demands

There a lot of things that evoke homicidal urges, albeit fewer now that I don't work in food service, which is frankly TOO much interaction with the underbelly of humanity to maintain equanimity off the clock. One thing that really sets off the boil is the @!$%^$ cat screeching at 2am, or 4am, or 1am, or any am except the am at which we are meant to be done sleeping. You see, she takes our middle of the night bathroom breaks as a cue to begin Operation Breakfast. It used to be the signal for her "midnight" snack, which we managed to eradicate about two months ago. What does the operation entail? She goes into the bathroom and howls at the top of her little lungs. For extra acoustic fervor, she will get into the tub where it echoes off the porcelain. Crafty little shit. Sometimes a harshly toned "HEY" is enough to settle the issue with short-lived results. But I finally figured out a solution that makes her go silent after about three minutes, and you will find it in the last line of today's first haiku.

howling falsetto
rings in my ears until I
shut the bathroom door

//

her belly sways as
she scurries to the window
to binge and purge plants

top picture: the kitchen sink of our apartment in Atlanta (pre-dog), August 2008, digital 
bottom picture: same apartment, demanding food, May 2008, digital 

This brief feline interlude has been brought to you by a very stressful little thing called Moving in December.  'Tis the season for overcommitment!  I know it doesn't rhyme, but I don't have time to agonize over syntax right now (or to wonder if I used the word syntax correctly).

As you can see from the way she's clutching the drawer, Fatty could care less that there are moving boxes in one corner of the apartment and piles of clothes heading to Beacon's all over the bed.  Petey, on the other hand, has been even more fidgety than usual and will occasionally let out a harrowing wail as he paces from one end of the apartment to the other.  He's taken to laying all over the boxes in a very obvious display of denial.

Long story short, our landlord is coming home to her apartment in January, and our sublet in the stodgy but oh so well located co-op is over.  Our next step?  Moving down the hall.  Seriously.  There's an empty apartment that is available for sublet and after much stalling and nail biting, we should receive the keys sometime* today.  I'm leery of telling the whole story here on the interwebs, otherwise known as naked land where everything is permanent and accessible to prying eyes.  Basically, it did not need to be this drawn out and ridiculously close to not happening in time for both christmas and the end of our lease.  Certain parties involved wanted certain things that they should not have been entitled too, but they negotiated their way into what they wanted at the expense of my sanity.  Yes, we could have tried harder to find another rental that wouldn't have involved such waiting and lack of control, but who wouldn't want to move down the hall? to a brighter apartment? and pay the same rent?  and live in exactly the same location that you were depressed about leaving?  So I suppose it was worth it.

*I say sometime because, in keeping with all other communication with these people, we have not been told when the owner is planning to stop by today.

haphazard mouseketeers

As I was eating breakfast today, I noticed that the cats were nowhere to be seen. Usually after her morning eat-a-thon, Fatty sprawls out on the carpet and stares at me while I try to read the newspaper (at least a week old because I'm perpetually bad at reading it the day we receive it). I asked Charrow if she had seen the cats and she said, "yeah, they're both laying in the bathroom."

You might think, "oh how cute. They're having a slumber party." Do you know what I think? VERMIN. As in, a 4 to possibly 8-legged intruder has crossed the threshold, and they are hunkered down in a stakeout with an intent to maim, kill, and eat whatever they find.

I went into the bathroom and found Fatty in a crouch, staring at the cabinet that houses the 19 tubes of toothpaste I bought on amazon subscribe & save. I aimed the flashlight at the baseboard behind the cabinet and sure enough, I saw the distinct curve of a mouse tail.

My bright idea was to catch him. Charrow thought it was futile. We armed ourselves with square tupperware, barricaded the crack under the door with a towel (how awful would it be if we tried to save the mouse from imminent slaughter and then accidentally shuttled him out of the bathroom and into the cats' death pen?), and blocked the closet door.

Charrow moved the cabinet and the mouse moved with it. I saw the flash of a tail, but the mouse remained hidden in Fort Toothpaste. There was just too much surface area for him to stay under while the cabinet moved, so we didn't have any hope of catching him that way. Charrow was ready to give up the hunt, but I refused to leave it up to the cats, so I suggested we squirt him with water to flush him out. She humored me and squirted in the mouse's direction a few times, but instead of seeing a flash of gray streak across the floor, all we heard was a disgruntled squeak.

The next strategy was to lift one end of the cabinet, but then charrow would be rendered useless, and I would be responsible for catching the mouse. Neither of us thought that was a good idea, so instead, she started dramatically shifting the cabinet around. The mouse ran past her feet, around the litter box blocking the closet door, and disappeared. We thought he had somehow managed to squeeze into the miniscule crack beneath the closet door, but that seemed impossible, so charrow poked at the towel covering the escape route under bathroom door. Sure enough, the mouse was tucked into a fold of the towel. Charrow tried to get her tupperware around him, but the wily little guy managed to zip right out from under her and back to Dry Goods Manor. In a moment of weakness, I said "what did you do?!" which could have turned the expedition into a sour finger-pointing game, but Charrow took it in stride, and I realized it was ridiculous to think that I could have done a better job.

At that point, we both surveyed the futility of the situation. Large bumbling humans. Tiny, lightning fast rodent. But I couldn't bring myself to let the animal kingdom decide the winner of the game, so we kept at it. A few more nudges of the cabinet, and the mouse was back out in the open. I screamed involuntarily because this time he ran towards my side of the bathroom in an attempt to get out the door, but he got caught between the towel barricade* and an industrial sized bag of baking soda (for the litter box).

I don't know HOW she did it, but when the mouse found a way out of his corner and was headed back to the safe house, Charrow threw her tupperware over him and viola! the hunt was over. The mouse ran in frantic squares under the plastic cage, and then just sat there while Charrow slid a magazine under the tupperware to seal him in for the release portion of the expedition. We took him up the street a couple of blocks to the wooded area that divides the neighborhood road from the main Grand Army Plaza thoroughfare. Thankfully, the city that never sleeps isn't early to rise on Sundays. We didn't pass a soul in the elevator or on the street. When we got back to the apartment, Fatty was basking in the glory of the living room rug like nothing had ever happened.

*This would have been a very different story without that towel. It's a small apartment, but can you imagine trying to find a mouse the size of a lemon before two bloodthirsty hunting machines?

the precipice of poo

I'm having a crisis of pet ownership. If you're not in the mood for a long-winded story about cats and/or cat poo, this is not the post for you. But if you, too, have struggled to find a decent pet sitter or have worried about what to do with your furry friends when you leave for that vacation you've been aching to go on, stick around.

The woman who lives above us has two cats. When we first moved in we could hear the cats running from one end of the apartment to the other and occasionally sounding the war cry of feline engagement. At some point, I met the woman in the elevator and mentioned to her that we knew she had cats and would be happy to cat sit if she ever needed it. She told me thanks, but she already has a cat sitter. I considered my neighborly duty done and thanked her for reciprocating the gesture. I was hesitant to take her up on her offer to visit our cats, but I finally broke down and called her one weekend (that's right, I used the phone). As it happens, she wasn't available, but she recommended her own cat sitter, who for the purposes of this post we shall call Wanda.

I called Wanda, and immediately knew she was a little...different. She answered her phone while riding her bicycle and proceeded to have a conversation with me while talking to the cars driving around her. I used to talk (sometimes yell) to other cars while I was driving so I wrote it off as stream of consciousness. Wanda said she would be happy to come by and meet the kidz (as she later referred to them in our email exchanges). Great! A last minute arrangement that will keep Fatty from gorging herself in the first hour of our departure and thus starving the stressed out Petey while we go away for a weekend.

Wanda was opinionated, to say the least. She rides an aging bike that has a seat made of hot pink duct tape. She frowned upon our use of dry food. She was against calling our more rotund cat "Fatty." She had several welcome suggestions for vets. When she left I felt like I had been reprimanded by my mother, but I also felt relieved that someone who seemed knowledgeable and experienced was going to be visiting the hairballs in our absence.

Jump ahead 6 months. After several trial runs of different brands, we've switched the cats to wet food. Wanda now visits them twice a day instead of once a day while we're out of town - a concession that I made after a particularly heinous shit storm of a weekend where there were explosive butt problems and a snow storm that stranded us in MD, much to Wanda's amazement. Backstory: Wanda was convinced the cats were sick. I, after checking out the manufacturers website, was convinced that they (mostly Fatty) had eaten too much food at one time because they were only being fed once a day. Ironic that "organic" "healthy" food can make them crap all over the world if they eat too much of it. I appreciated Wanda's concern and explained the transportation situation (nope, our Amtrak train was cancelled. yes, there really aren't any flights. um, if Amtrak is cancelled, I'm not about to book a bus that's probably not running to drive up a snow blitzed I-95). She was appalled at my inability to return home and proceeded to make me feel terrible for not walking 300 miles to see about some explosive diarrhea.

We recovered from the shit storm and vowed to have Wanda come twice a day to space out the rich food. I asked her not to feed them treats. We came home to find a treat on the desk, evidence of either her spilling pockets or her completely ignoring my request (I'm going to vote for the latter given that her email response to my treat-free request was "HA!"). After our most recent trip of 4 days, there were shit smears on the carpet, litter blobs scattered across the apartment, a nice squishy surprise on the bathroom floor, and the rogue treat left on the desk. In an effort to find out just what happens when she's here -- so as to avoid accusing her of overfeeding the cats or not paying attention to whether fatty eats everything -- I sent Wanda an email asking her to describe how the visits play out. The response I got was less than informative. In fact, it was infuriatingly vague.

Is she overfeeding the cats? Hard to say. Does she give them treats? Probably. Would there be butt smears on the carpet anyway? Quite possible, considering there was one waiting for us when we got up this morning. Do I feel well informed and confident that Wanda will comply with my requests? Not in the slightest.

Needless to say, I would like to discontinue Wanda's services. I have snooped around the interweb looking for a replacement (currently waiting to hear back from ProspectBArk!), and just yesterday I asked another woman that lives in my building for recommendations. I ran into this woman picking out cat food at the local pet supply store, so I figured it was safe to ask for her advice. She rattled off Wanda's name and started fiddling with her fanny pack to see if she had Wanda's phone number with her.

I almost let the woman give me Wanda's info without telling her that I would prefer to never call Wanda again, but I decided to be honest. I told the woman that I actually use Wanda now, but I'm not very happy with her. The woman nodded in agreement and we proceeded to have a conversation about how she doesn't have very much confidence in Wanda either, but she's been using Wanda for so long that she couldn't think about finding someone else. The woman has an older cat that needs to be medicated and instead of asking Wanda to do it, the woman has arranged for her sister to come down from Massachusetts to take care of her cats.

Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture? Why in the world is this woman loyal to a service provider that is not providing good service?? She said outright that Wanda is not good with her female cat. She agreed that Wanda does not have good communication skills. But "she's reliable and I've used her for so long"...

If Wanda is reliably bad, who cares if she shows up when you need her? If your car mechanic continued to do a mediocre repair job, would you say "yeah, he doesn't really fix my car, but at least he works on it every time I bring it to him?"

Yes, it's uncomfortable to sever a long standing business relationship. I've only been using Wanda for about 10 months, and I feel weird about having to see her everywhere (she cat sits for like half of our building and walks/shuffles with 2 jack russell terriers that live on the corner of our street). But we're talking about the welfare of your pets here. I'm willing to put up with the awkwardness of seeing someone I've essentially broken up with in order to feel good about the kind of care my cats are receiving while I'm gone.

Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I'm on the precipice of dealing with an older cat that is just going to poo on things when I'm out of town (or when I'm in town and sitting on the couch). I can't say for sure until I try out another cat sitter and see what happens. What I can say for sure is that I don't have a good feeling about Wanda, and sometimes that's enough to say "No, thanks."

*Today's picture is of Fatty and Laura, the best neighbor/friend/cat sitter in the world. Sadly, she lives in Atlanta and we live in Brooklyn.