Ack! Whatever shall I do when I run out of Cat Maintenance stories? Gadzooks, I may be forced to write some new stories.
Anyone who isn't familiar with the previous entries, just click on my name and go read some of them. I'm about to head out into the world to have dinner with a friend, so I'll check you guys later. Hopefully I can remember to post the Pit Jar for Dyslexic Globbers.
"You need to tell your boyfriends to clean up their acts," I admonished my two female cats, Shecky the Puff and White Cloud the Tailless Wonder. "Their personal hygiene is disgusting!"
These lady cats haven’t let the fact that they’re "fixed" keep them from having an assortment of gentlemen callers over the years. This was well and good as long as they confined their caterwauling to the yard and porch. However, when I encountered a strange gray tomcat with the crazed eyes of a frustrated lover standing on my kitchen counter at 2 a.m., I realized that the girls had been inviting the neighborhood "chow-heads" in for snacks. No wonder the cat food was disappearing so fast!
Occasionally I spend the weekend away from home with friends, and leave large bowls of food and water for my three feline companions...enough for nearly a week. Since they can come and go at will through the kitty door, I don’t worry about leaving them alone for a few days.
Then I started coming home to major messes in the kitchen. All the cat chow would be gone, the water bowls empty, and my white vinyl floor filthy with zillions of dirty paw prints. This happened several times, and I figured that some really boisterous cat parties had gone on in my absence. I attributed the nasty floor to the "boyfriends" who are outside cats and not as fastidious as my homebodies.
So, the next time I planned a weekend away, I fussed at Shecky and the Cloud about their lowlife, rowdy friends and warned them that, upon my return, I expected not to find the kitchen in such a deplorable state.
Instead, I came home to a worse-than-usual mess. Not only were the food and water bowls empty and the floor black with paw prints, but a 20-lb bag of cat chow, (which was half full) had been dragged from a cabinet and ripped open. The shredded bag now contained only a few fragments of chow!
Muttering invectives about jerking knots in the tails of cats, I cleaned up the mess, mopped and waxed the floor, and left the kitchen to make a phone call. Half an hour later, I walked back into the kitchen and came face-to-face with a furry, masked intruder!
I stood transfixed, not believing my eyes. The interloper turned tail (a RINGED tail), made a frenzied dash for the kitty door, and was gone before I could move. Things began to make sense...the empty, dirty water bowls...the consumption of enormous quantities of cat chow...the little black paw prints all over the floor. It hadn’t been cat parties at all! It was RACCOON parties! They were coming in through the kitty door, helping themselves to the cat chow, and washing it in the water bowls.
When I came home from work the next afternoon, the sun was shining brightly and the cats were lying on the front porch soaking up some rays. As I approached, I realized they weren’t alone. There, making yum-yum noises over din-din were THREE baby raccoons — enjoying cat chow al fresco! They scurried away when they saw me, disappearing into a nearby hedge.
As I live in a heavily-developed urban area, I never would have believed that I was sharing space with a family of raccoons. I was alternately thrilled and delighted at the resilience of wildlife, and worried about the possibility of my cats keeping company with rabid coons. The coon triplets looked very healthy (as well they should, on a balanced cat chow diet), but I decided to seal up the kitty door. Then I took the cats to the vet to make sure their rabies shots were up to date.
Lately I’ve been putting out extra food for "my" raccoons (plus a few cat vitamins too). I cleaned out the refrigerator and gave them the fresh veggies that were beginning to get old. They ate the yellow squash, but didn’t seem to care much for bell peppers. I even gave them a bowl of left-over steamed brown rice the other night, which they consumed with great gusto. Hey, I might not be the only one in the city with raccoons, but I’ll bet I’m the only one who’s got ‘em on a macrobiotic diet!
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As long as I am judging where someone else is with their Path, I'm not where I need to be with mine.