My dear, sweet kittycats. Or: My bladder is not a trampoline.

The BBQ Pit
1

(in the Pit for language)

I love my cats. I adore my cats. I have two of the cutest cats ever born - Oscar and Emmy the Wonder Cats ™. Most of the time, they bring me great joy. I got them as kittens in Brooklyn from the shelter, and they’ve travelled with me to Virginia where we share a house with my parents until my boyfriend moves here in the fall and we move in with him. They do very cute and adorable and kitty-ish things. Oscar likes to chase furry mice toys and make growling noises as if he is proving to them that while he may not longer have his balls, he is still THE BIG CAT. He likes to smack Emmy around once in awhile, but as she’s learning to fight back, I’m less worried about that now. Emmy plays a game where she sits at the top of the stairs and sticks a paw out the banister at whoever happens to be passing to get their attention, then flops over on her back to get her belly rubbed. My parents have fallen in love with these two, my neighbor’s children come over to visit Oscar because he’s also fascinated by them (he’d never seen children before), and my brother and sister-in-law found it hilarious that Oscar was willing to take on their Husky in a test of wills one Sunday afternoon (Oscar won).

My parents are currently out of town for a week, so they haven’t been getting the overdose of attention that they usually get. Emmy is usually fairly content to sit near me no matter what I’m doing. Oscar likes to be the center of whatever I’m doing. My best friend nearly got an email last night reading: “Hi - what’s up? I keep meaning to callsefhweurf 3e.”

I’ve been having problems sleeping well lately. I fall asleep around 11:30 if I’m lucky. For the past two nights, I’ve luckily fallen asleep at 11 PM, which means I SHOULD get enough sleep during the night. Unfortunately, I also need to get up several times in the night to use the bathroom - I’ve always done this and usually don’t have a problem falling back asleep.

Happily dozing on Tuesday night, I was suddenly awakened by something pounding with incredible strength on my bladder. I bolted upwards and yelled “What the FUCK?”. Looked down to the end of that bed and saw Oscar standing there staring at me. When I glared at him, he grabbed a fuzzy mouse by the tail and flung it at me. Apparently, midnight is his perfect playtime.

“No!” I shook a finger at him and put the mouse next to me. “Bad Oscar!”

Because that works. I could almost swear he rolled his eyes at me as he jumped off of the bed, his bushy black tail straight in the air, and walked out of the room swinging his butt (he’s a NYC cat, what can I say?).

Annoyed, I laid back down to try and sleep. But now I had to go to the bathroom. Again. I got up, did what I needed to do and crawled back into bed. I drifted back into sleep.

Right as I was hovering on that point between half-wake, half-deep-sleep, I again felt something slam itself into my bladder. This time, i reacted as I do when I have those dreams where I’m falling - my entire body jerked hard enough to shake the bed. Emmy, who was asleep in between my knees (it’s her favorite position, don’t ask), jumped two feet into the air, off the bed, and into the closet. Again, Oscar’s at the end of the bed with the mouse in his mouth.

I can see this is going to take more than a “Bad Kitty!”. I pick him up, carry him to the doorway (mouse still attached), and put him at the top of the stairs. “Oscar. Do NOT do that to me again tonight. If you do it again, I will lock you in the bathroom.”

And this time, the look is one of “Whatever, bitch. You’ll give me a fucking treat and then pet me for hours.”

Sadly, he’s probably right.

Okay, so you know how on shampoo bottles, it says “Lather, rinse, repeat?”. Last night was an entire night of “Jump, Yell, Sleep, Repeat”. He has his own mind and refuses to listen to me at ALL. He’s a brave cat with the backbone of a lion and good behavior just isn’t one of those things on his priority list this week.

I’m going by the grocery store tonight and getting one of those $2 waterguns. I have a feeling we’ll be having a showdown like Billy The Kid has never seen tonight. And I’m starting to get the feeling that Oscar is going to win.

Ava

2

Not to be cruel to the cat or anything but hey you need your sleep, but why didnt you just lock him in the bathroom?

3

It’s even more fun when they step on your boobs while walking accross your chest. And then they have to stand there, with all their weight on one paw, while they think about what they’re going to do. Remind me again why I love the damn things? Oh, right, the cuteness.

4

If I locked him in the bathroom, he’d throw himself against the door until I let him out. He’s done it before:).

Right now, I’m keeping him up. He doesn’t like me right now - every time he lays down to try and sleep, I wake him up by chasing him around the room. I’m hoping if I keep this up, he’ll sleep tonight.

Revenge is incredibly sweet:D.

Ava

5

Ask my husband about what fun it is to have the cats step on his “bits” … oh, the humanity …

6

Dear Human,

Why are you sleeping on my trampoline?

Love,
Fluffy

Heh.

7

ROTFLMAO*

Buttercup is the same way. She is the fattest cat on the planet with the boniest little feetses. She loves it when I finally get comfy on the couch and then she has to go climb all over me, step on my bladder, sit there for a moment and then decide that’s the PERFECT place to start ‘makin’ biscuits’ as my gramma called it. :rolleyes:

IDBB

8

With me, it’s the pugs who use the bladder for a trampoline. My cat just gnaws on my feet while I’m trying to sleep. Luckily, I after a short period of having to ignore the cat until she stopped crying, I can shut them all out of my room at night. Which means they only jump on my bladder and chew my feet in the day, when I’m awake. :wink:

9

I Love our two fluffballs, but we have one that insists that the perfect place to sleep is our faces/heads when we are sleeping! Try waking up spitting fur and having a cat mew/whine at you like it was your fault! :rolleyes:

10

Hah! My cat used to suffocate me so she could take over my pillow. She’d snuggle up at night, pretending to be cute, then, when I fell into a deep sleep, she’d press her skull against my nose and mouth, cutting off my breathing. I’d pull back a little in my sleep, and she’d keep doing it till she had the whole damn pillow to herself. This went on for weeks and weeks, till one night she tried it when I was still in a fairly light sleep and woke up to catch her in the act.

Foiled in that plan, she then took to draping herself across my throat as I slept, like a big, furry, very heavy scarf.

11

Y’know, you’d think an animal that sleeps twenty-two hours a day would be more sympathetic to your need for sleep, but noooooooo.

One of ours, before he was banished from every bedroom in the house, used to love nothing better than sleeping on my pillow, wrapped around the top of my head, like some kind of demented brimless earlapped fur hat.

This cat purrs at about the bass level of a deisel engine. I swore he was gonna rattle the freakin’ fillings outta my teeth.

Now he wanders the house all night, knocking stuff off of shelves and counters, crashing into everything and yowling like he’s lost. I’m gonna start duct-taping his dumb ass to the wall one night soon.

12

I need to acknowledge this.

Bailey the Wonder Kitty likes to play at three in the morning. He also plays run-smack-into-the-bed-at-top-speed. We have a studio apartment. Can’t lock him out of the bedroom.

13

I WON!:smiley:

I continuously woke Oscar up last night before I went to bed so he’d sleep all night. He kept getting pissy (except the one time I was on the phone with the cable guy and he decided he wanted to play ‘I’m gonna get you’ - which is played exactly the way is sounds - and he jumped in an Amazon box, thinking I couldn’t see him. I love the way cats think.). But it worked. I fell asleep around 8:30 from pure exhaustion, woke up once at midnight because I needed to use the bathroom, and the little ‘angel’ was asleep on the bed with me. He gave me a sleepy look and went back to sleep. When I woke up this morning, he was passed out in the exact same place.

snoopy dance

Ava

14

Lissla, you have to admit, though, that the brain damaged cats (90 or so % of all cats, it seems) are a lot of fun to have around, provided you’re not trying to sleep.

Why is it that a cat crashing headfirst into a kitchen cabinet, bouncing off and sliding three feet across the tile/linoleum floor, and then leaping up to turn in midair and race off at top speed in a different direction is so friggin’ funny? I never get tired of watching this stuff… during the afternoon, anyway.

Ava, I’m afraid you may have upset the balance of nature, here. Wasn’t this one of those signs of the apocalypse we were supposed to be watching for? :smiley:

15

You do realize, Ava, that Oscar will Get You for this. Forcing him to sleep all night, when cats are nocturnal animals and that is his natural playtime, means that you have just earned yourself a big payback. When you least expect it.

And you’ll deserve it. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

More than once, I have wondered why the human body requires eight hours of sleep, but only comes with a seven hour bladder.

And a perfectly workable alternate title for this one could been:

“No, Kitty, My Nuts Are Not A Springboard.”

17

Duffy, The Dominator and Ashleigh like to play several different kitty sporting events: boxing, wrestling, and, of course, The Wayman 500. It’s similar to the Indy 500 only the hallway is for the straight aways and the rest of the house is used for the rest of the course.

This house is the perfect house for it too. There is a doorway through the livingroom into the diningroom, into the kitchen, into the den, through the den into the hallway – you can go left down the hallway or turn right and find yourself back in the livingroom.

The den is a large room. We have a couch, loveseat, coffee table, two computers, entertainment center, 3 bookcases, 2 rocker recliners, an end table, and Rico’s beloved Laz-e-Boy aka The Wayman Trampoline Recliner which Rico falls asleep in nightly.

Don’t get me wrong. Even with all the aforementioned furniture, there is still plenty of room for me to walk through here. Some people would think if there’s enough room for an overweight, middle aged, suberbian, housewife to walk through here when The Wayman Trampoline is fully reclined, surely your average house cat would be able to get through here without going over it.

But those would be people who don’t know the average house cat. For those of you who are familiar with this species, you know that The Wayman 500 can’t possibly be run accurately without going over it. Especially if “Daddy” is asleep!

There are times I wonder how long my dear, sweat husband who didn’t have cats before he married me, will continue to put up with this. Ok, so I do think he’s resigned himself to the situation. :smiley:

18

Damn, I forgot to add the end of the sentence…

Ok, so I do think he’s resigned himself to the situation. :smiley: But I’m not sure how long his bladder will put up with it! :eek:

19

When I lived in an apartment my cat Grimalkin would chew on my hair to wake me up. His breath could melt steel. Not nice! He would also play the “Let me make little whiny cat noises while I knock breakable things off of shelves” game. He has spent many a night in the bathroom. Oh yes… Ah, but now that I have a house he has his own kitty wing…It’s called the finished basement. He sleeps in there all night and then in the morning I let him up, along with the other 2 darlings…Happy Shana!

20

When I was a kid we had a cat called Feenie…she had a neat way of tomenting my Dad…Sunday afternoons was nap time for him and Feenie would wait until he got all nice an comfy in the old lazy boy and was dozing off…she would without a sound or sign she was there jump up onto the back of the chair…wait a minute or two to be sure he was asleep then lick at his ears until he’d sputter and wave his arms around…she would then jump back down and hide behind the chair and wait til he fell back to sleep and begin the process all over again

She did that because the rest of the week that chair was my Moms and of course Feenies place of honor was Moms lap

Later she had kittens in the house and one day I heard a noise in the living room…when I went to check it out I just about busted a gut…all her kittens had trapped themselves at various heights hanging from the curtain…too afraid to go higher and unable to climb down…the noise I had heard was six little kittens going “mew mew mew…get me off of here”

I thought it funny but my Mom had a fit…the good curtains had forever more little marks in them from the kitty claws

In time even she found the humor of the situation…of course it was about 10 years later before that happened