I truly love my cat, Mud. I truly hate her alterego, HyperKitty. HyperKitty was definitely the culprit. Mud would never do such a thing.
Moments ago, I was sitting here, minding my own business, perusing MPSIMS, tapping my bare feet to some music (Phillip Glass, Songs from Liquid Days - nice little rhythmic tuneages). Suddenly there is a blinding pain in my big toe of my right foot.
I slid the chair back from the desk, and the cat is still attached to my foot, nails out, teeth in my toe, hanging on for dear life. I’m flailing my foot around for about an hour (by my estimation), slinging her all over the place. She is hanging on, refusing to let go of her prey, when she looks up, realizes the pink mouse putting up one helluva fight is actually attached to me and is in no way going with her. I’ve never seen a cat visually express the thought of “Oh, &#~%!!!”, but her eyes got really big as soon as HyperKitty yielded and Mud once again took over the body. She took off down the hallway so fast that I heard her lose traction on the tile floor and skid into the washing machine (metallic clunk). She is now hiding somewhere behind the bed.
My thought was “Thank god I had a tetanus shot in October.”
Tiny scratch (from a nail or her snaggletooth), bunch of nail scratches (I just had her nails clipped again about a week ago, damn she’s been busy with the sisalboard), and cat hair all over the floor (spontaneous shedding). I forced out a bit of blood, cleaned off the wound, and will keep an eye on it.
An honest mistake, since it’s dark under the desk. Although I am surfing the web with slippers on from now on.
I bet it was ALMOST worth the pain to see and hear that.
We removed the carpeting in the living room, exposing a hardwood floor. The cats had been very accustomed to having traction on that carpeting, but now we here claws scrambling for traction at all hours of the day and night. Sometimes I will see a cat with its body aligned along an east-west axis, yet the cat is moving in a northerly direction. I have to admit that I giggle every time I see it, because it seems to piss them off so much.
Yup. HyperKitty’s usualy mode of self-propulsion. I call it ‘ferret motion’: my friend had a ferret that rarely ran in a straight line, the body always positioned like a tractor-trailer out of control (what the heck is that called, where the driver looks out the window and sees the entire length of the trailer next to him/her? Not hijack, I can’t think of the word).
No dent in the washer, although I was sure there would be one from the sound of the collision. And she has forgiven me for not being a mouse: I woke up this morning and she was in her usualy place at the foot of the bed, sleeping against my foot. You’d think she’d recognize her bedmate after all these years.
It’s a “jackknife”, but the reason I posted was to thank both of you. I needed a laugh this morning, and the picture of claws scrabbling for traction followed by a metallic thunk, not to mention Lynn Bodoni’s cat facing east and heading north did it for me.
Story: A friend, who had her hair done back in a very long braid, was sitting in my den. Suddenly her head snapped back and she’s staring at the ceiling going “OW ow OW ow!” Kitty had decided it was time to kill the long blond “snake” and had attached herself quite firmly and was hanging and chewing about my friend’s back and shoulders. Kitty was quite indignant about being so rudely pulled off her prey.
Wow - that happens to me all the time.
Bed Pig aka Nasty Beast aka Terror (who was actually named Tarot) attacks my feet all the time.
It’s her favorite game. And nothing I do will make her stop.
They won’t even be moving - I’ll be taking my contacts out or something, and she’ll appear out of nowhere, sink her claws into my ankle (so I can’t get away) and her teeth into my toe or foot.
I’ll kick, scream, pour water on her - anything to get away.
And then I’ll get into bed, and she’ll be there 5 minutes later, sitting on my chest and purring away.
Back in the day, we had a cat named Alex that was simultaneously one of the smartest and one of the dumbest at the same time. Dumbest because he’d often try to do a controlled drift around the corner of the kitchen cabinet and invariably hit the wall (scratch scratch scratch BUMP). Smartest because he actually learned how to knock on the door to be let inside(1).
On our front door, there was a bit of magnetic weatherstripping that had come loose. He learned that if he grabbed it with his claws and then let go of it, it’d make a neat whapping sound and the Big Pink Ones With Thumbs would come and open the door.
(1)We lived out in the middle of the country, and never left Alex out overnight.
Our cat prefers ankles–specifically my mother’s. The cat does that cat winding thing, and when you are all complacent and thinking that she is just being affectionate, she flops over on her side behind your foot and attacks. Since she is declawed, this is just cute. Until she bites. Very sharp teeth. It is funny to come into the kitchen after hearing yelping and see my mother being attacked by a seven pound cat–and unable to escape. Heh.
Nasty Beast has bitten my mother in the face on more than one occasion.
The first time, I blamed the cat. After that - I blamed my mother.
Theoretically, she is more intelligent than my cat, and should realize that if she picks up the cat, she will get bitten. I would have hoped it would have only taken once, maybe twice for the pattern recognition to kick in.
No so.
One of my cats is not of the whigging out version of stalkers, but rather she is of the silent psychotic staring ilk.
Yesterday she somehow was doused in perfume (LilMiss denied it, but without that whole opposable thumb thing I sincerely doubt Clee decided to spray herself). She reeked. Being fairly sensitive to odors, my throat immediately clogged up, stomach roiled, eyes watered.
BATH TIME FOR CLEE!
First off, Clee looks a lot like this cat. We’re not sure if she IS a Turkish Angora, but her vet says it’s a pretty good bet. I CAN tell you she has a LOT of fur. Dense fur. She was bathed, and did very well. No bites, no howls (she doesn’t meow anyways).
However. After her bath and brush she sat in front of me and stared at me. In a “I hate you you evil bizzatch” way. I went into the bathroom. She followed, plonked down in front of me and stared. Hell, when I went to be last night she took her normal place on my pillow- but instead of snuggling, she sat. And stared. Very disconcerting. I wish she would’ve attacked me and gotten it over with rather than giving me the psychotic Hannibal Lechter stare.
We had a little black Persian names Elke a few years ago. The house we were living in at the time was laid out with bedroom hallway leading into the kitchen, which connected to the living/dining/front hall. We would be sitting in the living room and hear *thunder, thunder, scrabble, scrabble, thunk!" and know that Elke had run down the bedroom hallway (cats can make an amazing amount of noise sometimes), tried desperately to make the 90-degree turn in the kitchen, and bounced off the fridge again. She had long tufts of fur on her paws that cut her traction to near zero.
Elke also used to regularly have us holding our breath by jumping up onto the railing around the stairwell to the basement, which was about 2" wide, and sauntering casually all around it to the wall, where she would turn around and saunter back, while we didn’t dare move for fear of startling her and making her fall. She was mostly a pretty klutzy cat, and we were always expecting her to slip on her paw “feathers”.
With respect to the OP, one of our cuurent herd of cats is a little black shorthair that was rescued after having been abondoned by a feral mother. She is usually very sucky, and will demand to be petted or even sit up and stretch her front legs up to signal she wants to be picked up. The affection and petting is entirely at her control, however. If she’s had enough and you don’t stop immediately, her ears go back for a few seconds warning before she switches to weasel mode, and then it’s Polysporin and bandages time!
