Deckheads!
I thought, at this late date, that I’d heard pretty much every meow the cats had to offer. Aggrieved “yes, there’s kibble in my bowl, but you have to come watch me eat it” wail? Heard it. Burbly about-to-barf yowl? Know it well. Hair-raising “my tail MY TAIL FOOT TAIL OW HATE” shriek? Like an old friend.
Little did I realize that, having never lived in an apartment with an outdoor space, I had seen but the tip of a vast iceberg of meowing, an iceberg shaped like a summer vacation with young children — short, hairy, narcoleptic, omniphage children with no thumbs, no boundaries, and no respect for authority.
And it does not stop with asking to go out onto the patio, then sitting in the doorway, befuddled as to why I’ve opened the door, or clawing the screen and then getting stuck. In fact, each of those meows has several variations; the latter, for example, encompasses “oh, hi — can you please unstick me?”, “I meant to do that, obviously,” “STOP LOOKING AT ME WITH YOUR JUDGMENT OF…JUDGING (and please unstick me),” and “this is so embarrassing, I can only be comforted with treats, plural — no, not those, the good kind.” And did I mention that failure to de-screen-door the paws in question with a lightning quickness is greeted with a high-frequency banshee death screech?
Sometimes, it’s funny; more often, it’s like the stupid-questions montage from Clerks.
“Mom, I’m hot. Mom, I’m hot. Mom, I’m hot. Mom, I’m hot. Mom, I’m hot.…What are you doing DON’T PICK ME UP biting you now.”
“I want to go out now.…Later now, not now now.”
“I can see that it’s raining, now get out of my way OH NO I’M WET ACK.”
“Mom, I’m cold.…WHY ARE YOU PICKING ME UP? Biting!”
“Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?…Look how cute I am.…Mom?”
“Why won’t that bird fly in my mouth? Can you make it fly there?”
“Where does that tree go?”
“I want to come in. Well but I want you to carry me and now I don’t want to come in anymore YES BITING.”
“…Leaf!”
“I like to play with moths in-side.”
“Mom, look! Look! [zzzz]”
“I’m hot and cold — when are you going to move the table so it’s in the shade but out of this breeze?…Uch, not that direction, over here.…That’s great. Okay, I’m going inside, bye!”
“I ate a leaf and you said not to and I ate it and it tasted bad and now I’m angry.”
“This dirt on my tail is YOUR FAULT.”
“But I need to sit on your foot out here.”
“LEAF!”
“Where does that pipe go? Can I go where that pipe goes? Can I?Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?”
“…MOM?”
“Oh my god another leaf! Lots of leaves! Dog barking leaf CONFUSED YOUR FAULT and then some biting.”
“I’m thirsty.…I’m OUT HERE thirsty.”
“BIRD LEAF OTHER CAT IT’S LIKE CHRISTMAS OUT HERE!”
“I’m not chewing anything. I’m not! I’M NOT, MOM. [kak] My tongue feels like a foot. Mom?”
“I’m hot again I’M HOT RIGHT NOW stop touching me I SAID STOP.”
“Leeeeeeeeeeeeeaf.”
“Some puddle got on my paw. I SAID I DON’T KNOW can you please un-wet it please?”
“So, about that caterpillar? That you said not to eat it and you said, um, you said leave that caterpillar alone? So I did? So but then I didn’t and I ate it? Um, and the thing is it’s walking around in there all around in there with its fuzzy feet ack ack ack Mom I’m scared.”
“Just saying hi. So, hi. But since you’re out here, I’ll just go ahead and throw up this terror confetti of dried leaves, diet kibble, and the back half of a caterpillar.…Aaaaand I’m going inside now. Enjoy.”
Tags: "outdoors" yes "great" not s'much barfing city living Clerks fat cats feline fun times Hobey Little Joe orange cats shut up moving
“omniphage” = eats everything
Heh. I enjoyed that a lot. Not enough to let my own cats outside, I suppose, but the caterpillar thing? That is totally how they act about it (when I lived in Texas – I no longer do – they would crawl under the door sometimes). “I ated it, and it was not pleasant. Comfort me! COMFORT ME! Not on the lower belly! I scratch you now, you bad human!”
As a consolation prize, my cats are enjoying being in a larger apartment. Or, if you’re a daredevil cat like my orange one, they’re enjoying trying to scare me by sitting on top of the fridge waiting for me in the morning when I am barely awake, and then patting me on the head to make sure I realize they’re up there. Good times.
Have they started doing bird impressions yet? My two cats make bird noises all the time. Like any bird is going to be fooled – “oh, he’s just like me….only wingless, fat, furry and ginger”.
The chittering is pretty cool (oohhhh, how I miss my Smikey-Bites …), but it’s the Most Excellent “I’m about to pounce your ASS off, chipmunk” bum-wiggle that always accompanied it I miss the most. Smike was a great little hunter, scoring squirrels, ‘munks, and many many many a ground mole (these were the only items beneath his dietary interest, and therefore suitable for offering/teaching for The Human), and he never ever left them alive in the house.
He did fail to finish eating that one ‘munk, though. Cleaning up the remaining leg-and-tail combo, very gooey at that one end, after one of his python-style Triumphant Hunter meals was probably easier than catching it live, but perhaps ookier. Ahh, the food chain lives – in my living room.
(I am, by the way, well aware of the risks of both allowing kits outdoors, and of allowing them to EAT THEIR PREY. Smikey wasn’t much for negotiation, and *his* chittering glower made it clear that interruptions of his process would definitely result in his hunting skills’ being turned on The Human. So he did do this. If/when, after my hater-of-a-dog is no longer with me, I get a cat again, I promise to the Tomato Nation that I won’t indulge this sort of thing again.)
Brian: phage is “eater of” and omni is “all” – so they eat everything. And pets are often referred to by their “owners” as the kids, the children – so there ya go.
@Todd – so does mine! I’ve long ago stopped trying to move him to a better area – now I just shove some newspaper in front of him and hope for the best. It’s about 60/40, what can you do.
Sars, there is great fun to be had when one of your cats decides to take a nap in an existing puddle (wtf and why?! and I have photographic proof the puddle was there first). I thought I had heard all his meows until I heard that one!
I have two indoor cats. One thinks she is an escape artist and my whole family have had to develop lightning quick reflexes to catch her ‘dash for freedom’ if a door is opened. Only twice has she managed to get past us unnoticed. Both times, usually 45mins later she was sitting at our front door, looking both woe-begone and reproachful.
I then got the ‘Why did you let me do that? It’s so over-rated out there. What’s the matter with you?’ mew.
If she was brave enough I think she would have added an eyeroll and a walk away with the bum swaggering but she smart enough to know that would be pushing it.
I have never heard a sound like that from her except those two times. Very effective communicators, cats. I feel quite stupid in comparison with all these word things we use.
My cats chitter. Well, one of them. I wonder what purpose it could serve in the wild to say quetly to yourself, “There’s the bird, there it is, oh, come here, you, that’s right, fella, just a little closer…”
That’s a cute patio table, too. Plus a living plant! Your balcony/porch is much classier than mine.
True confession: I love the site, but usually not big on the cat stuff.
That said, the “…CONFUSED YOUR FAULT and then some biting” transcends the feline specific humor and is universally awesome and hysterical. I want a tee-shirt. I may need to make a tee-shirt…
You will also soon learn that you’ll be opening that damn door endlessly. ENDLESSLY. This morning alone I let out cat #1 (open/close), at which point cat #2 made the “let me in immediately and while I recognize the fact that I wasn’t actually at the door when you let Molly out I’m here now and you should have anticipated that” meow (open/close). He went for the food bowl, prompting cat #1 to want back in (open/close), which woke up cat #3 who began to rise from the chair (open). However he never actually made a move to get off of the chair until (close), prompting me to (open/close). Then cat #2 wanted to follow out cat #3 (open/close). I then moved one food bowl onto the patio (open) at which point cat #1 wandered outside again (close). That was about 10 minutes of my morning. If it weren’t for the raccoons I’d install a cat door.
This is comedy gold! I’m laughing (silently, as I am at work) my ass off here.
Ahhh… reading this in the office and trying not to laugh out loud was nearly impossible. I think I sprained something.
“I’m not chewing anything. I’m not! I’M NOT, MOM. [kak] My tongue feels like a foot. Mom?”
Love it.
It’s funny, but I don’t think my girls refer to me as Mom. I think they look at this as a roommate situation entirely, with all of us having equal rights to the apartment. They contribute to the household by shedding, barfing on the carpet, and spraying litter hither, thither, and yon; I contribute by buying the food, cleaning the litter box, and scratching on demand. So, you know, equitable.
Hee!
And also, heh. When I moved to a house with a fenced-in back yard, I expected my cats to be out there all the time. Turns out, having been indoor cats their entire lives, they want no part of it, beyond sitting at the patio door and chirping at the birds. They still act bewildered that the dog wants to go out there so often.
The return of the cats! I love reading about those guys, you could write about nothing else and we would read it Sars! You are responsible for cat owners everywhere to hear the inner dialogue of their pets!
We call our cat’s stalking/chittering “barking at birds”. It’s sort of a bark/short meow run through an Arabic filter. Very curt & almost back-of-the-throat phlegmy. My Tabby-to-English dictionary translates it as: “IF I hadn’t had my front claws removed by a previous owner, and IF I weren’t totally a house cat due to my living in a third floor apartment, and IF I weren’t restricted from the balcony because the last time I was out there I hadn’t realized the housing complex had changed the balcony rails from flat wood to slippery slanted plastic and I fell three stories to the grass below, THEN you would totally be mine right now, Mr. Robin. Totally. And don’t you forget it. “
This is hilarious. I love it when you write about your cats’ antics.
“I ate a leaf and you said not to and I ate it and it tasted bad and now I’m angry.” Hee!
We call that noise the murder noise.
Love the cat stories!
Granted, I am not far from it, but my kitty is driving me insane. After 15 years of drinking exclusively from a recently flushed toilet (run to toilet, sit in front of toilet, howl until toilet is flushed, then drink, “ahhhh, refreshing toilet water,”) my kitty decided she would drink from the bathroom sink – only RUNNING water – NO more of the toilet water for her. Run to bathroom, jump on counter, glare at me and howl the “I AM DEHYDRATED, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL DAY?” howl. I turn on the faucet, she tests the water for the right temperature, and drinks. SLOWLY. I can wait or walk out, intending to turn return in 3 minutes to turn off the faucet when she is finished. Sometimes I forget. Then when I return to the bathrooom to find the water has been running for the last 3 hours, she decides she is thirsty. My water bill went up. Now, she will drink only freshly pooled water in the bottom of the shower. Run to shower, howling, daintily step into shower, stare at shower head, howl, looking back and forth from me to shower head, howling. I turn the shower on, then off, she runs out because I have wet her, howls while she waits for the shower head to stop dripping completely. Walks back into shower, drinks water as it runs down the drain. This repeats until she is satisfied. However, every time I step away from turning on/off the shower, she hisses and smacks me as she runs out, because I have wet her while she is sitting in the shower, waiting for me to turn on the shower. She is 15, she is 15, she is 15. She is 15.
My big old fluffy orange guy always wants to get out at the crows. Not the pigeons or sparrows, oh no – the large, smart, sharp-beaked killer things.
Squirrels nest under my window air conditioner, and one year I had baby squirrels frolicking on the ledge next to the air conditioner. That was awesome in and of itself, but the cats’ reaction? Man, I loved that. There is a table right under those windows, so they got up there and were right on the same level, chittering and tensing up and going absolutely crazy.
Later that summer, I heard banging on the AC and opened the blind. A squirrel had brought a piece of dried-up pizza up there and was eating it, and the crust was banging against against the top of the AC. Good viewing times for me – the cats didn’t react to that sound, more fool them.
Final cat/window anecdote: the same big fluffy old orange guy managed to push his way through a loose corner of the screen in the window above my bed. He usually just sits inside the window on the sill, but in this case he got curious and proceeded to sit outside on the narrow 2nd-floor window ledge for 30-40 minutes before I woke up fully, reached up above my head to pet him, found no cat, looked around, and freaked out. At that point, when I raised the screen, he squished back through and acted as if nothing had happened. Ack.
@Lori/Lori’s 15-year-old cat: Lori, I recently got a non-pet-specific catalog which featured, of all things, a fountain for one’s cat. Since I have a water-baby (a two-year-old, 20-pound water-baby), that fountain is on my Getting This list – it’s under $100, I think it’s probably under $50. It circulates clean water continuously; maybe this would appeal to your elderly, persnickitty kitty and help keep your water bills under control? Apparently, although the fountain runs continuously, your water itself does not. My kitty LOVES to watch water run … which is why the current water bowl is a big heavy lasagna pan. He kept making tidal waves with the regular water bowl, to his brother’s annoyance.
@Jean: Oh, indoor cats and their backyards. I’d managed to repress that memory until you mentioned it. I had a house full of indoor cats who all wanted to be/had been outdoor cats, and who kept trying to escape. So the day when my then-husband and I were going to flea bomb the house, unleashing Nuclear Death Fumes, was going to be easy: move a couple of chairs out into the backyard, with the cats’ food and water dishes, a few books, and the cats could have sanctioned Supervised Play outdoors while the N.D.F. raged indoors!
Great idea, right? Turns out that every single cat – twelve of them at that time, as I recall – was a little furry agoraphobe, and had to be dragged outside. Once outside, they wanted to run back into the house while the N.D.F. raged.
It was a truly horrible day.
@brickton: I would happily wear such a t-shirt, for the very universality and awesomeness you mention.
Since being allowed out for an occasional outdoor frolic, my Norman has discovered how effective a very loud voice can be. In, out, in, out. And he can be out ALL day long, but he always yells at the door to come back in and use the litterbox INSIDE. sigh.
crying. CRYING.
“STOP LOOKING AT ME WITH YOUR JUDGMENT OF…JUDGING”
omdg. crying.
My 10 year old cat was on our fifth floor balcony hiding under a blanket when I heard this loud high pitched shreeking noise. I ran into the living room to see if my declawed cat was ok I saw her crouched in the corner with a bird in her mouth. WOW.. screaming and freaking out to my she let go and the bird started flying around the apartment. Crazy how did this old cat who has only been outside in the later years of her life with no claws catch this bird?? What a hunter she is.
Hee. Love the cats. Which is good, as I support 3. While occasionally they deign to recognize their names, my husband and I are fairly certain that we’re referred to, and only when absolutely necessary, of course, as ‘That guy’ and ‘That other guy’.
I have now read this essay approximately 40 bajillion times, yet it still makes me laugh hysterically. I thought of it the other day when my mom was telling me how she unceremoniously tossed both of her toddler kitties (about 10 months old at the time) out the back door and into the 18 inches of snow on the back deck. You know, just to see how they reacted to their first experience of snow. Needless to say, Bonnie and Clyde were not best pleased. They were, however, really intrigued by the concept of snow. They wanted the back door to be left open so that they could look through the glass storm door and glare at that cold and evil white stuff.