Cat Conundrum

It is not true that we have two cats as before. You may be thinking something happened to one – one got hit by a car (as one of our cats did ten years ago and had to be scraped off the pavement with the help of the neighbor) – and two minus one equals one, which in my book is a very nice number – very close to zero – so we are getting someplace, aren’t we?

No, the above car incident didn’t happen anytime remotely soon, nor did one of our two cats accidentally ingest poison while roaming outside killing all sorts of small game, nor did some other calamity descend on the unwitting animal – no, nothing like that happened.

No, it didn’t.

In fact, the math is going in the opposite direction: two plus one equals three. So now we have three cats!

Two Cats eating, with one sniffing the flowers!

My dear son happened to be staying with another friend up in Oswego recently, and this other friend, so it happens, got engaged but was encumbered by a cat he owned – a cat the fiance didn’t like – so he gave his cat – in a great act of generosity – to my son. So now my son has a cat, and this son had to move back in with us.

What can you do with a cat, except bring it home with you to enjoy all the accouterments of living in the Stahl household: food, doors opened pretty much at anytime to the outside, as we have seven kids at home that can open such doors, many warm beds that the seven kids and two adults sleep on, warmth from the cold of winter and so I ask you: for a cat, what’s not to like? And for him, to have his cherished cat live thusly?

And so Brutus moved in. I kid you not. That’s his name.

So we have Melcore, a big – some would say fat – golden kitty afraid of even the mice scurrying in the kitchen, and Ukie, who is not full grown yet but seems to have balls the size of New York City itself (more on that in this post), and this new cat, Brutus, who seems pretty chill and is a whole size bigger than the upstart, Ukie.

Ok.

I have come to co-exist with cats; I feel no love for them, but I had to admit – upon my other sons intense questioning – that the Ukie kitten is cute. It is, but I patiently explained to him that they grow up into something called cats. They do. If they stayed cute kittens their entire life long, that might be acceptable. But they grow up, just as ever so cute toddlers do, into something very different.

Ok, they are cute when they’re kittens

But three cats is a bit over the top for me. They are just everywhere, sleeping someplace in every room I go into – everyplace I go in the house there is a relaxing, luxuriously lounging animal always catching some Zzzzs while I’m busy trying to raise children, keep the house from falling down, pay those bills that keep rolling in and keep the vehicles running to boot, as well as buying – and I put three exclamation points after this next item – these cats their food!!!

But there they are, and here am I, caught like a mouse in an evil maze with no way out, because in no way can we rid our house of these ever-so-cute animals, and according to my children it’s clear to me that if they go, then I’ll have to go as well, so we’re all living here in one happy animal house with some kids scattered about, with me laboring to keep the ship afloat while the cats lounge. Just how it is.

Regarding the above maze analogy, I’m just glad the cat hasn’t found me running through it naked and wildly screaming “I can’t take it anymore,” with my hands flailing over my head- finding no way out of this cat-infested house – for then I’d be a nice morsel to pounce on, torture and kill. Only now there would not be one of them pouncing after me in gleeful expectation of torture, but three.

What a nightmare!

Just Checking In

I’ve been slack and remiss at blogging. Great ideas come to me, and some of them actually find their way to paper; once there, of course I have to edit them to death, thus attaining the standard that I always aspire to, and it all takes time – something I don’t always have. So I’ll just check in now with a few tidbits from my always busy life:

The Kitten. What can we say? She is an absolute terror. She harasses the older cat, Melcore, endlessly; will jump on Melcore’s back, play with his tail and even bit him in the arse as he walks across the kitchen floor. I’m surprised he hasn’t killed her, though he will hiss at her sometimes. When she’s not torturing him, she’s torturing us. All feet shall be played with and attacked and the more they jump, the funner it is! I tell my kids this joke: what’s the difference between having kids and a cat? When the cat is bad, you can just put it out, but you can’t do that with kids. So out goes the cats, but in the kids stay.

The little terror resting up for her next onslaught….

My fatigue. It’s generally better, and that makes life 100 percent easier. It’s very difficult to live life with no energy.  Possible but no fun. It bit me yesterday but I’m better today. That’s good: there’s enough to do around here, that’s for sure!

Water. We have no water. Well, that’s an exaggeration. We do have water: a bit of it, sometimes. As long as no one washes their clothes, takes a shower, flushes the toilet or draws tea water for the electric tea kettle, we have water. Do more than a few loads of laundry – no water. Teenagers take showers like we live in a rain forest – no water. Too many flushes – no water. The water slows to a trickle in the evening, as it did in other droughts, but this drought is different, and much worse. Wake up in the morning, and there is a trickle; be washing dishes mid-day, and suddenly a trickle, and at evening-time: a trickle. A trickle leads to: off goes the water pump again at the breaker in the basement, since we don’t want burn out the jet pump in our well. Two hours later we are desperate – someone has pooped!  On the pump goes and we have water right up until we don’t. Perform steps again. Repeat until bedtime.

Elections (US). I read a guys blog who is usually right on but unfortunately not so optimistic about this countries trajectory into the future. He writes about this strange thing called the 2016 election here and ends his blog thusly:

In history, elites commonly fail spectacularly. Ask yourself: how could these two ancient institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties, cough up such human hairballs? And having done so, do they deserve to continue to exist? And if they go up in a vapor, along with the public’s incomes and savings, what happens next?

Enter the generals.

To end on a happier note, the world may be about to end, kittens can attack us unmercifully, our health may suck at times and who really needs all that water anyway, but if we’ve given up everything and have become a disciple of Jesus, everything will work out well for us – and very well – in the end!

The Bell Tolls

It must be difficult walking around in your boring life, with all sorts of trials and tribulations, without the slightest idea that someone is trying to murder you and even worse, this fact it found out too late.

Mr Kitty, Oblivious to his Fate

Such is the woe of Mr. Kitty, our old cat, the gentleman killer of mice, moles, birds and rabbits in our yard; the psychopath in a tuxedo, always prepared for a dinner with aristocracy but also grumpy at the trials of life: stupid humans, all to little food from them, and bodily problems – one of them being (and here we are embarrassed): constipation*.

Yes, we shall put this grand animal down, down being a nice way to say what we plan to kill. Being the cheapskate that I am, I googled how to put the animal down at home, a self-styled DIY project something akin to adding a second bath onto the house or fixing the gutters. The internet is a great place, and the recommendations ran from a bullet in the back of the head to death by car exhaust, to putting sleeping pills in the old guy’s food dish – and how many is enough to kill a cat?

In the end, we decided to pay the buck but haven’t actually done the deed yet. So we mention the procedure here and there, as Mr. Kitty lays all sprawled out on our coffee table, oblivious to what we are plotting about his few remaining days on Earth.

Perhaps this is justice for all the terror he has struck in small animals around the house, and if they heard and relayed it around the neighborhood, perhaps there are toasts in their holes in the ground and in the walls of our house and the nests roundabout – toasts to me, who did all the necessary research for the deed and also to my wife, who has agreed. How much better their life will be, and how much nicer when they are able to walk across the yard without the terror of a pounce – the same pounce that took their mother, cousin, brother, second cousin, grandfather and great grandfather, as well as a number of close friends.

Mr Kitty, though, doesn’t care. He is a cat. He gets to kill and then sleep 14 hours a day, but soon the bell tolls, and we will take a ride in the car.

—

*Well, obviously Mr. Kitty has more wrong than just constipation, but that’s a topic for another blog.

Animal Update

Where would we be without our furry four legged creatures, and the two legged winged poultry that walk quacking around our yard? Far less enriched, I am sure. So I feel it important to give you – the dear readers of my blog – and update on our animal friends.

Nathanial with one of his Chickens

Mr. Kitty, the graceful killer of mice, moles and rabbits, is very thin, and there has been talk of putting the old psychopathic killer down, due to – of all things – constipation. Let’s just say it’s a long story, and the idea has been floated to use the .22 or asphyxiation by car exhaust, but no method has been settled upon. In the end, we might pay the buck to do the old gentleman in, but Father is balking at the cost.

Then there’s Melcore, the second cat, who somehow has lost the curiosity and stalking behavior of his species, and reacted to an old hound dog in the yard by running up a telephone pole just off our deck. Many comments on his fatness are made by bigoted members of our family, to which our 13 year old teenage girl strongly exhorted us not to “fat shame” the cat.

We started with six chickens and three ducks, but the life is cruel and the faceless man in a black robe and a sickle paid us a visit, and now we have suffered a loss. First Alfonzo, a poor young chick with a big heart, fell in the water dish and drowned, and we were thus one chick less. Then a dog came down from a neighbor’s house – an old hound dog that seemed to have barely enough energy to get out of the driveway – this old hound dog trapped two of our ducks under our back deck. The old hound roused himself enough to snap at one duck, flapping wildly, and killed it. He took it’s little life, an act of Darwinian cruelty. At the next duck he aimed his big jowls at with poor precision and only broke it’s leg with a wild snap of his hounddog mouth, and the duck managed to escape with its life.

So we are now have only two ducks, though one of the two is – yes – a lame duck and has to sort of hop and drag his lame leg behind him as he goes, whereas the other duck is just ducky, having never encountered the old hound dog. And whereas we started with six chicks we now have five, and they are no longer chicks but, like a young girl developing breasts, they have some chicken chunk on them now proving their adolescence.

The brain behind all this animal activity, my son Nathaniel, did some Google research and found out that ducks can be traumatized by the death of one of their kind, so he has devised a second, less stressful coop just for them, out of respect for their mental health issues. The ducks (on respite) and chicks (not on respite) were separated for a while, but when he just put them back together, they bonded again without any problems -fortunately.

Then just today I was pulling into my driveway and what did I see by our mailbox? Two turkey-like creatures, just gobbling away in the grass. I’ve never seen such a thing in 15 years of living in this house. What does this portend? More animals. Oh no.

The Birds I saw in my Driveway Today

A Tale of Two Cats

On a subject less heavy, I will talk about our cats, of all things.

Mr Kitty, an Orangeman fan

We have two cats:  Mr Kitty and Melcore.  Mr. Kitty adopted us about six years ago; he showed up at our back sliding glass door and has been with us ever since.  He just moved right in, in his Mr Kitty way, and has become part of our family.   Some call Mr. Kitty cute, with his black and white tuxedo fur, but I’ve always held the opposite – that he is, yes, a killer.  In fair weather, it’s not uncommon for him to bring dead or half dead mice into our house or even a bird; walk outside our door and you can see the littered remains of his mass murder spree: a dead rabbit here or there, half a mole head by the driveway, the tail of some animal by the picnic table (the only remains left).

I have no love for Mr Kitty but I respect him, and he respects me.  I respect him because – overlooking his ghastly psychopathic side – he is a fighter.  He often comes home with wounds on his back or side – whole areas of his skin gone, and we don’t know what he was fighting or how big it was, but surely this animal held his own (or went down fighting).  He will be gone sometimes for over a day, and we don’t know where he is or what he is doing.  He leads a double life, we suspect, and probably comes home when he’s tired of the brawls or the unending rampage against small animals.

He comes to us to sleep or to get some chow, and he is not above curling up on the couch with us, this O so cute killer of ours!  And he can be a bad kitty, getting up on the table or even sleeping on my printer, but like all cats, he cannot seem to learn.  Have you ever seen an advertisement for Cat Obedience School?  No, I doubt it.

Bad Kitty sleeping on my printer!

Cooly, Mr Kity walks around as if he owns the universe, and everything in our human realm he finds boring or trivial, and if you look at his Mr Kitty face, he looks like he has had many trials in life (of which we are one), and he seems piqued that he has to endure us.

Melcore is the opposite.  We bought him via a Cat Adoption program; we picked him, he didn’t pick us.  You would think he would be the most well adjusted animal you could find, but it is not true.  He is skittish, and runs off as if you’re going to beat him when you walk down the hallway and he happens to be there.  Melcore couldn’t kill a fly – not because he’s so humane, but because he’d be afraid of it.  He too goes outside and does something – what, we also don’t know – but never comes back with prey in his mouth, and always comes back looking for one thing:  chow.  He will scratch pitifully at the sliding glass door until we let him in, then will sit by his bowl with one arm up and bent, following our every move with his Melcore face, a pitiful clump of fur in the universe that needs food.  If he is not taken care of to his linking, he will go down the hallway and meow until someone gets up and does something for him, like feed him or let him out.  He will not eat anything but cat food, not even tuna.  Yes, he is a cat that will not eat tuna, and I think some brain damage has happened along the way.

Another bad kitty, sleeping near my electronic equipment!

He is a welfare cat and wants a handout.  He is our dependent.  Whereas Mr. Kitty could do without us, I think, and pencils us into his ever busy life of killing small animals, Melcore needs us to keep his little fat belly full, even though at the same time he might be afraid of us.  He does let us pick him up and is somewhat tolerant of the shinagins of our 9 year old boy, but, in the end, like all cats he will escape such human foolishness, and we will find him curled up and sleeping somewhere, and these days he seems to like sleeping on the clothes in our clean clothes baskets.

I’ve often thought that in heaven we will all be cats.  We’ll sleep on the windowsill in the sunshine and watch the world spin, get up to eat some chow and settle back down into our nap;  then, for some excitement, we’ll go outside and stalk a mouse – just for the fun of it.  It’s probably not the best analogy of heaven.  But I do think that, for our animals who both despise us and find a way to live with us, they have arrived.