Showing posts with label Tabby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tabby. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2011

What is her problem?

In my not quite four years of having Cat as my servant, we've gotten along relatively well. She knows her place, and keeps my food dish full and has yet to chase me away from the top of her wardrobe, where I sleep at night atop the spare sheets.

So you can understand my surprise and displeasure when she walked into the kitchen the other night and yelled at me. Yes, moi, the most wonderful cat in the world.

I was doing nothing. Honestly. Seeking a big of peace and quiet from the television and Big Stupid's barking, I found a place to relax. More than large enough to accommodate me, it was out of the flow of traffic.

Yet in comes Cat, disturbing my peace and acting as if I'm waaaaay out of line just because I'm sitting on top of the range hood. Yes, I had to use the table and the stove as springboards, but what's so wrong with where I landed?

Sometimes I simply can't understand her. Instead of delicately licking the dripping water from the spout in the bathtub, she immerses herself in the thing when it's full of water -- ooh, even the thought of being that wet gives me chills. And rather than doing the polite thing and licking her paws clean when she eats, she wipes her fingers on paper instead.

Christmas is just around the corner, though, and I do feel that perhaps I should give her a gift in acknowledgment of the generally good job she does as my caretaker. I know many of you are authors and readers. Would you happen to know where I can purchase a manual for her -- perhaps one titled "Care and Feeding of the World's Most Wonderful Creature?''

Tabby

P.S. If you're looking for a book to give for Christmas, don't forget all the books Cat and her good friend Cammie Eicher have out there!

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

I'm telling on her

It's Cat here -- Tabby is sleeping, and I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you what she's been up to. I know she won't.

Tabby is a house cat. She joined the family of me and Maggie, my oversized Sheltie, not quite four years ago. She has established a routine that consists in great part of yelling for food and then yelling at Maggie and me at random.

On occasion, she has decided to take a walk on the wild side and escape out the door when I'm fool enough to give her three inches to slide through. I've started leaving the side door open a foot or so, enough to give her room to come in and not enough for Maggie to get out. Her normal time from escape to sauntering back in is somewhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on the weather and if there are neighborhood cats out there.

Last Monday, she made one of her famous escapes. I left the door open ... but no Tabby.
I left it open when I went to bed, but she was still missing on Tuesday morning.

I expected her to be at the door scolding me when I got home from work Tuesday, but again, there was no mad meow. I began to worry.

By the time I climbed in bed Tuesday, I figured she was gone. My daughter, attempting to reassure me, insisted Tabby would come home when she got hungry. Still, I had this sinking feeling that poor Tabby had tangled with a car or gotten beaten up by the tom cat that prowls the neighborhood and I'd never see her again.

I was wrong. She showed up this morning, demanding to be let in and chowing down as if she'd never been fed before. She made a circuit of the house, ensuring that her favorite places hadn't been touched. She sat on the newel post for a minute, then jumped into the window overlooking the driveway and checked out my desk, where she likes to sleep by the keyboard. Satisfied that her haunts were intact, she climbed onto a basket of laundry in my bedroom and curled up to sleep.

And she's still sleeping. I suspect that wherever she was and whatever she did, it wore her out. I'm hoping, too, that the animal control officer doesn't show up tonight with a warrant for her arrest for graffiti on the vet clinic's wall or an order to lock her up for disorderly conduct while high on catnip.

Or if he does, I can bribe him with a copy of Bittersweet, my new historical romantic suspense from Turquoise Morning Press.