MY LIFE AS A CAT, by Charlie

Chloe and I have been living here for 14 months now, and we are making reasonably good progress toward our goal of taking over the household.  Of course, the main obstacle continues to be Mom.  We are trying to train her to be our slave, but she is very obstinate and slow, in terms of adopting the proper attitude and learning the proper skills. But we cats have lots of patience, besides having 9 lives, so we are sure to prevail in the end.








Ever since we first came here -- well, ever since we started coming out of our room on a regular basis -- we have felt it was one of our main responsibilities to check and make sure Mom is still alive, especially when she is lying in bed.  So we often stick our faces in Mom's face to find out if she is breathing.  So far, she always has been, which is good, because we don't want her to wake up dead someday, like our first mom did.

The only problem is that Mom does not really like a nice kitty face sniffing at her in the middle of the night.  She says our whiskers tickle her and make her have to rub her face so that the tickly feeling will go away.  This seems silly to me, but that's what she says.

I guess it goes without saying that life would be lots better without those dumb dogs around, but I don't know how we can get rid of them, so we just have to make them at least respect us.  The three boy dogs are really not too terrible, and they pretty much ignore Chloe and me, but that crazy Piper is always coming up and sniffing at me like she wants to be best buddies or something.  I find that notion totally preposterous, so I am forced to hiss at her to make her keep her distance.

Barry is maybe the nicest of the dogs, in spite of calling himself the Alpha Dog.  I even let him get on the bed with me sometimes, or I sit on the office floor just a few feet from where he is sleeping.  So far, nothing terrible has happened in either circumstance, so I'm beginning to think it might be safe to do these kinds of things.

I like to sleep with Mom at night, although I don't usually spend the whole night in bed with her.  In the winter, I liked curling up under the covers with her, but now it is very hot summer weather, and cuddling is not such a fun activity.  But with the ceiling fan running, it's usually cool enough that I can sleep next to Mom without getting overheated.  Chloe sleeps with Mom sometimes, too, but not nearly as much as she did in the winter.

And speaking of Chloe, she continues to be naughty, but she's more careful now about doing her naughty stuff when Mom can't catch her at it.  Every morning when Mom and the dogs first get up, Mom opens the back door to let the dogs out, and Chloe runs outside, too.  She used to just sneak out a few feet from the door, but now she goes all the way across the patio.  The reason she goes out there is to eat some grass.  It's like every single morning she has to have her little grass salad before breakfast.  At bedtime, she likes to go out on the patio and hunt bugs under the floodlight.  Mom is trying to be more careful not to shut Chloe out of the house.  I don't usually go outside, myself, although I have ventured cautiously out on a few occasions.  Mostly I like to go in the basement when Mom is doing laundry.  One night she didn't notice I was down there, and she shut the door and then went to bed.  I had to meow and meow until she came and let me out of the basement.

Anyway, that is just another example of how much training we still need to do with Mom.  If she had any good sense, she would just leave the basement door open all the time, so that we could go down there anytime and snoop among the cobwebs.  Another training project we've undertaken is trying to get Mom out of bed earlier in the mornings, but we've only had moderate success with this.  At least she now gets up at 6:30 instead of 7:00, but it took a lot of work to make even that small change in the daily schedule.  Those lazy dogs don't seem to care how late Mom sleeps -- well, except for that tall dog, Nicky.  He usually needs to go outside and pee by 6:30, so he's actually been a pretty good ally in helping us train Mom.

I could go on at some length about all the goals Chloe and I have, but I think I will leave those for another blog entry.  I just remembered that Piper said I should tell you that she is having to spend the whole day again today at the vet's office, so you had better feel sorry for her (which I don't, personally, but if you want to, go ahead).  Today Piper is getting tested for Cushing's Disease.  I'm not sure why it's an all-day affair, but it is.

The results of Piper's bloodwork from last week didn't tell us exactly what is wrong with her, but Dr. Griswald talked to an internist, and the internist said maybe Piper has leptospirosis.  So the lab is testing for that, too.  Mom read about leptospirosis on the internet, and she didn't think it sounded like what Piper has, but what does she know?  She's not a veterinarian, after all.  The results of Piper's urinalysis didn't show much of anything except a low specific gravity, which means that Piper's urine is dilute and watery.  The bacteria culture hasn't finished growing yet, so we don't know if Piper has a UTI or not.  If you want my opinion, I think she's basically lazy and is just trying to get some attention.  But don't tell her I said that!