were holding the other end. As soon as you stopped playing, she stopped. Nimoy takes her war with yarn to new heights. A ball that started off as being stolen from my closet (attached to a blanket I’m crocheting in my spare time), unraveled its way (with help) to the hall, down the stairs, across the entry and around the foot of the table there, back across the entry to the stairs leading to the basement, and (this is my favorite part) got buried in the litterbox.

I awarded that win to Nimoy and detached the yarn string from the blanket. I have more.

Something Wrong With Nimoy

There is something fundamentally wrong with Nimoy. The Girl suspects she's inbred. Just a little, like her grandparents were cousins or something.

First, her ears don't flatten normally. Cats flatten their ears when they're unhappy, but I've never seen Nimoy do it. She doesn't like it when Jingles whaps her; she hisses on occasion, but never flattens her ears. She sort of does when she's "hunting," but it's not the same. Her ears don't flatten in the normal sense; they rotate sideways so she looks like she’s wearing one of those wide-brimmed flat WWI helmets. And her expression isn't one of excitement or concentration, she looks concerned. Also maybe a little dimwitted.

Plus, this cat doesn't know what to do with a box. Oh, sure, The Box Of Judgment is fine, she knows how to perch in there, but all other boxes are beyond her. She'll climb them if it's handy, pull something out of them – particularly packing peanuts to bat around and leave all over the house. There are a ton of packing peanuts and socks stolen from drawers left cracked which she hoards in her stash under The Girl's bed. Weird.

I found a perfect, Nimoy-sized box the other night. I showed her, and she was unimpressed. She tried to get excited about it, I mean she bit it a couple of times. It didn’t do anything or smell or taste interesting, so she tried to walk away. I caught her and put her in the box. Nimoy just sat there staring at me, as if to say "Now what?"

Sigh. So I picked her up and rearranged her into a little sleeping ball and laid her back in the box. I tucked in her tail. She proceeded to bite her tail, but she stayed in the box.

So far so good. I got ready for bed and laid down beside her, the box sitting between my spot and Hubby's for whenever he came to bed.

Seeing it was bedtime, Nimoy jumped out of the box and stretched out in Hubby's spot. She even put her head against his pillow. Box aren't for sleeping in, they're for sitting in judgment of the house.

She is similarly confused by baskets. Except when you upend an empty laundry basket over her, then she accepts her confinement without complaint. She moves it around some, like a little Dalek, but mostly she just sits there. No playing, just a time out. Jingles considers laundry baskets to be toys. Any other type of basket is just a fancy box and is treated accordingly. We’ve held Nimoy while Darth Jingles played in a basket, but Nimoy just didn’t get it.

I seriously don't understand this cat.

Misnamed Cats (And The Box Of Judgment)

The renaming of cats that began in December has continued, and it’s becoming absurd. It started with The Girl rechristening Darth Jingles as Darth Huffy because she’s in a snit about the new kitten, Nimoy. Nimoy is Star Trek based instead of Star Wars, so she was briefly renamed Jar Jar. It should have stopped there, but it didn’t. The Boy got in on it, offering up alternative monikers for his cat as Darth Grumbles, Q.T. McWhiskers, and Remington. Nimoy has gone through Winky (After the Harry Potter House Elf or more likely the derivative of Tinky-Winky from The Girl’s once favorite TV show: The Teletubbies. She’s now embarrassed about this obsession, as well she should be). Nimoy was briefly Nermal (grey tabby in the Garfield comics) also and I almost wished that one had stuck. Swinging to the weird again, the kitten passed through monikers such as Lemon Drop, Meringue, Yelly-bean (because she’s still so vocal), Stupid, Sweetie (as in “Hello, Sweetie,” the catchphrase of River Song from Doctor Who. I’d be good with that one too.), and Tiny Cat. Sadly, Tiny Cat is the one that’s most common now.

This kitten is going to have some serious identity issues. Well, she would, except I suspect she’s too dim to realize what’s happening. As you can imagine, she doesn’t answer to any name, but then again, she’s a cat. Felines aren’t known for coming when called unless there’s food involved. 

The Girl has also taken to gushing about the adorableness of her kitten. There’s no point, she’s a kitten and therefore adorable by definition; waxing poetic about it doesn’t accomplish anything. Regardless, we get daily plus statements about how The-Cat-Formerly-Known-As-Nimoy, or (^><^),  is ultra-special in some way. Well, special as in the unflattering implications of the adjective perhaps… Yes, Nimoy is special. Aside from that, frequently heard remarks go like this:

The Girl: Look at the markings on her face. She’s like a tiny cheetah.

Me: Yes, she’s a tabby.

The Girl: Her stripes are really pretty.

Me: Yes, she’s a tabby.

The Girl: And look at her color – she’s not gray and she’s not brown, she…camouflage.

Me: Yes, she’s a tabby.

The Girl: Those tiny pad on her paws, they’re so cute. And her teeth and claws are dainty but sharp.

Me: Yes, she’s a cat.

And so on. Actually The Girl is tired of me pointing out her kitten isn’t really special in any way, any positive way, so she’s started directing her observations elsewhere.

The Girl: She’s so sweet. Look at the way she bats at my nose.

The Boy: With her claws out, yeah, sweet. My cat’s better.

The Girl: She loves sleeping on the back of the chair and snuggling my head.

The Boy: Again: claws. My cat’s better.

The Girl: And she’s not a picky eater. She eats dry cat food or moist. Even the dry no one else likes.

The Boy: And she has semi-permanent gas, fantastic. My cat’s better.

Do you see a theme? She’s turned her attention to Hubby recently, who has a chronic habit of humoring her.

The Girl: Look, she’s –

Hubby: Uh-huh. (Continues typing on computer without looking or paying attention.)

Now Jingles responds to her Girl’s doting over the kitten differently. Very differently. As in ‘if looks could kill’ sort of different. To be fair, if The Girl or The Boy aren’t involved, Jingles is learning to tolerate Nimoy. (Nimoy is still the kitten’s official name, I just haven’t heard it used recently.)

We’re seeing a lot of cat wrestling now. Cat wrestling as in two cats wrestling each other, not as in someone dressed as a cowboy and roping cats. Oh, wait, that’s cat wrangling. Part of the problem is having two cats. Another part of the problem is we have only one “Box Of Judgment” and both want to sit in it and gaze with ultimate power over the household. FYI, the “Box Of Judgment” is a cardboard box that lays on its side and moves around the family room so it can be in the worst possible place at any given time. There is power there.

Anyway, Jingles pins Nimoy easily, I think that’s a given considering she’s three times the kitten’s size and weight and an accomplished hunter. So Jingles pins Nimoy, whaps her a couple of times on top of her head, then sits back to wait. Nimoy lays there on her back and sizes up the situation. Does it cross her mind that things are not in her favor and she should – just as a passing thought – be submissive to the irritable shadow hovering over her? Not usually. Nimoy reaches up tentatively as if to whap Jingles back. She’s yet to make contact with that ploy, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. As soon as she reaches up, Jingles quickly whaps her three times, then sits back to wait again. It typically takes several rounds of this before Nimoy decides it’s not working out in her favor, wiggles away, and scampers off. At some point she’s going to learn not to push Jingles over the line between playing and irritability. Unfortunately, Nimoy’s earned the name change to ‘Stupid’ (through pure observation), so it might take a while for her to learn to stop baiting the dark, cat-shaped shadow who rules this house. At least it’ll be entertaining while she learns.

                                                       

Winning Isn't The Point

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t win the lottery last night. Alas, it would have been handy. Also, just this once, the subject doesn’t manage to circle around to cats, like so much else does in this house. There had to be something that didn’t.

I think my favorite part about really big lottery pots are the increase of news articles about math and finances. No one seriously has the lottery as their retirement plan, or at least they don’t call it that. When someone implies winning the lottery is their answer to declining social security funding, it’s their way of saying they don’t have a plan. It’s sort of like a cynical American idiom.

I know I have a few blog readers who aren’t in North America, for you happy souls not troubled with constant worry over Presidential Primaries and outright horror at who our next president might be, let me quickly explain our lottery. I’m not sure what countries have and don’t have them, so bear with me.

Only 6 out of 50 states don’t participate in the lottery. In the 44 that do, and territories, you can buy a ticket, pick six numbers, and pray they match what the machine spits out on Wednesday or Saturday night. If you get all six, you win.

When it comes to winning the lottery, being willful doesn’t matter. This is the part where I get irritated that we’re in such a hurry to teach trigonometry to high school students that we don’t ensure they understand statistics. A bigger pot means more people will buy tickets, but that doesn’t mean you’re competing with your neighbor. They have exactly the same chance of winning that you do and the odds of your one ticket winning doesn’t change no matter how many tickets your neighbor buys. It’s not a raffle, it’s a lottery. You have to choose the numbers, not have your ticket drawn out of a giant fishbowl containing millions of other tickets. I’m really tired of hearing people talk like they don’t understand that.

CNN ran an article a week ago and listed some of the things that are more likely to happen than winning the lottery:

I really like that last one: you have a better chance of being struck by lightning while drowning. Wow.

And after all of this, even intelligent people will buy the occasional ticket, especially if they don’t have to go out of their way to do it. Why? Hope. And it’s fun to think about if I won the lottery I’d … But you can’t dream if you don’t play.

The Boy is unimaginative. He’s almost 16 and doesn’t have a learner’s permit yet because of his grades. We require him to have an overall and semester B average, and he had a bad year last year. But if we won the lottery, I’d pay the extra to add him to the car insurance. Also, he wants a car. See? Boring.

The Girl is thinking tactically. Lottery winners are targets, so she wants to move to a house that has a perimeter fence, and another ten feet in – like for guard dogs. Except instead of dogs, she wants guard goats. Yes, goats. A combination of fainting and screaming goats, plus billy goats to ram intruders. I’m unclear how exactly that’s better than dogs, but she has it all planned out. Something about goats are friendlier to the environment and cuter. I’m very pleased she’s not going into a security-related field.

Sick Of Something

Everyone in our house is sick in one way or another. Hubby and The Boy have some nasty virus that has them both in bed whining about dying or something. The Girl has cramps plus anxiety from an upcoming debate event, but at least she hasn’t succumbed to the malevolent microbe. Okay, she has a scratchy throat and is wandering around with a bottle of Chloroseptic in her hand whining about the disaster that would befall the free world if she lost her voice, ignoring my pleas to shut up and save her voice. Whatever, it’s on her.

Jingles is sick of Nimoy, and Nimoy is sick of being ignored so she’s stalking her larger shadowy companion everywhere – and getting her nose whapped for her trouble. That would be fine, except Nimoy is loud about everything she does. Nimoy’s level of protest is registering with the two sick males in the house who insist they’re trying to nap and The Girl trying to memorize an oratory and study points in general to prepare for … I don’t know. Anyway, in theory the tiny kitten is threatening society.

Am I sick? Well yes and no. I have Multiple Sclerosis, which I may have mentioned before, and I’ve been fighting increasing fatigue the past few months. At the moment I’m considering the stairs. If I go down the stairs again today, I might not be able to get back up them and I’m weighing the pros and cons of spending the dregs of the day in my room versus sleeping on the beanbag in the family room tonight. The beanbag is actually really comfortable, and it’ll decrease the chances of catching this bug from Hubby … Yeah, I’m going to risk it. If I end up stuck down there, so be it.

Okay, moving on. Otherwise, no, I’m not sick. Nor am I likely to be. I have the immune system from hell. Seriously, I could probably survive ebola. Granted, it would suck, but I’d make it. As much as I look at Hubby’s misery right now and sympathize, I sit and wonder if I’d trade him places.

Here’s the deal: I don’t get sick. Okay, I rarely get sick. I catch a cold every couple of years. And at this point everyone reading this wants to kill me. This is the magic of my immune system. But this is not a superpower, there’s a catch. While I don’t get coughing, sore throat, runny nose, congestion, etc., I do get exposed to whatever bug whichever kid brought home. My immune system sees the germ, goes into overdrive to kill it so I don’t catch it, then … gets bored.

So? Well, imagine you’re holding the hand of a hyperactive toddler who’s never been told ‘no’ and he’s whining he’s bored. Also, you’re standing in, let’s say, an artist’s sculpted glass exhibit with all the delicate pieces on pedestals for proper display and appreciation. And the toddler’s hand slips out of yours …

My immune system is sort of like that. It gets revved up, then doesn’t have anything to do and turns its malicious attention on me. Like that bored toddler, in my metaphor, my immune system starts finding ways to keep itself entertained … like picking on my nervous system. Oh, joy. That’s why I didn’t have the strength to open a Ziploc yesterday even though I’m not the one with a cold. Technically. 

I’m not going to make it back up those stairs.

Pushing all that aside, because the stairs aren’t currently a problem, nor are Hubby and the kids. The Boy woke, ate, and went back to bed. The Girl is upstairs (Thank God!), Hubby is … I’m not sure where Hubby is. Not here. That is the problem actually, because both cats are.

Doesn’t it always come back around to the cats? Why? I have two teenagers, writing that I need to get done, snow removal, dishes, and yet it comes back to the cats. No matter what’s on my agenda for the day or week, the cats manage to wheedle themselves in as more important at some point. At this point, I have an irritable sleek shadow casting death glares on the bell-laden fluff-monster dancing about on the other side of me. I am the barrier between them, which is fine, except for the low feline growls.

Growling in this house has different meanings depending on where it’s coming from. For Darth Jingles, a growl is anything from a warning to a declaration of impending Force Choke. Or hissing ball of claws if the Force Choke fails. For Nimoy, a growl is an invitation to play. Do you see the potential for miscommunication and hence my concern? For one cat, my outstretched legs are the Mason-Dixon Line; for the other, a tennis net.

I’m going to die.