Inside The Mind Of An Evil Feline

Darth Jingles is three. Yay … All right, here’s the thing on that: she’s a brat, but she’s a full grown brat. We raised her from a tiny kitten, too small to even jump up on a bean bag or chair. She’s lived in our house almost her entire life, and mostly enjoyed being a spoiled only-cat. The youngest sibling, baby of the family, and so on.

That being said, I’m watching her wander around the family room ‘exploring’ like there’s anything left to explore in this house. Okay, she hasn’t been on top of the kitchen cabinets or in the attic. I think that’s it. Every nook and cranny of the basement and garage? Check. On top of the entertainment system, including speakers? Check. On top of each and every bookcase that doesn’t come close to meeting the ceiling because these are not standard height walls? Check. Inside bathroom cabinets and (I still cringe) the kitchen ones as well? Check. Pantry? Check. The gas fireplace is sealed, that isn’t happening. Dream on, cat.

It’s a tad irritating to walk into the family room, pass the fireplace, TV, Blu-ray, cat, shelves of DVDs, back up – the cat is sleeping on top of the Blu-ray? No. Get down. She’s good about not needing to be shooed away from places multiple times. I haven’t seen her on the Blu-ray since. Hubby chased her through the house after the kitchen countertop and dining room table incidents, no further problems. She’s allowed on the bathroom counters, but not kitchen and she knows the difference. We can leave a can of tuna up there and she won’t touch.

All that being said, it’s her house. The giant bean bag that fits three teenagers is hers. She sleeps in the middle of it and won’t move for anyone. If Jingles chooses to sleep on the living room sofa, so be it. Somehow she knows Mommy doesn’t like it if she sheds there, and keeps it to herself. That’s kind.

She has a basket in The Girl’s room on her bed. Another by the window in my room, and another in the living room. In The Boy’s room she has a shelf in front of the window with her own pillow and the entire top bunk of his bunk beds. Oh, and she has a kitty bed in the laundry room, because it had to go somewhere. That was before she staked out spots in every other room and we had this insane idea she’d sleep there. Silly humans.

Outside, Jingles has her glaring spot. We all know it by name, even many of the neighbors, and she can be found there when she’s upset with us or in the later afternoon. She likes to sit there and watch people come home from school, then work. She sits there, where she can see the cul de sac, quietly watching, judging, condemning.

Once darkness falls and the neighborhood is silent, she hides in the shadow of a bush and makes her family call to her. Always three times at least, she prefers four. Jingles listens for the irritation in the voice of the Great Furry One (Hubby – he has a beard) and decides if he’s game for one more round or if she should come this time. Sometimes she guesses wrong and she’s out for the night. Or she gets caught in a neighbor’s garage. Perhaps something interesting is more promising than a warm bed with her children. (The Great Furry One breaths loud, The Girl kicks, The Boy sneaks out of bed late at night to play video games, so a good night’s sleep at home isn’t guaranteed.)

Most of the time Jingles comes in for the night, it makes Mommy and her children happy. Kitty-Mommy gives her tuna, and Darth Jingles puts off her condemnation of us at least for another day.  I’m serious, the cat looks evil most of the time. We love her for it.

Late Update: Things I Learned Over Spring Break

This is a little late in posting. Sorry, I’ve been busy being … annoyed mostly. I may get to that later.

Things I learned over spring break:

1.       Regardless of the number of tiny Made-in-China Adventure Time figurines my daughter has, there is always room on her shelves for more. (She was missing the Ice King, but now she has him twice)

2.       The Boy decided blue hair is awesome – not just highlights or a streak – his whole head.

3.       The Girl decided if her little brother can have bright blue hair, she can too. Then she just did dark blue underlayers at the last minute.

4.       Both kids think I’d look great with blue hair.

5.       I’m going to wait until I’m 80 for blue hair like other grandmothers.

6.       Both kids decided Hubby would look great with blue hair after I declined to fall for their line.

7.       Hubby is smarter than his children. (He also isn’t dyeing his hair)

8.       Hubby and I need to make a plan for how to tell his parents about our kids doing the ‘fun’ thing while they’re young.

9.       My parents think it’s awesome that their grandkids look like Easter eggs.

10.   Darth Jingles hasn’t noticed the kids look different.

11.   Two foot high chocolate Easter bunnies contain a lot of sugar, even when hollow.

12.   All baskets belong to the cat.

13.   It is possible for me to not be in the mood to write a sex scene for a long time.

14.   Don’t go to the aquarium on the first day of spring break

15.   If you do go to the aquarium on the first day of spring break, don’t take someone who needs a walker

16.   If you’ve failed to follow the advice for #14 and #15, keep user of said walker away from parents who might deck him for swearing about stroller-induced jams in narrow spaces

17.   Jellyfish are awesome.

18.   Just because a steakhouse charges upwards of $45/entrée doesn’t mean they’ll get your steak right. Or even your order.

19.   The city thinks my cat is a dog. (I’m serious. I have a request to license my dog, which I don’t have. They insist I have a black domestic shorthair dog named Darth Jingles. Close.)

20.   I may take Jingles (on a leash, of course) down to wherever to license her in person.

21.   I am beyond ready for Doctor Who to start again.

22.   Jeremy Clarkson getting briefly fired from BBC’s Top Gear shook our household more than I would have expected.

23.   The Noble M600 isn’t legal to import into the U.S., even with waivers.

24.   The Boy took entirely too much pleasure in watching my eyes prickle with tears at his announcement of #23. I’m serious, he stood right up next to me, almost nose to nose, to see if I’d cry. I almost did.

25.   My in-laws cannot grow cherry trees.

They’ve killed three now. We’re getting them another one, because my mother-in-law really wants a cherry tree in the front yard for some unknown, God-forsaken reason. Yes, I think that adjective is correct in this case.

I have a thing about cherries. I used to climb my grandmother’s huge cherry tree as a kid and pick cherries with my cousins. I loved cherries, they were the best thing ever. Until on cousin showed me ‘checking for worms’ wasn’t a formality. He showed me the worm. That was devastating to me six-year-old view of the world. From that day forward, I have not liked cherries.

Imagine Hubby’s surprise when I kept hinting that maybe we should plant their cherry tree among our own little orchard. There’s a cherry tree in a neighbor’s yard to pollinate it, it’s all good.

Do I want the cherry tree? Hell no, it’ll make a mess. I don’t want my annoying nephew coming to pick them either, which is what’s going to happen when it gets planted at my in-laws. But the tree stands a fighting chance at our house and it clearly doesn’t at my in-law’s, which is the real issue I’m trying to call into question here.

Hubby laughs at my inner-Lorax and tells me to calm down. We don’t have to plant the cherry tree at our house, we don’t have to deal with the annoying nephew. (He’s cute, but he’s a brat and he’s never going to grow out of it.) We’ll plant the tree in the backyard on the little hill where their other pear tree used to be (before the deer got a little too eager). It’ll be fine.

Hmm. We’ll have to put a fence around it and put out bales of hay for the deer. At this point, if feeding the deer for twenty miles around is what it takes to see her cherry tree through the winter, my mother-in-law would do it.

And that’s what I learned over spring break. Sorry to disappoint on the lack of drugs, alcohol, or scantily clad girls. Those stories were all after-hours.

Jingle's Collar

Darth Jingles came home without her collar, again.

This may not seem a big deal to most people, after all, none of my cats growing up ever wore a collar. The thought was ludacris to even try to collar a cat. (Also, why does Word want to change “ludacris” – a perfectly normal and acceptable word in the English language to “Ludacris” – the rapper? Really?) Anyway … Jingles has a collar because of our HOA. Technically she’s also not allowed to stray outside of our yard, something I understand but I have no idea how to enforce. Thankfully she tends not to roam far and the neighbors don’t mind her. Actually, a lot of the neighbors like her. But she’s required by city and HOA code (our HOA is scarier) to wear a collar. She’s chipped, so it’s not like if she gets picked up they won’t know who to call. But that cute little piece of feline jewelry lets everyone know she’s not a stray.  Also, her tag actually says “please don’t shoot me” on it. Hubby has a warped sense of humor.

Actually, it was Jingle’s collar that gave her the name she has today. Other contenders included “Stinkmuffin,” but I digress. When she was a kitten, scampering around the house, the single bell on her collar would sound her location. Remember It’s A Wonderful Life? There’s a line in there a couple of times: “every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” We had a cat winging angels all over the place. Being the dark people we are, naturally we came to the conclusion there couldn’t possibly be any angels left in heaven waiting to get their wings, therefore our dear black cat had to be killing people to create angels to wing them. She’d run down the stairs and wipe out entire villages in third-world countries, according to this theory. Only a Sith could be so efficient. Hence ‘Darth Jingles.”

History aside, Jingles wears a collar, usually, and occasionally loses it. They’re stretchy so she can get out of them if she snags on something. You know, cat collars. The quick-release clasp on the one she had originally was lost and never recovered. The one she lost a few days ago has been lost once, and a neighbor picked it up in their yard and walked it over. Our phone number is one there, just in case, but he recognized who it belonged to. We also meet new people in the neighborhood when they find her collar and call us, so we go retrieve it. Nice people.

The rule is: if Jingles isn’t wearing a collar, she doesn’t get to go outside. This is where a cat losing a bit of elastic with a pendant becomes a bigger issue. She didn’t want to stay in and wait for someone to find and return it, or wait for Mommy (me, I’m a kitty mom) to give up and go get her another one. In fact, Jingles was making enough of a pest of herself in her attempts to relay how urgent it was that she be allowed out to frolic in the spring air, that I sent The Girl on a quest to find an old retired collar. (One we got a call about just hours after I succumbed to her plaintive meows and purchased a replacement collar and tag.)

Jingles wouldn’t even sit still to let us put the ratty old collar on her. It took two of us to bell the cat. This is unusual, she generally recognizes collars and/or the harness and leash torture as a prerequisite to being allowed out. Yes, she will walk on a leash. No, she’s not happy about it. I think she does it because she likes to humor the kids and they always release her to run off eventually. Anyways, little furry wiggle worm finally has a tattered Christmas collar on her. It’s pathetic. The bells (three on this one, her last one didn’t have any because it doesn’t stop her from catching birds – a neighbor witnessed that – and it’s noisy. Of course it is, it’s a bell. At one in the morning, that bell sounds much louder.)

So the three bells have the paint worn off, and the nail polish I used to re-paint them a glossy red is also gone. Just little metal bells in the remains of tartan bows on red elastic. I dare say she’s going to try to lose it this time. Hopefully she won’t ditch this collar before someone finds the previous one.

Jingles isn’t vain. She rolls in the gutter before coming inside (thanks for that, by the way, you little brat). But she keeps herself clean (after the gutter-roll) and has decent manners considering she’s a cat. Aloof, yes, but not on the table or kitchen counter. Since we wrangled her into this collar, she hasn’t tried to wiggle out of it. Yet.

That being said, The cat is loose again in the neighborhood. And angels are getting their wings. And/or whole third world villages are being wiped out and then getting their wings. I should check the news.