Considerate [BW][Long]
Yowie
air-conditioned. So consequently the only bad thing about being on 5
weeks vacation over summer was the lack of air-conditioning (and clean
fresh, bushfire-smoke-filtered-out air)
Shmogg doesn't usually sleep on my bed during summer. It’s a
fact that I have had to get used to. I don't know quite why he doesn't
like sleeping on my bed in summer – I have a queen sized bed all
to myself and since neither Shmogg nor I can cope with coming into
direct skin-fur contact (I’m allergic and get really itchy,
don't ask me what his problem is) its not like we are going to make
sharing the bed an uncomfortably hot and sticky task. Heck, there's
been many a cold winter night when I've awoken to find myself huddled
all in one corner, with Shmogg claiming the remaining seven eights of
the bed. The lack of purrs on a hot summer nights I guess will always
remain one of those inscrutable mysteries of catly behaviour
The fact that he consistently doesn't sleep on my bed does not of
course stop me from trying to tempt me from getting him to do so.
There are various tricks, ranging from the subtle methods of making
intriguing scritching bed-mice sounds from under the sheets to the
more combat assault - pick-up-and-plonk methods. None actually work of
course, but I guess I' must be an optimist at heart (or just really
hard to train, take your pick). But even if I can get him to come onto
the bed, he'll accept a bit of loving and then go and sit on the sill
of the open window, allowing the breeze to cool his fur and making
enough spooky partial silhouettes through my vertical blinds to scare
me stupid several times a week.
Al through my vacation, with both the decadent
oversleeping-of-the-alarm nightly sleep and the blissfully indulgent
afternoon nap, I have done my level best to be purred to sleep, to no
avail. As some form of compromise (or a way of teasing me) Shmogg has
adopted as his actual sleeping place the chair my laundry uses to
relax in before making their way to the floor. And of course, being a
long term member of the family, he has adopted the nocturnal traits of
his fellow house mates and snores like mad when asleep. The sound of
Shmogg snoring in my room, Joel snoring in his room, and Fluff playing
destructo-doggy in her room, despite being quite loud and disturbing
to regular people, is a summer lullaby to me. But a kitty purring me
to sleep is even better.
During my summer holidays I had vowed to actually read. I am proud
that I have finally read Stranger in A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
(although I still don't get what all the fuss over it was about),
re-read an old favourite "The Princess and Purdie" managed to finish
the last two pages of "Guards Guards" by Terry Pratchett just before I
went to work last Monday. And although I cut it right to the last
minute, I did actually finish three whole books on my vacation, which
is an achievement for me these days.
It was Shmogg's fault that I cut it so fine though. For Christmas I
got a reading light for my bedroom. As much as I love sitting up in
bed reading, I really hate having the ceiling light glare into my eyes
while I'm stuck with reading a book that is mostly in the shadows.
What I really wanted was a light that shone over my shoulder and onto
the book. The wonderful reading lamp finally solved the problem. But
with all the bushfires and other mad family goings on, the first real
opportunity I got to *really* use the new reading light was the last
Saturday Night of my vacation. The Last Saturday Night was the last
opportunity I had to relax in bed while also being able to read and
read and read until I literally fell asleep at some hideous time of
the early morning. There is almost nothing more blissful in my mind
than being left in peace to read in the most comfortable peace of
furniture in the house. (Reading in a candle-lit, champagne supplied
bubble bath is the only thing that beats it).
But of course I have a b*st*rd cat. All the plans of mice & men are
ruined by b*st*rd cats.
I settled down with "Guards Guards", we were just getting to the
climax of the story, when Shmogg jumped on the bed and headbumped me.
And turned and purred and bumped me again. I scratched distractedly,
waiting for the Guards to re-instate the Patrician and make everything
Normal again. Shmogg, of course, had other ideas. Having seen that the
book was the centre of attention and not himself, he took to
headbonking the book, jolting it just enough to disturb the image of
corporal Cotton and the Dragon in my mind's eye. There was nothing for
it really. I rolled onto my side so that I could scritch Shmogg to his
satisfaction, and laid the open book down onto the bed so that Shmogg
couldn't violently headbonk it out of my clutches.
I guess it was inevitable really. Within a nanosecond of the book
becoming a horizontal surface, there was a catbutt firmly planted upon
it. The butt was quickly followed up by stomach and chest, carefully
concealing every single printed letter on the open double page (but no
more) with his fat and fuzzy form. He meatloafed himself into a
position that could be maintained for an indefinite period and started
power purring.
Every single sodding night since about September when we packed up the
heater and unpacked the fan, have I wanted a power purring kitty on my
bed. For *months* I had been persuading him, cajoling him, begging
him, and kidnapping him to stay on the bed with me and sing me to
sleep with his precious power purring, and every single night he has
denied me this singularly unique pleasure – until I had only two
pages to go before I finished a really good book.
I have this theory that cats are not made up of the normal space dust
that the rest of the universe is made from. Cats don't like being
restricted by some dumb universal law of thermodynamics, and have
adapted so that their mass and volume are constant, unless they are
acted upon *by the force of the will of the cat*. My proof is that
normal solids cannot expand to take up a whole bed, or contract to fit
behind the fridge and then expand again so as to be absolutely stuck.
Regular everyday matter, from the smallest particle to giant black
holes have a consistent mass, except that a cat jump from the top of
the fridge to the floor and decrease their mass so that they still
make less noise than a pin dropped from the same height, and in this
case Shmogg increased his usual approximately 6kg mass into the
mythical immovable object.
There's nothing quite so horribly frustrating than being denied the
satisfaction of finishing a book when you know you are only minutes
from the end (much like when one is interrupted just before putting
the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle). I wasn't going to take this
sort of nonsense from a mere cat who on every other day of summer
wants nothing to do with me. In a fit of completely futile
stubbornness, I *tried* to move Shmogg. I tried pushing him off the
book, shoving him off the book, even tipping him of the book. And
while I could lift the book up with Shmogg on it, Shmogg himself could
not be lifted from the book. I muttered and cursed and said some
terrible things about his ancestry, but in the end had to admit
defeat. Shmogg wasn't going anywhere, and I had bloody well better
deal with it.
Besides, the power purrs were working their magic. I was getting very
very sleepy, despite the fact I only had two pages to go……
We had a lot on during the Sunday and there was no chance whatsoever
during the day of resuming reading "Guards Guards" where I left off.
And by the time bedtime (early bedtime, work on Monday) had rolled
around, I had come up with a cunning plan.
Instead of my regular ritual of begging, pleading, cajoling,
persuading, wheedling and grovelling to Shmogg for him to stay on my
bed and purr me to sleep, I acted like I didn't care.
I turned the reading light on, feeling right proud of myself. I turned
the bedroom light off, thinking how damn clever I was. I got into bed
with the smile of the righteous. Full of confidence in my own
intractable cunning, I placed the open copy of "Guards Guards!" in the
exact location it was the night before. And then I called Shmogg over,
tempting him with my carefully laid out trap.
He came over all right. Straight over, in fact. One foot on the
forehead, next foot into the left boob, another into the right. All
feet landed into the bladder region as he took a flying leap from my
trampled and prone body to the windowsill, pulling the last vestiges
of chain at the bottom of the blinds out in the process.
"Guards Guards" was carefully aimed with pin-point accuracy and
therefore it should have come as no surprise to me that it so
completely missed B*st*rd Cat and landed instead at the exact point
where it would topple over and fall in the small, precisely "Guards
Guards" shaped crevice at the back of Shmogg's sleeping chair, which
is far to heavy for me to move by myself at that time of night. But
damned if I was going to finish my vacation without finishing that
book.
Which is ho I cam to be reading the last two pages of "Guards Guards"
early on the morning of the first Monday after my vacation. Shmogg was
helpful too, he bit my big toe to wake me up for his breakfast fifteen
minutes before the alarm was due to go off instead of his usual five
– which gave me precisely the extra time I needed to read those
two pages. He's nothing but a considerate B*str*d cat.
John F. Eldredge
Hash: SHA1
On 13 Jan 2002 19:44:00 -0800, yowi...@yahoo.com.au (Yowie) wrote:
>He came over all right. Straight over, in fact. One foot on the
>forehead, next foot into the left boob, another into the right. All
>feet landed into the bladder region as he took a flying leap from my
>trampled and prone body to the windowsill, pulling the last vestiges
>of chain at the bottom of the blinds out in the process.
When I was 14, we had an adolescent cat who would spend the night
outside. In the morning, my mother would let him into the house, and
he would gallop up the stairs, leap onto my bed, and come down with
all four legs stiff, so as to get a nice springboard effect. One
morning, I happened to be asleep on my back, on the near edge of the
bed. When he leaped up, instead of landing on the mattress, he
landed squarely in the pit of my stomach. So, my awakening that day
was by having all of the air knocked out of me!
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--
John F. Eldredge -- eldr...@earthlink.net, eldr...@poboxes.com
PGP key available from http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371
"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power;
not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."
Woodrow Wilson
Byron & Christine Burel
Byron & Christine Burel
> air-conditioned. So consequently the only bad thing about being on 5
> weeks vacation over summer was the lack of air-conditioning (and clean
> fresh, bushfire-smoke-filtered-out air)
>
(long hilarious story)
> Which is ho I cam to be reading the last two pages of "Guards Guards"
> early on the morning of the first Monday after my vacation. Shmogg was
> helpful too, he bit my big toe to wake me up for his breakfast fifteen
> minutes before the alarm was due to go off instead of his usual five
> – which gave me precisely the extra time I needed to read those
> two pages. He's nothing but a considerate B*str*d cat.
Yowie, let me take my hat off to you, madam, what a fine bit of storytelling
you do! Great imagery, suspense building, and plot development! I laughed
myself silly over this, and I do appreciate your sharing your story of
b*st*rdcatness incarnate!
Christine
P.S. I cannot believe your taste in books -- I have "The Princess and
Purdie," on my bookshelf and it has always been one of my favorites since I
was a child!! But I have never met anyone before who has even heard of
George MacDonald! Also, I love Terry Pratchett -- have a lot of his books,
too -- the ones with "Death" in them are my favorites.
Yowie
news:bd8a52d5.02011...@posting.google.com...
<snip>
> Shmogg doesn't usually sleep on my bed during summer. It’s a
> fact that I have had to get used to. I don't know quite why he doesn't
> like sleeping on my bed in summer – I have a queen sized bed all
> to myself and since neither Shmogg nor I can cope with coming into
> direct skin-fur contact (I’m allergic and get really itchy,
<snip>
Apologies for the silly formatting. It looked fine when I posted it, but
I'd typed it out in MSWord and copied & pasted into Google's posting
service. And instead of putting plain old boring regular dashed and
apostrophes and quote marks it that *anyone* can understand, it put "smart"
punctuation in, leaving the story with indecipherable goggledy gook becuase
"smart" symbols aren't standard anyehere except in Microborg.
I can supply a "cleaned" copy if anyone needs or wants it.
And I hope that next time I'll remember to save it as a text file first.
Yowie
clairefay
> air-conditioned. So consequently the only bad thing about being on 5
> weeks vacation over summer was the lack of air-conditioning (and clean
> fresh, bushfire-smoke-filtered-out air)
Great story! 'Guards, Guards' is one of my favourite Pratchett books,
especially the Dirty Harry scene. For your next reading exercise I suggest
'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' - much better than 'Stranger in a Strange
Land.' If you get two copies of the book, you can read one while Shmogg
sits on the other.
Claire
KLC
<bbu...@home.com> wrote:
>
>P.S. I cannot believe your taste in books -- I have "The Princess and
>Purdie," on my bookshelf and it has always been one of my favorites since I
>was a child!! But I have never met anyone before who has even heard of
>George MacDonald!
>
Me, too! The Golden Key is my favorite. It's the only story I know
which really has no "bad guy" at all. The imagery is so vivid and
endures in the mind.
KLC
KLC & the Cattitudes:
Yukon, Polaris, Twinkle Afar, Jubilee
Kelowna BC Canada --- kristac AT s-h-a-w DOT cee, eh?
Patch
"John F. Eldredge" <eldr...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> When I was 14, we had an adolescent cat who would spend the night
> outside. In the morning, my mother would let him into the house, and
> he would gallop up the stairs, leap onto my bed, and come down with
> all four legs stiff, so as to get a nice springboard effect. One
> morning, I happened to be asleep on my back, on the near edge of the
> bed. When he leaped up, instead of landing on the mattress, he
> landed squarely in the pit of my stomach. So, my awakening that day
> was by having all of the air knocked out of me!
Talking of beds [ well you weren't really, but there ya go !!! ], I have
just got a new one, 5 1/2 foot wide - its amazing how it feels to lay in bed
with three dogs and varying numbers of my 14 cats with an extra foot width,
especially with hubby working away at the moment.
Sheer not-so-squashed bliss :-)))
Patch
Hazel Az
"Patch" <d.guipag...@LOLntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:a6O08.22052$_x4.3...@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com...
> Talking of beds [ well you weren't really, but there ya go !!! ], I have
> just got a new one, 5 1/2 foot wide - its amazing how it feels to lay in
bed
> with three dogs and varying numbers of my 14 cats with an extra foot
width,
> especially with hubby working away at the moment.
>
> Sheer not-so-squashed bliss :-)))
>
> Patch
Nice of you to buy the kritters a new bed. :-)
Pity there is no room for your husband.
Hazel Az
polonca12000
am I kidding, Soncek has a chair he sleeps on and I can't make him sleep on
the bed with me no matter what I do :( He does use my pillow for sleeping
on, but only when I'm not around.
--
Polonca & Soncek
Hazel Az <ar...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:a21s5k$nj1$1...@slb3.atl.mindspring.net...
Patch
Aye, that *is* why I bought it :-))
>
> Pity there is no room for your husband.
Its not a problem - he knows where the sofa is <g>
Patch