Category: In Which We Mock Our Pets

Goldie moves his bowels with enviable regularity. He eats his moist food, he waits half an hour, he poops, he announces. “Rawr Rawr RAWR,” he says, and repeats, until someone gets up and cleans out his litter box. There was one day I slept really hard (5 hours deep sleep out of seven) and did…

I was in a restless sleep when Goldie yelled insistently from the basement Monday at 3:30 in the morning. Gary was in the great room, awake enough to look at the cat coming up the basement steps. The sound of Gary screaming is what woke me up. “GOLDIE DROP IT DROP THE MOUSE!” Goldie foolishly…

Last night, Goldie again made a big production of caterwauling from the basement. Now that I know the drill, I immediately went down there. He led me to the same corner. I saw what I thought was the same species of tiny-winged flying beetle bug, only twice the size. Not moving, clearly dead, knocked on…

Goldie has almost no interest in crepuscular play time now. It was how we bonded for months, and now, I dangle all manner of things in his face and he shows no interest. Instead, he has been spending hours downstairs. I no longer spend any time hunting for him when he goes missing. He’s at…

Goldie has suddenly lost interest in our crepuscular play time. I understand that cats grow bored with their toys and crave fresh fake meat. He’s been spending lots of time in the basement, possibly after the mice, so I bought this squeaky fake fur mouse. Goldie was intrigued at first. Gently pawed at it. Showed…

The bond of trust I have with Goldie the Cat is weakening. Goldie has seen that Gary and I are saps and is taking advantage. To his credit, he isn’t playing us against each other. I know of households when one person wakes up, feeds the cat, then minutes later the same cat insists to…

There was some fallout from the day I did not play with the cat. The next day the cat seemed to have no interest in our usual routine. No furminating, no post-furmination petting, no coffee for me / treats for him special time. Just a glance of equal parts contempt and disinterest. After the evening…

I intend to leave the house today, for both work and play, and possibly even an errand. This means that I will miss the cat’s crepuscular play time. At dawn and dusk Goldie wants to kill small things. He signals that it is killing time by lying on one of our two small rugs and…

It delights us when Goldie the cat does the classic cat moves, like when he sits on the window sill Halloween style. Lately he’s branched out into classic cat bathroom behaviors. I can’t get him to lap up water as it’s coming out of the faucet, but one day we arrived home to find that…

Previously, Gary was dismayed the cat was doing an acrobatic leap over the basement steps. “Goldie, please don’t do that: you’re going to die. “ Gary realized that he had no control over the cat’s urge to leap, cats-gonna-cat, so he decided to switch his approach. Instead of discouraging the leaps, he encourages the leaps.…