Four posts in one

Can someone please shut my cat up?

Henry has never been a quiet animal. The politically correct term is “vocal”. He does a lot of meowing. He meows to announce his entrance into the room, he meows while he’s jumping onto the couch, he meows when I come in the door.

But he also does this very, very loud meowing. It’s more like howling. Yowling. Screaming like he’s stuck in a bear trap. He used to do it from time to time, maybe once a day at the most. It’s a little weird, but cats are strange animals. He also perches himself on the banister like a goat and plays fetch with a keychain. Whatever, right?

But lately, oh my god. The howling is every day for HOURS. He’s howling while we watch TV. I go up to make sure he’s not actually stuck in a bear trap and he’ll just be sitting on the floor, staring at the wall. Sometimes he’s in his cat condo, pulling himself around in a circle. What the hell? Does he miss Max? It’s not exactly like he and Max were cat-BFFs. Our cats are not friends; they largely ignore and just barely tolerate each other. So why the mourning? The very loud, very annoying mourning? Or is he just having a heated discussion with the brick wall? I don’t know what to think.

I feel guilty because he must be sad to be howling like that all the time, right? Or maybe something is just broken in his brain? He also spends a large amount of time pushing around the water bowl in the bathroom, eating hair elastics and chasing his own tail. At least those activities are QUIET.  Now he’s like a screaming baby, he just cries and yells and oh my god I don’t know what is wrong. Have some food? Some treats?  Head scritches?  Want to chase a toy mouse?  Want to get picked up?  Want to bite my hand?  Eat this hair elastic?  Here, there’s some dental floss you can pull out of the garbage!  Tip over the recycling? Chew on some plastic bags?

Nothing. Works. I am going crazy.  If I can find a cat psychologist, what do you think the chances are it will be covered by pet insurance?

The knee bone’s connected to the other thing

Some rare yet serious side effects of knee surgery:

I’ve become so used to treating my left knee gingerly (and being reminded quite indelicately when I forget) that I can’t help cringing when I see people on TV doing things that would hurt it. Jumping on trampolines, are these people crazy? Running through an airport? Sliding into second base? People, you’re going to hurt yourselves! Be careful!

My right knee, by comparison, now feels like a bionic super-knee. I’m constantly amazed at how far and how well it can bend, how I can sit with it tucked under me and go up the stairs and use it to kick the laundry basket out of the way and it doesn’t even hurt! It’s insane! The human body, it’s a miracle, you know?

I get a lot of dirty looks riding the elevator down one flight to my office. I used to similarly judge the people who were too lazy to take the stairs down one flight, so I deserve it. Judge not, lest ye become that person punching the button for basement while all the other people in the elevator sigh and eye-roll.

And it's even pink 

After carefully waiting until both of our contracts were up and then waiting again for the new crop of phones to be released, I have a new cell phone. It has internet and email and it is the best thing to happen to me, technologically speaking, since Tivo.

The one bad thing is that now when I log on to the computer in the morning, all the fun of checking my email/twitter/facebook/Google Reader and seeing what the world has been up to while I’ve been offline is gone.  It kind of makes mornings less fun, if that's possible.  But I forgive it, because it's just so cute and smart and I can't stay mad.

I kind of liked staying home better

One of the things I learned while I was at home with absolutely nothing to do is that, if left to its own devices, by body would like to get no less than 10 hours of sleep a night. At the time I felt like a lazy slouch for spending so much time in bed. What I realize now is that’s how it feels to be rested. Weird. For reasons related to circadian clocks and the conspiracy of the working world against non-morning people, I usually get about 6 hours of sleep a night, and I can manage on that pretty well. But my God, it felt good to sleep right on through to 11am. My brain, like, worked. Faster. Like I said, it was weird.

Comments

[NGS]

Our cat yowls, too! But not nearly that often. She is "vocal" most of the time, with the meowing when entering and leaving rooms, when someone new comes in the door, and if my husband and I are talking to each other or to someone on the phone. But she yowls when we go to bed. We close her out of the bedroom (we're mean pet owners with allergies) and she stands outside our bedroom door and yowls for a few minutes. Then there's one last pathetic, quite meow, and she's done until she wants us to wake up at about 6:30-7:00 in the morning.

So I don't know what these cats want with the yowling, but they certainly have our attention!!

[nancypearlwannabe]

But is it an iPhone?!

[Pink Herring]

No, not an iphone, but it does look like one! Its a Motorola Droid... no switch to ATT required.

[Pink Herring]

Its not an iphone, its a droid. I wanted the iphone, but I just cant do the att switch. We had att a few years ago and the coverage was so bad that we couldnt use our phones in our own house. But still, woo! I have a faux-iphone! It is glorious!

On Nov 15, 2009 9:45 PM, Operation Pink Herring [email protected] wrote:

No, not an iphone, but it does look like one! Its a Motorola Droid... no switch to ATT required.

[kate]

I think that our cats must be long-lost brothers or something like that. My cat NEVER. SHUTS. UP. He yowls constantly...and eats ridiculous amounts of hair ties. If you figure out a way to make your cat stop screaming, PLEASE let me know before I completely lose my mind.

[Kristan]

10 hrs, wow? I'm soooo happy on weekends when I get 8!

[Annemarie]

Our cat used to do that every single night. We thought he was looking for us since it was when we turned the light off to go to sleep. Not so much. We snuck up on him once and he was walking around in circles with a toy in his mouth. We have just written it off as crazy.

[Mary]

I say don't feel bad about taking the elevator down 1 floor. Not every person's disabilities manifest physically. You don't have to be in a wheelchair to use the handicap parking spot. (I learned this from my Mom whose lungs operate at 70%.)