Friday, August 15, 2008

...a pet owner: How To Win a Battle of Wills With a Cat

Two years ago this fall, we adopted two cats from our local shelter and dubbed them Cosmo and Wanda (those of you with younger children will probably catch the reference).

See perp #1:












and perp#2:









(doesn't he look sweet?)




Now, Perp#1 has apparently been having some abandonment issues (twice we have left them on overnights, each a couple of days, which we have done countless times) and she has pooped and peed in my new office. Seriously, the carpets been down a month. Really not happy with her, but I get the point. Why now though, I have no idea.

Perp #2 though- he's the real star of this story. We left to visit some family on Friday and returned late Monday (don't worry, we left tons of food and water), only to find him outside. Looked fine, but I was completely freaked out as 1) I'd carried the cat inside myself before leaving and 2) had no idea how long he'd been out and 3) wondered if he'd found some mysterious way to escape. It would be another day though before we found out the truth.

The truth, as it turns out, was discovered at 3:40 the other morning as Perp #2 decided to make a break for it. The escape route? The air conditioning unit located next to my side of the bed. He'd managed to pull out the stuff we had sealing it underneath, and had separated the accordian thingy on the sides that make the window "closed". I caught him before he got out, closed it all back up, called him a naughty name and went back to sleep hoping that would be the end of it.

Uh, nope.

To make a long story short, I spent the next two hours chasing him away, tossing dirty items of clothes at him, tossing him, shooing him, pushing him off the bed,hollering at him to get him to stop clawing the box for the crib that still needs to be put together, and finally (remembering) resorting to getting out one of the kiddies squirt guns and soaking him before he finally stopped trying to either escape or get us to let him out. Let me preface all of this by saying I'm 34 weeks pregnant and really need my sleep. Without it, I'm fairly useless and all sorts of crankiness.

Night #2. AC comes out of window, thankfully, it's not too hot. Cat tries to get out and realizes the window is closed. It's around 4:30 am and so I hope that's it. He'll go away.

Nope.

So out comes the squirt gun. Any funny business. Squirt. Goes for window. Squirt. Jumps on bed and walks all over us. Squirt. Squirt.

I'm fairly sure tonight will run something similar. But my gun will be loaded, and I'm gonna win damn it.

Squirt.

2 comments:

Fiona Cartolina said...

that's funny - I love cat stories - I'd be quite happy if this entire blog was cat stories - no? - look, it was just a suggestion, ok?

:-)

AKA Delaney said...

Ha ha ha!! I'm sure they'll make future appearances- don't worry!