Photos taken by my husband, the lovely and talented Murdock Scott!

Cats have had their paws in world politics since ancient Egypt. Now, under the leadership of Chairman Meow, they are ready to launch their bid for feline world domination. Show that you support your cat’s radical ideology before it’s too late!

I haven’t felt much like posting lately. I’ve been sick and just not in the mood to write. I’m still not in the mood to write but it’s been almost a week so I’m going to try to think of some things that won’t bore you, my two readers, to tears.

I’m working from home this week, because our building at work is undergoing renovations. They’ve ripped out the ceilings, some walls, a bunch of doors, and have turned off the air conditioning. Oh, did I mention that they didn’t find new places for everyone in the building to work during the duration? No, people are expected to show up, sit at their desks, suffer through the sweltering heat and humidity, breathe in dust and asbestos and mold and god only knows what else that’s floating around in the air, and tolerate the incessant drilling and hammering noises. It’s only because my boss is freaking awesome that I’m allowed to work at home while all this is going on.

I wish we could have cats at work. It would decrease the stress level. They are SO CUTE when they are trying to get your attention. Neko has been all over me, all day long.  She’s either lounging on my desk, or trying to drape her formidable bulk across my mousing hand, or purring and licking my fingers, or trying various other things to get me to pay attention to her. I might set up a cat-cam tomorrow.

“Ha! I wrap myself around your teacup and leave you no room to mouse! PET ME!”

The other thing that happened last week – the building flooded AGAIN. We had a rainstorm Thursday night and it was heavy enough to flood our floor for the FOURTH time in the three years we’ve been there. Just like last time, they did not bother to take up the carpets or dry them out adequately. I am sure the mold is growing like crazy. It smelled pretty bad when I went in on Monday afternoon.

I can’t understand why the higher-ups are continuously and consistently willing to let their people work in a building that by all rights should not be occupied during heavy construction periods (including during the asbestos abatement from last December, when they insisted that the air quality was just fine but refused to show us air test results), or why they seem perfectly happy to let mold grow underneath our feet and enter our lungs when it repeatedly floods.

It just seems to me like there should be a lawsuit mentioned. I have half a mind to pry up some carpet tiles and take some photographs of what’s certainly growing underneath.

Anyway.

I was sick enough over the weekend that I couldn’t go down to Austin with Kathryn, to visit Debbie and tour the wildflowers of Central Texas. I’m bummed about that; I was looking forward to a girls’ weekend! Food, drinks, giggles, M&Ms, staying up till at least 11 p.m…. god I’m old. I hope that we can reschedule for a little later this spring.

We have termites. EW! TERMITES! We paid a painful amount of money for the pest control people to come out and shoot poison into the ground around our house and drill through our foundation to shoot poison underneath the house too. I absolutely hate poisoning the ground but don’t know what else to do to get rid of those little fuckers. I don’t think they managed to do too much damage though. I’m just glad we caught them before they SWARMED. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. Once they poke out through your walls, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it’s time to look for a new place to nest, and they come shooting out the little holes they’ve made in your walls, one after another after another, and fly around until they find a suitable structure to eat. INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. We scotch-taped over their little holes in the walls so they couldn’t get out, forcing them back underground where the poison is (hopefully). However, this afternoon we noticed a bunch of them swarming around in our front yard. No idea where that batch came from; maybe from someone else’s yard, or the creek behind us. Anyway, apparently today was swarm day so I’m really glad we caught our infestation in time. EW!

Doc did some very cute husbandly stuff over the past few days – today he sprayed that termite swarm in the front yard, and also got rid of a wasp nest that was being built by our garage door. Damn paper wasps. Over the weekend he also fixed my shower; one of the springy washers in the faucet finally disintegrated and the shower wouldn’t stop spraying. He turned off the water to the house, after scooping about a cubic yard of yucky stuff out of the water main access hole in our sidewalk, and went to Home Depot and – surprisingly – found the right replacement bit for the faucet. I say “surprisingly” because nothing in our house is standard size, or made by companies that still exist. We really need to replace the whole faucet though, and for that we have to go down to Teter’s on Gaston to get the right kind. Apparently it’s the only place in town that stocks this old nonexistant brand anymore.

So I celebrated Earth Day by not only telecommuting (which saved about 1/4 gallon of gas and 14 miles on the Prius), but also by being a responsible tree caregiver and having our trees trimmed. The price wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, and they look great. Our backyard looks much roomier and a bit sunnier now that the 30-foot tall Bradford Pear has been “lifted and thinned,” as they call it, and our ginormous Land of the Lost Buford Hollies growing in the courtyard are still about 15 feet tall, but much thinner and lighter now. We were afraid they might bend and crack under their own weight. I’d post a photo, but without a “before” shot it really won’t look like much to you.

Corporal snuggling works wonders on misbehaving kitties. It annoys them, and makes you feel better!

All our cats’ brains are abnormal. Martini’s brain is taken up mostly by the short circuit lobe and the “inability to get along with a new cat” area; Neko (like Leslie’s cat Bob) has an enlarged barf gland; and Loki’s obsessive compulsive disorder originates in the “total drive to be where they are forbidden to go” cortex.

All three of our cats are normally very fastidious with their bathroom habits. Loki and Neko never ever go outside the litterbox. However, Martini is a little pickier and she does not like using a box that one of the other two cats has recently used… and if it’s not to her liking, she poops on the rug instead.

This is a little irritating but totally manageable. Poop is easy to pick up and get rid of, and a spritz of Lysol and a light scrub brushing over the area takes care of the problem.

Pee, however, is another story.

Only once before has Martini ever peed outside the litterbox, and that was about eight years ago when we switched the cat litter to the crystal style granules — which we loved but the cats hated, and Martini let us know in no uncertain terms by squatting on the rug next to the box while I was scooping it out and peeing right in front of me. Yes ma’am, message received, we’re switching back to clay litter.

A few nights ago she decided again that she didn’t want to use the litterbox that one of her siblings had recently used, but this time instead of just pooping on the rug, she peed on a piece of plastic sheeting that we had accidentally left lying on the rug.

Cardinal rule #1 for cat owners: Don’t ever leave plastic sheeting lying around; it is an irrestistible cat pee magnet.

Oopsie.

Luckily for us, the pee was contained within a little pool on the plastic and did not make its way to the rug. We were actually downstairs watching television at the time this happened, and only discovered it when Martini waltzed by and we caught the distinct odor of cat pee. It was all over her; splashback, I guess.

So she got a bath! The first one in her whole life. She was surprisingly relaxed throughout the whole thing, probably because she had no idea what was going on or why in the world we would dip her into a sink full of water. Shock makes one complacent. We got her all soaped up with lavender shampoo, rinsed and towel dried, and she was as good as new. No grudges, and no reoccurences of The Incident. So far, anyway.

I wish I’d thought to take a picture of her with her back half all wet and skinny, but I just didn’t think about it in time.

Hopefully now she equates “pee on the rug” with “get a bath” in her mind.

I should probably also mention here that I had a summer job one year in high school at a pet grooming shop, washing cats. I guess they put the newest and youngest employees on cat-washing duty. I still have scars, both physical and mental. Whenever the subject of “worst job you’ve ever had” comes up, that one is usually the winner.

If you have to work in an office, wouldn’t it be great to work in one that looked like this?

I bet you didn’t know that each year, November 19 is World Toilet Day. In celebration, you can attend the World Toilet Summit:

A major world conference devoted to toilet provision and standards, the Summit sees delegates from all over the world attending conferences, experts’ forums, seminars, toilet exhibitions, network meetings and amazing toilet tours.

Heck, I’m all for working to provide better sanitation to the underpriveleged, and perhaps convincing certain cultures to dispense with the astounding habit of using one’s left hand to wipe one’s bum instead of toilet paper. I just didn’t know there was an organization devoted to all things potty.

You know the “In a world….” guy? The guy who does all the movie trailers, like “In a world, where nightmares come true…” Oh yeah, you are thinking, THAT guy! Well, there’s him and like four other guys who do all that kind of voiceover work. Check out this video on YouTube where they all get together. I had a hard time connecting the images of real live human beings talking with their voices, but as soon as I closed my eyes it was crystal clear. Kind of like when I see someone like Seth Green or Dan Castellaneta talking, I can’t really hear any of their characters’ voices but as soon as I close my eyes I can. Weird!

Also: I made my first lolcat!

I can’t say that I completely understand the phenomenon, probably because I’m too old to have caught this wave when it started.

This one is Bob’s cat Marley:

Doc and I went to a cat show on Saturday. Our friends Michael and Jill have a Norwegian Forest Cat that they have begun entering in cat shows.

I had a preconceived notion of what cat shows were like, and I was none too surprised to learn that it was being held at a convention hall tacked on to a Holiday Inn next to a rodeo arena in Mesquite. I imagined that it would be full of yowling, unhappy cats and their stage-mom-crazy owners who would give off a notable “white trash” vibe. Oh, and that the place would smell like a giant litterbox.

I was right on the latter two counts, but surprisingly the unhappy meows were few and far between. Most of the cats had a glazed look in their eyes indicating that they’d long ago given up trying to fight this unnatural lifestyle of baths, back-combing for maximum fluff, eye makeup (I’m totally serious), and manhandling by strangers poking their fingers in their mouths and looking up their back ends.

Michael and Jill were a notable exception to this, of course, and their cat (a kitten, actually, at 7 months) was very sweet and a bit frightened at times. When it was Ghali’s turn in the show cage, he was alert and attentive and talkative. I think he won at least one ribbon.

We got an information sheet with our entrance fee, which explained in the Junior Showmanship section that “young people are important to the sport of pedigreed cats.” Wait, now: pedigreed cats are a sport? That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? I don’t remember having a Pedigreed Cats team at my high school or anything like that. Also, I find the names the people give their fancy purebred cats rather ridiculous. Coonunnski Teton Cody of Star Coons, Nascat Waving the Checkers!, Terrificats La Joya Negra DM (makes it sound like the cat has a doctoral degree), Idlemaine Dream Maker. I assume that these cats also have “familiar” names like Misty or Neko or Muffin and that these aristocratic names are for show purposes.

Doc thought that my preconceived notion was utterly preconceived, but afterwards he agreed with me.

We purchased an awesome cat toy at one of the merchandise booths: a little tiny hedgehog with plasticky-feeling fur on the end of a wire attached to a pole. Loki absolutely adores the hedgehog, and is performing acrobatics like I’ve never seen before.

I had a terrible dream last night. I woke up this morning crying and shaking. If you are sensitive to stories about animals getting injured, please don’t read this. I know I’m going to have a hard time typing it out.

I was in a hospital, foll0wing around the “Dr. Cox” character played by John C. McGinley on “Scrubs.” I carried five fresh artichokes with me, and a paring knife. I would occasionally stop and cut off the bottom or top of an artichoke to reveal the insides. In my dream, artichoke middles contained little metal rods with beautiful sparkling glitter and glass beads on top.

I followed Dr. Cox into a patient’s room, and he said that the patient had total amnesia and had no idea who he was. We had to help him remember. I thought I recognized him and said “Brandon?” But it wasn’t who I thought it was. My cat Neko was in the room, lounging on the bottom floor of her cat tower.

A nurse opened the door to the patient’s room and the “Sun” and “Jin” characters from “LOST” walked in carrying baseball bats. The only way to help the patient remember who he was, was for them to hit Neko with the baseball bats. I was terribly upset about this but knew that it was the only way, and it was very important so we had to do it. They took turns smashing her with the bats. I could hear her little leg bones breaking; they made sounds like shattering glass. She wasn’t protesting; she just lay there passively letting them do their work.

I knew that if they hit her in the head they would kill her so I tried to turn her around so her rear legs were facing them instead of her head. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I threw myself on top of her, shielding her from the blows and crying “Please stop, you’ll kill her, please don’t.” Vaguely in the background I heard the patient suddenly remember his identity. I was too busy crying to care, and I couldn’t remember why murdering my cat would help this guy and why I would let anyone do this to her.

The absolute saddest part of this whole thing, the part that is making me cry even now, is that Neko knowingly sacrificed herself to help a complete stranger. She knew she was going to die and she did it anyway.

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I heard rap music coming through somebody’s closed car windows. A few minutes later I woke up slightly, and realized that I was actually hearing the incredibly loud, rhythmic purring of Neko standing on Doc and kneading him in his sleep.

Brittney and I watched the Fair Park fireworks show tonight. The weather was unusually temperate for July in Texas – my weather widget says 85 right now, an hour after the show began, but it didn’t feel that warm. We staked out a choice spot on the Buckner/Peavy hill, and while the show was kind of far away, we had a completely unobstructed view of downtown, the lake, and the display. Big bonus: There were maybe 100 people total at our spot, so we had no problem whatsoever with traffic.

Afterwards we walked over to a little playground that probably dates from the 1950s or 1960s, and sat on the teeter-totter for a while (or “see-saw” if you prefer). It was solid metal, built out of pipes. It had been painted many times over and the paint had flaked off into different layers. The seats were just metal rectangles and they weren’t so kind to grown-up thighs. Note to self: wear jeans. Note to Brittney: maybe not a miniskirt next time. Good thing it was dark!

And just for amusement’s sake, here is a photo of my crazy Martini. Check out that insane look in her eyes. She loves crawling underneath blankets and poking her head out.