Awww, Bookkeeper.
Folks, I can think of plenty of occasions where I can discreetly (or not so discreetly) text but it wouldn’t be appropriate or feasible to speak audibly. In the middle of a big lecture hall, or heavy metal concert, for starters.
Tony is in the hospital and I can’t do anything but call him. He’s already threatening to walk out Against Medical Advice, but seeing as how I won’t be there to pick him up, he will probably collapse about 4 feet out of the door, so will end up back in the ER with a busted up face and shit.
My main worry is that they are going to try to release him to a nursing home for rehab. That’s where most people catch COVID and die, so we are looking at other options for him. Having him stay with us during his recovery wouldn’t work very well, because I’d probably snap and smother him with a pillow after a couple of days.
If any of you all think that adopting a crazy old man is a good idea, go home and sober up, then think about it again.
(I love him, I moved him here to TX when I got married and put him in a nice townhouse. He has a lot of good qualities. He’s batshit crazy and never shuts up with his random stream of consciousness and conspiracy theories. I can take about half an hour of listening to him before I start drinking. He’s only 60, I want to be bitching about him for at least 20 more years.)
I’m taking my old, hyperthyroid, and IBD kitty to the vet Tuesday. He’ll be boarding there for a few days so I can get a break from his wailing.
I love him, but after almost 3 months of his non-stop screaming I need a break, or I’m going to hurt him. And I don’t want to hurt him, because I love him.
I bet I start missing him an hour after I drop him off. 
I bit the side of my tongue the other day and it’s swollen a little and sticks right out into my molars, so I can keep re-biting it.
Join the club. For something that protrudes all of a silly millimeter, it sure does seem to stick out much much more than the proverbial sore thumb, doesn’t it?
Why is he screaming? Not pain, surely. Is there he something he desperately wants and can’t have?
[ol]
[li]He’s hungry.[/li][LIST=a]
[li]He’s had enough food and wants out of the powder room where I feed him (to keep the other cat out of the very expensive prescription food).[/li][li]He wants his food moved around in his dish so it’s back in the center instead of up against the side where he pushed it.[/li][/ol]
[li]He’s hungry (again).[/li][/LIST]Put this on a loop for several hours in the morning, pause for a nap in the afternoon, and several hours in the evening. His yowl is very loud and very piercing and he will not stop until I feed him, let him out, or move his food around depending on where he is in his cycle. The real trick is figuring out if he wants out or if he wants more food but doesn’t want to try to eat it off the side of the bowl. It’s about a 10-15 minute cycle, which makes it really hard to get any work done.
I used to be harassed by a cat. It’s not easy living under their furry little thumbs! In my case, the solution was to move to a house in a rural area that had a cat door. Once the kitty got to have everything he ever wanted, he was a pleasure to be around. :dubious:
They can be real tyrants, can’t they? And we love them anyway.
I live in a suburban area, and the township laws state that pet cats are not allowed to roam around loose. Not that I’d let my cats out, anyway. Cats do too much damage to the local ecosystem, and vice versa, plus there are the dangers of road traffic. I freely admit this is a case of YMMV, though.
Attention food delivery-persons. When dropping off several grocery bags, perhaps you could PUT THEM BESIDE THE DOOR, instead of directly in front of it (leaning on it in some cases). For those who’ve never seen one: It’s a screen door. It opens outward. And when doing so, will shove/crush/dump the bags directly in front of it.
Using a few brain cells might actually affect your tip, yanno?
Plus, as I discovered yesterday, they will hop up into someone’s raised garden and completely decimate the catnip plant someone was growing for their own cats’ enjoyment. Grumble.
We also have laws in my city stating all pets must remain in your yard or be leashed. I’ve had nasty go arounds with an ex neighbor over their cat and them letting it out every night to torment my cats. Whenever it’s brought up on nextdoor or fb, there’s a lot of push back about them being out is natural, blah blah. Then you see those people posting needing help finding their cats. Correlation?
I don’t even know where to begin with this: Man Shows Up To Toronto Anti-Black Racism Protest In Blackface. He was arrested for breach of the peace.
Witnessing the quantity of screen time my kids are getting is actively pissing me off. It shouldn’t, but it does. I have to work full time (we’re all working at home now) so it’s not like I can do shit with them, but for fuck’s sake, seeing their teen and tween brains turn to mush in front of a screen it really making me batshit crazy.
My son has to spend at least part of the day online because he’s taking a virtual course, but neither of them have any obligation whatsoever to watch youtube for hours on end. The thing is, having them watch me on a screen all damn day doesn’t help, either. I’d get all punitive, but my son is 14. How punitive can I get with a 14 year old? Anyway, I’m out of ideas. Every time I google recommendations I’m met with these chirpy, vomitous articles about how I can entertain my children every waking moment. If they can’t find something else to do soon I’m going to be the asshole that makes them clean the house all summer.
Wow. No wonder you need a break! I suppose you’ve tried the ‘tough love’ approach of trying to only do what he wants when he’s not actually screaming?
I had a cat who would do that ‘pack the food into the vertical sides of the dish’ and complain about not being able to eat it trick, but it didn’t last long. It was ordinary food, not special, and we had three other cats at the time. They were perfectly willing to help Misty get her dish cleaned when she called for help. 
He’s not so much spoiled and demanding as he is old and hyperthyroid, which makes kitties very, very hungry. He is on medication for it. I *know *he’s not doing this to annoy me. He’s just old and sick and the sick makes him a bottomless pit.
I tried the I’m only feeding you at certain times of the day tough love. If he doesn’t get fed, he will continue to yowl until he is fed. Before the lockdown I might have lasted about 2 hours before I caved (and sometimes he’d stop before I caved), but that was also when I was out of the house for most of the day 3 times a week and it was far easier to enforce a schedule.
He tends to make his demands around the established feeding times anyway. If the only time it happened were just before it was time to feed him, it wouldn’t bother me. It’s the multiple repetitions of the cycle for hours *after *the feeding time that have me frazzled. And since I use the evening “feedmefeedmefeedme” to get his medications administered, it reinforces that if he screams, he gets fed.
As for the bowl trick, I can’t let him learn that if he doesn’t eat from the side then Eddy gets it. They don’t eat the same food because he’s on very expensive prescription food because of the irritable bowl disease (IBD), so it’s not something I can afford to feed both cats.*
Did I mention that if he’s not fed fast enough to suit him, he’ll start trying to open every accessible cabinet door by pulling on it by using his claws to hook around the edge? There’s no food behind those doors (and I now have all the kitchen lowers bungied so they can’t be opened), but interspersing the yowls with the bangbangbang makes things even worse.
It’s a good thing I love my little putz, is what I’m saying. And the break will help me recoup. I just expect to find myself missing him despite the blessed peace.
*48 of the 2.9 oz cans costs about $80-90, and he eats at least 2 and sometimes 3 a day in addition to the handful or so of dry kibble that is also quite expensive ($26 for 4 pounds). Having Eddy eat it too would mean more like 8 or so cans a day, because Eddy is a bigger cat and needs more food than Shiva does.
Did you mean obligation or objection. I’m in constant conflict with my students now that we are physically back in the classrooms. They have zero self-control, absolutely no self-motivation, and a complete lack of awareness of appropriate use of the hand-held tech that they are supposed to be using for research, as a dictionary, as a translator, or to help them check their work for grammar and plagiarism. What are they doing for the entire forty-five minutes of the class? Here’s my running conversation as I’m walking around the classroom to monitor their progress on their assignment:
[ul][li]I don’t see how WeChat is helping with this assignment.[/li][li]How is that video giving you the answer? Put your mask on correctly.[/li][li]Is the fashion section on Taobao really connected with your topic? Oh, and put your mask on.[/li][li]Are you really supposed to playing that MMPOG right now? Your mask is supposed to cover your nose too, not just your mouth.[/li][li]Didn’t I just ask you a moment ago about WeChat? And where is your mask?[/ul][/li]
I swear I should just record that whole spiel. But then the school might think that’s better than having us teachers in the classroom and *poof" goodbye job.
Morgyn, maybe try a food bowl with a very sloped bottom? Like more of a wok shape, than a flat saucer. That way, the food will re-collect in the middle - this is the only location where it actually exists, for many cats.
Edge food disappears into some invisible realm.
Oh, yeah, duh, my complaint: I’ve been enjoying binge-watching “Community” on Netflix but the three-second intro song is STUCK in my head now.
Nothing fancy about that particular song. The intro to anything tends to loop in my head, especially if I’ve heard it repeatedly anyway. But oh, why do TV shows I like always pick such horrible intro songs? I’m gonna hate them anyway, do they have to be extra ghastly?
I nearly fell off the OITNB bandwagon just because of their song, and I liked that show, dammit! This is more … background soothing company. I’m not *that * invested.
Goddammit! It’s not you brother’s fault you grabbed his ear, and it’s not your brother’s fault you’re fucking around instead of helping to clean your rabbit’s hutch.
God damned COVID and no summer camps, so they can spend some time away from each other.
August can’t come soon enough
Amen to that. I’m trying to work and apparently am fair game to everyone in the fucking house. I have a DO NOT DISTURB sign I hang on my monitor when I need to, you know, not be disturbed. Finally I lost my shit one afternoon when I had a kid standing on each side of my work table, yelling across me while I was trying to finalize a pricing sheet.
On a related note, things are opening up here and my daughter was already signed up for a few camps that are saying they plan to be held mostly outdoors with social distancing enforced. So I figured great, they only start at the end of July, we’ll know how things are trending then. My husband vetoed it entirely saying the kids should stay home exclusively. He’s probably right, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to veto when you’re not interrupted every 15-20 minutes. I’ve been taking notes on the number of interruptions I receive per hour and right now we’re sitting at four. Interestingly, my youngest, 10 years old, and my husband are tied for worst offender.
(Yes, that’s totally petty, but I honestly needed to see if I just FELT like I was being interrupted or if I had empirical evidence that I really was being interrupted.)
Anyway, I feel your pain - hopefully we’ll get through the summer without appearing on Cops.