Alrighty.
For those of you that are “regular readers of my silliness”, you know the Princess and I have two certifiably wacked cats, named Molly and Boo.
Both cats have various “health issues,” which unfortunately, on more occasions than I care to admit, have indirectly caused us to prematurely gray and acquire fluffy midriffs.
(Work with me here, People! You don’t expect me to blame the chocolate chip cookies for our fluffy midriffs, do you?! Stress can cause a myriad of health maladies! Among them, fluffy midriffs.)
Boo has a condition called “malabsorption syndrome” that causes her to constantly be hungry and “on the prowl for food.”
Like a newborn baby, my Siamese needs to eat regularly and howls (quite loudly) when she feels underfed – no matter what time of the day or night it is!
What drives me even more bonkers, though, is the fact that she jumps up onto our kitchen counter to prowl for food.
We’ve read all the latest info on what to do for this behavior, and have purchased more damn gizmos, than I care to admit, to try to change her behavior.
Ultimately, the cat deterrents caused us a great deal of pain and sent Boo merrily on her way with a smirk on her little face that basically said, “You dumb broads don’t have a clue what to do. Just meet my demands and everyone will be a happy camper.”
Uh-Hun.
Last summer, we started using a squirt gun on her and discovered that the little bugger doesn’t like the squirt gun.
Great, me thinks!
We’ll just use the gun from now on and we’ll be good to go.
Yeah, right!
If you know anything about Siamese, they’re smart.
Some smarter than their owners, and Boo is no exception to that rule.
On the other hand, Molly is cute, but a few fries short of a happy meal, as my Uncle Tony likes to say.
At least, though, with Molly, you know if you frequently feed her, periodically pat her head, and methodically make sure she has fresh water every day to dunk her paws into (so she can drink), she’ll leave you alone.
As long as you let her sleep wherever (and whenever) she wants to, and leave her to hell alone for most of the day, she’ll let you share her air space.
God forbid, though, you pet her when she’s lookin’ cute and approachable, and DOESN’T want to be petted!
She bites.
Leaves your hand intact and doesn’t draw blood, mind you, but damn well lets you know to get to hell away from her!
Molly’s the Princess’s cat.
They totally “get each other” and eerily have the same disposition.
Boo, on the other hand, is my cat.
High maintenance, but a love-bug.
You can grab her by her tail and hold her upside down and she’ll just stare at you like, “Seriously? WTS are you doing?”
Doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, but can drive a sober person to drink, when she’s hungry.
Kind of like me when my Buddha belly is hungry and my BP drops.
So, the “squirt gun solution” seemed just the answer to our little problem, except “the gun”, as we now refer to it, always seems to be missing or inevitably someplace not easily accessible when Boo is being a naughty girl.
One day, when the gun was missing and we were yelling to each other, “Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun? Get the gun!” we coincidently noticed Boo’s slight interest in what we were yelling and happened to observe that she jumped OFF the counter onto the floor, saving us the trouble of finding the “blasted gun”.
Being the discerning cat owners that we are, we aptly decided that we’d start yelling this question/command on those many occasions that we couldn’t easily locate it, and have done so now, for quite some time, with a moderate rate of success.
By pure happenstance this week, I mentioned to my Tuesday Tea Ladies Group, that I’d noticed our new neighbors scooting themselves and their baby carriage to the other side of the street, when they spotted me out walking in the morning, and that it was a tad disconcerting to me.
I was relatively confident that I was free of lotion goobers, nose drool, face zits, ratty sweatshirts, and not sporting any odd looking blue rubber rain suits.
And I was definitely feeling unsettled by their perceived snubbing, and didn’t have a clue as to why they’d intentionally try to avoid me.
So, Ada, one of my more direct friends, flippantly comments, “WTF! You and the Princess yell, ‘Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun? Get the gun!’, on a regular basis, and you wonder why your new neighbors are trying to avoid you?!”
“I KNOW you (very well, I might add) and I’d run like hell if I heard you saying that every night!”
Uh-Hun.
Well, guess that little mystery is solved.
Be kind to each other, People! And if you’ve got a neighbor who’s a bit of a character and a “little different”, remember: Different is just different.
We’re all a bit odd, at times – some of us just a tad more than others.
I’ll catch ya next time, looking at life from my shoes.
Life in Lucie's Shoes 