Cats of DOOM

[Drunk Monk]

Sunday feathers here
Daughter cleans the floor (her cat)
No body. No Joe.

[Greg]

Joltin' Joe has left and gone away. Hey Hey Hey

[Drunk Monk]

Just feathers only
Just small ones. No beaks. No feet.
Easy clean up. Thanks.

[Drunk Monk]

The trap has been sprung
Cheese taken. Door failed to work.
Where is Joe?  Still here.

[cranefly]

Traps set in garden
for mousers eating 'matoes'
egads killed a bird

guilt, dismantled them
after trapping one damned mouse
clubbed it with shovel

over and over and over
beyond all haiku
Buddha laughing softly in my ear

[Drunk Monk]

A live hummingbird 
Daughter is home. It’s her cat.
Caught with a towel

[Drunk Monk]

One more hummingbird
Chased out of the bungalow
Slain outside by Dawn

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

What do hummingbirds and vampires have in common? Both are slain by the Dawn.

[cranefly]

Yeti FTW!

[Greg]

I did not want to play
But near the steps
Like from the belly disgorged
lay the gooey remnants of a bird
Near full intact
covered with goo and cat food bits.
Fat Fergus was too fat.

[Drunk Monk]

I CAUGHT JOE!

I left the live trap near my bed about a week ago and was just settling in after driving to San Diego & back within 40 hours and I hear this weird noise and think ‘wth Stacy - go to sleep already’. But no. It was Joe.

Joe is now free. Released to the wilds of Windham st. Far down the block for some other cat to catch.

Now I’m gonna get some sleep.

---

FYI you need to put the trap along the wall; that's where they like to run. .

 Great advice btw. That’s exactly where I placed the trap. Thanks!

[Drunk Monk]

Joe really deserved his own thread.

So Stacy enacted rodent-proofing in our bungalow back when Joe was our non-paying tenant, so everything is in sealed containers. We’ve kept it up since he left. 

I just did a deep cleaning of our kitchen garbage can and discovered a mouse-sized home gnawed into the bottom of our non-recyclable can. This might have been there for a while because that can is black plastic and the hood is at the bottom so it’s hard to see. I will monitor the situation and keep you updated on this gripping episode of my world.

[Greg]

Free Joe!

[cranefly]

The game never ends.  I'm sitting in my office typing away, and Halvah appears in the hallway.  She approaches me, snorting, because she always snorts, being forever Persian.  And she sits there in the doorway, impatient to play.  I get up, step ever so gently towards her, trying to get close enough for a pet.  But she backs away.  She knows.  She knows just how far away she needs to stay.  Finally she will turn and run.

I'm supposed to chase her.

With a folded-up newspaper.

And swat at her as she vanishes into the carpeted tube in the living room.

She'll sit just inside, tail sticking out, swishing.  I'll whack her butt with the newspaper until she can't stand it any longer and she runs to the other end of the tube and reverses.  So I whack her there until she runs to the other end.  She digs during the whacking.  Eventually she'll stop midway and I'll go back to resume working.

But within a minute or two she's back in the hallway, snorting, looking plaintively at me, sometimes coming closer if I ignore her.  But never close enough to catch.  Never close enough to hit with the newspaper.  She's essentially deaf, but makes up for it with an uncanny awareness of "safe distance."  She doesn't even have to be looking.  She can be looking away, licking herself, whatever, in the hallway, and try as I might I can't get close enough to whack her.

Which brings me to the shameful part.  On very rare occasions, when I'm at wit's end -- because this is hugely disruptive of any kind of concentration while working -- I will quietly, when she isn't looking, underhand the newspaper down the hallway and hit her on the rump.

This sparks a glare and an irate "meow!" from her, whereupon she retreats into the living room in a huff.

Which always reminds me of a samurai movie that DM told me about once.  The hero samurai (Mifune?) , almost beaten in the end, casts his sword at the samurai villain, stabbing him in the stomach.  The villain stands there, aghast, saying, "You threw your sword?  You threw your sword?  How could you throw your sword!"  Because the sword is such an intimate, essential part of the samurai, never to be separated from one's person.

Anyway, when Halvah gives her irate meow, I always hear, "How could you throw your sword!"

[Drunk Monk]

Shiva is gone.  Tara has taken her to UCSD.  There was a brief period after the passing of our previous cat, Redbell, and Tara's acquisition of Dawn, where we were free of cats.  But otherwise, as long as I've lived with Stacy, some 32 years now, we've always had pets, mostly cats, but for a short period between Redbell & Shiva when it was only the Pom.  I'm allergic to cats which is just as well because if I wasn't, I'd have a lot of cats.  I've learned to work around my allergies, mostly through qigong, and also by maintaining a clean room, my man cave, as a cat-free zone where I could retreat if need be.

I just dropped my family, my three ladies, wife, daughter & cat, off at the airport.  Shiva is an 'emotional support' animal, so Tara can have her in her private room in her shared dorm space in the International House.  Shiva has been an indoor/outdoor cat all her life and now must adjust to living in a small dorm room.  Fortunately, it has a large window that looks out on to a dead-end corridor of greenery where rodents live.  

I will miss Shiva a lot.  But fortunately, there's a new cat in my life.  We took a huge gamble on xmas this year and got my mom a cat.  She's always wanted one.  She had them as a child, but my grandfather hated cats and used to hunt them when he was young.  He sold his kills to labs.  Cat cadavers were really expensive to import into Hawaii.  My mom hasn't had a cat in maybe 60 years, always using my allergies as an excuse, even though I moved out decades ago and have managed living with cats for the last three decades.

My mom's new cat is about 7 years old - Mr. Skittles - a handsome grey and white cat that's quite shy.  He lived with a friend of a friend, but she's on the move and can no longer care for her.  Now Skittles has free reign of my mom's huge house, and my mom has a lap cat for her TV watching.  So far, my mom shays he's been mostly in the living room, either burrowed under the sofa or watching from the front window sill.  I'll report more upon my next check-in visit with my mom next week.