Our alarm in the morning is the signal to one of our cats that food will be had shortly, and she begins to demand it now. We have tried delaying feeding them until after our morning routine, we’ve tried spraying her with a water bottle, locking her up in the dining room, all to no avail. She just starts up meowing and doesn’t stop until she gets fed, whether that’s 5 minutes or an hour after the alarm. Meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-… for hours on end if we’d let her. Same with the 6pm church bells nearby.
Another one of our cats drinks beer. She’ll grab at the bottle if you have one and pull it towards herself (actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her try and drink beer from a glass) and just lick the opening while purring up a storm. We don’t really let her have a significant amount, but once I’ve emptied a bottle I do tend to let her lick whatever drops she can get from the bottle mouth.
The same cat likes to walk along the bamboo curtain rod that’s placed about halfway up our living room window (just to block the view inside from people climbing the outside stairs). She licks and rubs her head against the curtain rod and will reach for it if you hold her in your arms close to it. She gets really mad when you try and take her down! Thing is, it’s very narrow and kind of wobbly, so she likes to keep one leg on your shoulder while she hops across the thing. Since my desk chair is near the window, she uses me as a support pretty often! It’s rather cute to see how obsessed she is with being on that curtain rod!
As I said, Tervis - they are great, double walled insulated and have sippy lids. Great for ice cold drinks or hot drinks. You can find knock offs, but they tend to be cheaply made and the lids don’t fit properly, or the acrylic they are made of is thin and cheap and they crack.
heh heh heh
I never thought about that until now.
I named Grey a few years back before I became acquainted with Dresden.
I must remember to mention this to the DB.
Are your kitties older? Sometimes they get arthritis in their little necks. drinking without bending hurts less. Of course, sometimes its just to let us know they’re still around.
My cat likes mint. One day, before I had discovered this fact, I was sitting at my computer with a box of Altoids open next to me. I didn’t really pay attention when my cat jumped up on the desk, until I started hearing, “slurp, slurp, slurp.” He had licked every mint in the box. Strangely, just the other day, the exact scenario repeated itself with a dish of olives.
He also steals green leafy material. One time when I was making some soup, I turned from putting a handful of bok choy into the pot to discover the kitty making off with a large chunk of the rest.
We have one of those electric bottled water dispensers. One lever dispenses room temperature water, and the other dispenses very cold water.
We have 9 cats (We would have had just four, but my husband decided to bring in ‘Todd’, who was a stray, and after a visit to our vet, we found out that Todd was/is a girl. A pregnant girl. She now happily lives here with us, as do her four kittens, and our original four cats). It seems that a few of them have figured out how to press down on the little lever, and let the water fall into the little drip pan dealie, and they drink from there. They prefer it to their water bowls, which they think are splash pools.
I swear, we don’t even have to put out water in their bowls, anymore (But we do, just in case), because they can dispense their own cold, fresh, bottled water whenever they want it. We just need to make sure that we put a new five gallon bottle on whenever it needs it.
Jody…yes, my cat is named Jody Foster…no I didn’t name her Jody, the shelter did. Anyway, Jody will come sit on the couch next to me if I am on the phone, and will bat at me to get me to pet her. Or she’ll just sit and stare. I love her, but she’s freaky when she does that. She’s got eyes like those kids in velvet paintings - round and huge.
If Sunshine wants to be on my lap, by gosh, she will be on my lap. She will curl up there no matter how many times I move her off. Eventually, I just have to give in.
I used to always have water sitting around for a few days in a cup or glass by the bed. For some reason, water that settles for a day or two tastes so much better than water fresh from the tap.
Annie can be fast asleep on the bed, but me stretching out for my own nap is a signal for her to wake up, walk over, and bother me for a few minutes first.
She starts with a loud purr. Then she gets up on me and kneads, using her claws. She won’t sit or lie down; she turns around, occasionally putting her kneading paws in, shall we say, sensitive spots. Of course, she is convinced I need a close-up look at her butt, too. If all this elicits a physical response, such as me trying to gently push her away, she nips at my hand. And all the while, loud purring.
I’ll admit that she will eventually stop and lie down on me, and we usually have a nice nap together. But the preliminaries are lengthy and irritating at times.
My husband’s cat loves the human water glasses, too - I put a lid over my glass beside my tv watching place to keep her out of it. It turns out that if the glass only has a bit of water in it, she’ll knock it over out of spite. Since we cat-proofed the back yard and she discovered outside water, she’s crazy for that, too now (she also wants to get picked up and put on the sink for sink water, too). Cat water fountain plus water bowl available all the time, but it’s the special water that she’s crazy for.
My cat, however, is normal in every way. There’s the “pick me up and swing me around in the empty laundry basket” thing, but other than that, perfectly normal.
My dog sort of logically deduced some sort of rule about whatever hits the floor is hers by default. One day, while I was sitting down to eat my steak, my dog sat next to me (usually) politely waiting for scraps. However, when I stood up for a glass of water, she picked up my steak and dropped it on the floor, expecting me to give her the whole thing.
“Oh ho!” I said, “You think you’re smart eh? Take THAT!” I then picked up the steak off the floor and ate it, teaching her a lesson she remembers to this day.
I really do like cats. No, I really do. I just don’t like living with them very much.
Currently I’m the legal guardian of my SO’s 2 cats (long story). They’ve lived with me for a few years now and the novelty has long since worn off. I didn’t think it was possible for humans to be even more standoffish than cats but apparently I was wrong.
They seem to think that I have some obligation to pet them or otherwise pay any more attention to them than it takes to fill the feeder or watering dish. They are constantly trying to sneak past the barriers I’ve set up around the sofa to jump up and sit with me. While I’ve been successful in training them in certain ways (don’t go in my bedroom and stay out of the bathroom when I’m in there) - ok, mostly successful - the sofa thing seems to be non-negotiable.
So I’ve been trying to compromise by letting them sit with me in the evening. I’ve also been making an effort to brush them once a day. That seems to have gone a long way to allaying the sneaking and pouncing.
No, all three are quite young. Two of them are only about 2 years old in fact. And they have their own kitty water fountain thing, too.
They also steal straws if you have a straw in your drink. You’ll see them make off with it then catch them slinking around the house later still carrying the damned thing.
There is a chair in the family room that both the cat and my husband have claimed as their own. 9 places to sit, but they both want the same chair. Occasionally I place a newspaper article or a magazine on the chair, if I find something my husband might be interested in. Twice recently, I’ve been there when the cat jumped up on the chair, and while looking directly at me he calmly batted the reading material onto the floor and curled up for a nap. I swear he was training me!
His other “cute” thing: he thinks 5:30 AM is a wonderful time to get up, and he thinks I want to get up with him. He *breathes *on me. Every morning. I’m startled awake, and I open my eyes to see a cat one inch from my face.
When we first became foster parents to Mouse, (I did not name him. Stupid people name a 25-lb. cat Mouse.) he would steal drinks of milk out of any unattended glass. But apparently he’s lactose intolerant, because he would immediately throw up. He’s figured that out now, and thankfully leaves the milk alone.
In the almost-three-years since I got my cat, there has been a mouse in the house exactly once.
Pudding (my cat) got it cornered in my closet while we were at work. When I got home, she ran straight out, meowing to me about it, and showed me where it was.
Being newlywed, I thought this was exactly the kind of situation a husband should take care of. So Pudding and I sat down on the floor and watched the mouse till he got home. The poor mousie had been frightened half to death, and was too tired to try to run away.
My husband managed to scare the mouse out of the closet and into the open, and to put his shoe down on its tail (on the carpet), trapping it but not hurting it.
The mouse realized the jig was up. It sat up on its rump to watch my husband. And then–this is the good part–Pudding bent over and gave it a kiss on the nose.
She was devastated for days afterward. I don’t know if she’s just starved for animal companionship or if she thought the mouse was a kitten–but truly. She loved that mouse.
