Tag Archives: cat

How Cruz the Cat Became an Outdoor Cat. Again.

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The First Straw:
The Meowing. Cruz has been the world’s most vocal cat ever since we got Scout 4 years ago. He yells all the time. Even before we sentenced him to (a comfortable) life inside the house (being pampered) without parole, he would come inside and scream at us every day until we walked into the kitchen and pointed out that the food bowl — which he was standing next to — was actually already full and he didn’t need to be meowing his freaking head off for no reason whatsoever.  As you can imagine, moving Cruz inside the house did not help this situation. It did not help it at all.

The Next Straw:
Peeing on the Rug. We haven’t had a litter box inside the house for Cruz in about 3 years. When Scout was a puppy, she totally thought that the litter box was some kind of doggie sand-box with magical poop-flavored treats buried in it, I guess because dogs are kind of dumb sometimes. In order to stop my dog from eating cat poop, I removed the litter box that Cruz rarely used anyway. We learned very quickly after removing the litter box that while Cruz can mysteriously stay in the house for 12 daylight hours at a time, he can not survive the 6 hours between when Zack goes to bed and when I get up in the morning. He pees on the bathroom rug when he’s in the house overnight. Every time.
And I admit, if you’re going to have a cat that pees in the house, having one that goes to the bathroom, then pees on something that is washable, cheap and absorbent is kind of a best-case-scenario. He even crumples up the rugs after he pees on them, as if he was kicking litter over the area. The crumpled rug serves as an obvious signal that Something Is Bad Wrong, and, in the process, prevents you from stepping in cat pee. Cruz peeing on the rug is about as good as animals peeing in the house gets.
Trick is, even when your animal awesomely pees in the house in the best way possible, it still suuuuucks.

The Straw After That:
Upon taking the cat captive in the house, I had to re-instate the dumb litter box. Luckily, Scout is old enough now that she’s been (mostly) uninterested in said dumb litter box. I cleaned out our laundry room and made Cruz his own little kingdom, complete with bathroom and eating facilities. Because he is a cat, and because cats seem to come pre-programmed with the litter-box instinct, Cruz immediately started using the litter box again. Unfortunately, that meant that there was a shit-ton (pun kind of intended?) of litter on my freaking floor. I had the wherewithall to put the dumb litter box into the least-used room of our (teeny) house (that we use every last square foot of), but that didn’t really solve any problems. I still felt the need to wear shoes in my house at all times, and that didn’t really sit well with my inner-hippie.

The Next To Last Straw:
Zack (via text message): Guess what your cat did?
Sarah: Peed on the rug?
Zack: Tracked poo across our white comforter. I wiped up what I could and sprayed the rest with Woolite cleaner before I had to leave for work.
Sarah: WTF?! How is that even possible?
Zack: Guess he was a little messy when he left the litter box.

The Last Straw:
After work one day last week I drove home to get Zack so we could go meet some friends for dinner. Zack came out to meet me in the car with his right hand held up in the air like he was about to ask his 7th grade math teacher a question. When he got in the car he said, “Your cat got out.” (The cat, I should note, is only “my” cat whenever it has done something stupid. Like peeing on a rug, or tracking poop across a comforter.) Zack explained that he’d been trying to get out of the house when he saw Cruz making eyes at the door. Cruz likes to try to escape when Zack goes in and out of the front door because when someone (or something) has a track record of success at doing a certain thing, they typically continue to do it. See: Scout begging for cheese in the kitchen, Cruz begging for milk while I eat cereal, me talking myself into going to get breakfast burritos for every other meal. Anyway, Cruz made a dash for the front door as Zack was getting out of the house, and he was successful in Stage One of his escape attempt. Zack tried to lunge for the cat and grab him before he completed Stage Two, which would be to get out of our glassed-in sunroom via the kitty door we made for him several years ago and never bothered to shut after we decided to go all lock-down on his ass. Zack didn’t quite get the cat, but he did catch the edge of the metal window with the tip of his finger, which caused his fingernail to bend backwards into a position which God never intended fingernails to occupy. By the time he made it to my car, Zack was speechless he was in so much pain.

Fingernail pain in the worst. Fingernail pain is worse than peed-on rugs, poop-smeared comforters, litter-covered laundry room floors, or incessant meowing. As soon as Zack showed me his finger, which had instantly turned black-and-blue, I said, “THAT’S IT.” Then we looked at each other and said, “Screw this. Cruz is back outside.” We probably would have high-fived to celebrate our cohesive decision, but I opted not to, lest Zack kick me out of the house for causing him fingernail pain, too.

Handled, MacGyver Style.

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Cruz has been doing better than expected with the transition to The Great Indoors. I read the article that Edith linked me to, and I have obeyed it. As suggested by the cat training masters (hah) I created a special little place for him, I have played with him, I have shown him oh-so-much affection. The transition, however, is not going well because of my adherence to the foundational principles of Cat Training 101. Instead, it’s going well because Cruz has figured out that Zack (nice, unsuspecting) sometimes comes home while Sarah (cruel, attentive) is not in the room. He’s escaped upon Zack’s arrival a couple of times now, and is always gone overnight when he gets out. He always comes back in the morning, mostly because he’s addicted to the food and awesome cat treats we’ve been giving him since we’ve been trying to manipulate him into wanting to be in captivity. It feels like we’re aiming for Stockholm Syndrome.

I decided that the laundry room should be where the cat sleeps at night. That’s where his food and litter box is, so it seems like an appropriate place. But, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll remember that when we first moved into this house, we had some problems with the laundry room door accidentally locking and trapping people in there. (And by people, I mean me.) Anyway, to solve THAT problem, we basically had to disassemble the door knob so that the door doesn’t latch at all now. That’s worked really well for the last 3 years. It just isn’t that awesome now that we’re trying to trap our stupid cat in the room.

It’s cool, though. I handled it. MacGyver Style.

You Want Information?

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I have an almost lethal onslaught of information that I’ve been storing up to unload on the blog.  Posts with tons of information in them are never fun, but for the sake of proper documentation, I am going to write it all out.  That being said, I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

Those of you who know me know that my promises to be brief are totally worthless.  Actually, I’ll ramble on as long as I want to.  Just like I’m doing here.

  • We went on a little vacation.  Zack and I headed South with a couple of friends of ours for a long weekend at Camp Eagle, where we used to work.  We got to spend the weekend doing all the things that people assume that camp staffers do all the time.  When we worked there we were far to busy to really take advantage of the camp the way we wanted to.  It was fantastic to be in such a beautiful place, not having to spend any of that time in a dish-room.  On Friday it was so warm that after we got done riding bikes and kayaking, we all jumped into the sparkling Nueces River and it’s welcoming 68 degree arms.  The sun was so bright that we didn’t mind the cold at all.  I checked my pockets before I jumped in the river, trying to be careful not to damage any phones or iPods that I might have on my person.  That’s when I was reminded that the true freedom of vacationing there is the freedom from electronics; it is the freedom to jump in a river without worrying about what’s in your pockets.
  • Mom and Dad were planning on watching Scout for us while we were out of town.  You all know this because that’s the reason why I was giving them baths last week.  Wednesday morning I had to take Cruz to the vet because an abscess that was hiding behind his left elbow had ruptured, leaving a circular hole in his arm that was roughly an inch in diameter.  It went all the way through the layers of his skin.  You could move it around and easily locate muscles, bones and other bits of anatomy in his little kitty arm.  He had to have a surgery to debribe the dead tissue and close up the hole; he has about 15 stitches from what I can count on his arm.  Before the surgery, we were planning on leaving Cruz home alone for a nice quiet weekend to himself, per his request.  He’s a real loner.  But since he had to go off and get hurt, we were forced to take him to my parents house where he had to suffer through a weekend of endless treats punctuated with daily antibiotics and not going outside.  Life was not nearly as rough for him as he would have had me believe on Wednesday night when we left him.  He walked around the house and hissed at everything (pianos, stools, cats, anything that had mass) to announce his pissed-off-ness.  Almost a week later, Cruz is totally fine and back to his normal, outside-playing, couch-dwelling habits.  He does tend to forget that I shove medicine down his throat every morning, though, and each day looks at me with a mild disgust after I squeeze the dropper of LIVE SAVING MEDS down his little throat.  And every day, I look at him and say, “WAH.”
  • I still haven’t heard from TWU about their nursing program, but that’s still normal. We’re not supposed to hear anything back from them until the middle or end of this month.  In the mean time, we paid $400 to TCU to secure my spot in that program.  I am still in total shock that I am going to be in nursing school.  The shocks come in little waves as little bits of my life change as a result of this decision.  Big sale at NY&Co online?  Doesn’t matter, because I don’t have to buy ‘work clothes’ anymore.  At least not the kind you buy at NY&Co.  WEIRD.  I have a limited number of days-in-heels left.  I better use them wisely.  (editor’s note: in order to “use my days wisely” I decided to walk back to my car in my heels today instead of switching to my tennis shoes like I usually do.  This proved to be an unwise decision on all accounts, especially when you take into consideration the mid-workday hack-job I did on my toenails.  Note to self: ‘wisely’ does not equal ‘more often.’)
  • After 4 months of getting about 1/2 of our mail (and the other half being returned to sender for no good reason that we could tell), I finally got to talk to someone at the Post Office who was willing to look for a problem.  After 20 minutes on the phone with an employee from our zip code, I found out that we have not 1 but 2 change-of-address forms forwarding our mail from our old house to our new house.  Zack filled out the form once, they scanned it twice, and for some reason that made every other piece of mail sent to our house get rejected.  It’s hard to think of other instances where 2 is not better than 1, and I still don’t truly believe that we have found the real problem.  I do HOPE that it was the problem, though, because if one more piece of my important, life-changing mail gets sent back-to-sender because there is “no such addressee” when I CLEARLY LIVE AT MY HOUSE, I am going to go absolutely ballistic on those guys.  And when I walk in the door, they are all going to moan and be like, “Her? Again? Can’t we just get her mail right so that she will stop yelling at us?”  And I will be like, “IN MY WILDEST DREAMS, BUDDY.”  Here’s a truth nugget for you: my heart-rate is up over 100 bpm just thinking about this.  The USPS gives me The Rage.
  • And finally, more on the nerdy side of things, I ran across this video today about The Crisis of Credit Visualized.  It gives people like me, people who have no idea what any of this financial mess is really about, a chance at understanding the very basic concepts that underly everything.  Nevermind the educational aspects of it, the graphics are neat.

On Bathing Pets

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Last night after I took a shower, Cruz the Cat came to visit me in the bathroom.  He has a long-standing love affair with the shower; he loves to jump in after we get done showering and lick the drops as they come out of the faucet.  This is the one and only time that Cruz is a fan of the bathtub.  Other than the faucet fixation, he hates the shower.  He especially hates it when his owner decides that it’s time to bathe his nasty indoor-outdoor self.  

Just before I took the shower,  I noticed that Cruz had located my bathrobe (or, in cat vocabulary, The Most Perfect Napping Place) and was sleeping on it.  When I forced him to get off of said bathrobe, I noticed that he had left a dirty brown spot on it where he had been laying.  The dirty brown spot indicated to me that it might be time for Cruz’s quarterly bath time.  But he didn’t know that he’d left a dirty brown spot on my perfectly white bath robe.  He only knew that the faucet was dripping, the shower door was open, and the moment was right.  But I am smarter than the cat.  I remembered.  

So I thought to myself, self, this is a good time to just go ahead and bathe the cat.  He’s already in the shower, the shampoo is already on the counter.  Just go for it.  Besides, I reasoned, I am in the mood to take on a challenge that I can win.  And in the contest of Sarah v. Cat, Sarah wins. 

What I didn’t realize, though, is that it would be a really close call.  30 minutes and one angry cat later, Cruz was clean and moaning over his defeat in the bathroom.  

So tonight when I came home from work, I decided that in light of my recent pet-washing victory, I would wash the dog.  Zack and I are going out of town this weekend and my parents will be dog-sitting for us.  Giving Scout a bath has been on my list of things to do all week; I can’t send Scout to her first weekend away smelling like a dirty dog.  After washing the cat, the idea of giving Scout a bath seemed like a bed of roses.  Sure she’s not as small as the cat is, but she is surely more obedient.  Turns out that washing the dog isn’t a lot easier than washing the cat.  I’d liken the choice between them to one of the nastiest ‘would you rather’ questions you could come up with.  Would you rather take 5 years off your life from the stress of trying to catch your cat as he does soapy Nastia Liukin quality somersaults in the bathtub?  Or would you rather be soaking wet and covered with dog hair as you beg water to defy gravity and somehow wash all the soap off of the underbelly of your 45 pound beast who totally hates you for this?

I’m no idiot, though.  This time, I bathed Scout before I took a shower.