Drive-by Microchipping

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Web, Fellow Felines, Canines, Bunnies and Rats,

Hear my story and be prepared. Vicious gangs may be operating in your neighborhood waiting to kidnap and brand you forever as one of their own. No neighborhood is too "good". You are not safe anywhere. This could happen to you. This IS our true story:

Saturday morning, Blackie and I are just hanging loose, watching a little KittyTV when the next thing we know, we are brutally kidnapped by vicious gang members, shoved into tiny cramped cages,

and shanghaied into this hot noisy red thing that smelled of coffee, gasoline and, worse, wet dog. Strains of country music attempted to drown our screams and cries for help. It was not successful.


I AM not happy!

It gets worse from here ... we're driven for maybe five minutes then transported roughly into another building. We are then pulled from our cages and tortured to reveal our personal information which we can hear being entered into a computer in the background. Then IT happens. We feel the sting of the needle. We here them say "it's in" and your information will be linked to the central computer available no matter where are. We are forever linked to this brutal gang.

We reenter our cages and once again enter that smelly red thing. Shamed and demoralized by this entire process, we wonder, how can this gang be operating in our "safe suburban neighborhood". Wouldn't the neighbors get suspicious? Wouldn't someone call the sheriff? Then we see THE SIGN. They are openly recruiting right next to the proverbial Saturday morning garage sales.


Crushed by this revelation, we find little comfort to return to what we formerly regarded as "our" safe house. We are permanently changed knowing that if disaster strikes and we end up in a "shelter", we can NOW be identified. Our privacy is lost forever.

Total strangers, who previously would assume we were a couple of scruffy strays, would NOW know without doubt that there was this group of people frantically searching for us; miserable without us, loosing sleep until they could but return us home and love us and pet us and play with us and feed us tuna entree. How HORRIBLE is that?

Uh, well, ok, uh, maybe this whole thing isn't so bad after all?

Nevermind.

--
Charlie

Is There a Problem?

Don't look at me like THAT. You have hair remover rollers in your car, your desk, your purse and all over the house. Besides, I don't shed.


--
Charlie

Cross Country with Quito and Patch

An update to the saga of our HumanGyrrl, our OtherHuman and our two feline neighbors, Patch and Quito, making their way across the country in a small compact car.

They left Seattle on Saturday morning and the humans have really been enjoying the countryside as it goes by. With a 5% chance of actually seeing the peak of Mount Ranier, they did!

For the felines, other than the early morning in the crate "choir of discontent" (as our HumanGyrrl calls it), Quito and Patch have not been too stressed.

In the Utah motel stop, Quito got himself under the king-sized bed mattress which was on a wooden box. The humans had fun dismantling the bed to get him out.

Once the humans are firmly on the road, they've been letting the felines out of their individual crates. The problem has been the sun. When it pours in the windows on the side and back of the car, Quito and Patch don't like it. The air conditioner is OK in the front but struggles to reach the back where the cats are housed. For much of the trip through Utah and Wyoming they were cuddled together in one crate on the shady side of the car. The humans have stuck maps up on the window to keep the passenger side reasonable.

Tuesday they drove through the Colorado mountains so heat wasn't an issue. Wednesday while driving through Kansas even the humans were hot. They started to suspect a problem and stopped in Topeka to discover they were almost out of coolant. All spent about an hour in an air conditioned room at a local JiffyLube while it was worked on; cats in one cage as they prefer, with a little baby just walking ogling them and then a probably 6 year old jabbering away. Cats were wonderful.

Saturday morning: Seattle, Washington
Saturday night: Pendelton, Oregon
Sunday night: Ogden, Utah
Monday night: Granby, Colorado
Tuesday night: Goodland, Kansas
Wednesday night: Springfield, Missouri
Thursday night: Memphis, Tennessee
Friday night: Gainesville, Florida --> they're home!

Father's Day 2006

Let's get one thing understood up front: I am the ALPHA member of the Feline Oligarchy so I don't often get sentimental. (That's a warning that you may want to skip this post.) But it's Father's Day and I want to write about me and Ed. That's us in the picture taken right before I moved to Florida. It was our "good-bye" shot.

You might have gathered that I have rather humble beginnings in rural northern Minnesota, being born in a hay barn as one of many litters. When I was a teenager, my original people put me in a car for the first time and drove 15 miles to another farm where Ed and his wife lived. They were retired and their elderly cat had died a month earlier. They weren't going to have any more animals because they didn't think they would live long enough to take care of them. But my original people knew how lonely Ed and his wife were and figured that I was a pretty self sufficient guy and maybe, in my own way, I could take care of them.

It was Ed who named me Blackie but I got to be pretty good friends with both of them. The woman walked very slowly and had to use two canes but she always came to the door for me. And she didn't get mad at me when I attacked her curtains. The three of us did pretty well together for about three years. Then one day the woman went away and didn't come home to live anymore. She had moved to the Care Center in town.

That's when Ed and I started living together - just the two of us. Or as Ed would say "we were baching it" as two bachelors living together. In his 84 years, Ed had always lived on this farm and he had never lived alone. He could have gone somewhere else to live, but he adamantly chose not to. He would drive in to town every day and visit his wife. Then he would come home to me. He fed me my tablespoon of chicken flavored stinky goodness first thing in the morning and kept my crunchy food in a Frisbee on the floor. He kept my water bowel full. He let me out when I wanted out; he let me in when I wanted in. Evenings, we would spend together with me on his lap watching whatever sport was in season while he snoozed. I knew, in great detail, how the Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves, etc. seasons were going. When he woke up from his evening nap, we would have ice cream together before going to bed. In the morning he would wake up with me sleeping on top of him. We spent a long year and a half living together and really got to know and depend on each other.

It became apparent that Ed also needed to move to the Care Center. We both would have liked it if I could have moved with him, but nobody knew that I was litterbox trained. Besides, the Center already had a cat and I was used to being an only cat. And the Center's cat went outside and Ed didn't want me to be outside in town where I might be hit by a car. Since my mousing skills were current, I had several offers of places to go, but Ed didn't want me to have to go "back to the barn" and he thought "I was too good of a cat to be destroyed". While he always thought that the Florida humans were a little "odd" in how their felines ran their house (he teased them about that a lot over the years!), he decided that maybe Florida might really be the best place for me to go. So he made the Florida humans promise that when he moved to the Care Center, they would come and get me. They did and I've been here over 15 months now. And I've made a pretty good home of it.

Ed and his wife are now in a different Care Center, but they're still together. I know he has my picture on his bulletin board. I know sometimes that he still remembers me and the things we did together. And I also know that most times he doesn't. But I remember enough for both of us. And today, especially, I remember Ed.

Happy Father's Day.

--
Blackie

Comings and Goings

Well, I've had an exhausting week. Sometimes my humans wear me out and they're not even home to do it. It's their comings and goings that get to me.

The one Human came dragging in at 2:30 in the morning just less than a week ago from some "work trip" to Tennessee. That suitcase is still in the bedroom not quite unpacked.

The HumanGyrrl was here for a suspiciously long time on Monday and Tuesday putting her things in that clothes swirling machine and then in to a suitcase. And she had her computer hooked up to OUR fast connection and kept printing out addresses to independent book stores between Seattle, Washington and the Florida/Georgia border. We haven't seen her since then.

Then this morning, the OtherHuman comes out with YET another suitcase packed and worrying something about not having a seat assignment.

So I asked them what was going on, insinuating that perhaps we were entitled to a little bit of explanation being the Oligarchy and all. So they told me. At first, I thought that they had to be joking; they couldn't possibly be serious. But then all the pieces came together and the story came out:

A year ago, the family next door moved to Seattle for one year. Their woofie went with them and the two smaller humans in their van. Their two felines stayed behind with our HumanGyrrl until the family was settled in their new home. Our HumanGyrrl then drove our feline neighbors to Orlando to catch a direct flight to Seattle.

Fast forward one year: The neighbors are getting ready to move back to Florida. BUT instead of flying our feline neighbors back home, they flew our HumanGyrrl to Seattle. Today, our OtherHuman flew to Seattle to join her. Together they are going to chauffeur our feline neighbors across the country in the neighbor's small compact car with a manual transmission with only am/fm radio. Following the route of all independent bookstores located between Seattle and Florida. (I suspect. They didn't actually tell me THAT, but I KNOW them and that is exactly what they would do. And Charlie is going to have to conduct more research on boxes so they have someplace to put all the books)

All I can say is at least they left the one Human home to feed us and clean our necessary boxes. And that they had better not get any ideas about moving US across the street much less across the country.
--
Sky

Teacher's Pet

Sigh.
Sorry, it's part of our deal. We need the Human's opposable thumbs to post the pictures so we allow her to write the caption while we (members of the Feline Oligarchy) write the blog itself. As you may gather from previous posts, I am no one's "pet". I don't even refer to my "companion humans" as my pets. Why rub their noses in their servile status?

On the other hand, I'm sure my OtherHuman would be pleased to be called "teacher". Here I am helping prepare for classes this week. You may not be aware that one can not simply put books into an empty box without first ensuring that the bottom is structurally solid and that there are no parasites lurking within the cardboard. There are endless details to consider which require careful qualitative research, detailed documentation and, of course, publishing the outcome in my peer reviewed journals.

I prefer to follow-up my research sessions with tuna-entree' and a nap. All good scholars need to relax now and then.

--
Charlie

Visiting Fred, Sampson and Maggie

Our humans have been working too hard so while we were partying this weekend we were very grateful that someone took pity on them and invited them to another one of those "pool parties". But this one was "potluck" so here I am, supervising so my inept humans can come up with a dish that other humans would actually eat. I think it's pretty difficult to ruin fruit salad (even for MY humans) so fruit salad it is!
BTW: do you know that there is NOTHING that is even tempting for a poor hungry kitty to eat in a fruit salad? If they would only add some tuna or oyster juice, it would have potential.

Apparently, they had a really good time, but since they missed us so much, they made friends with the resident felines.

Here is Fred, in his climber. He's got a closed tube on top - I think Charlie and I could have lots of fun fighting in one of those. Fred looks too suave and sophisticated to even think about "fighting".

This is Sampson co- ordinating very nicely with the antique white on the rocker.

And here is Maggie. She's sweet but a bit shy around other humans as she is actually under the bed covers here. She looks really pretty in that shade of "quilt" though.

Our humans must have had a good time because they came home all relaxed and didn't even ask too many questions as to what we were up to while they were gone.

Which was a good thing as we had a REALLY GOOD TIME at Oreo's birthday party. We'd never been to a party before (with other felines anyway) so were really pleased to be invited. Oreo is one Fantastic Feline!
--
Blackie

She's Back ! We Didn't Starve!

Our Human is back! She came dragging in at 2:30 this morning with some story that she'd been at a conference for five days. Now that our blogging computer is back, we will have more to say about our experiences. Meanwhile, we are eating.

Alberta

Sky

Blackie and Charlie

BTW: We didn't REALLY starve while she was gone. Our OtherHuman talks a tough game but is really a pushover when it comes down to it. But we really appreciate the notes of concern and suggestions from our feline comrades in blogging.

--
Alberta, Sky, Blackie and Charlie

The Suitcase Came Down

Clue #1: The Suitcase came down from the crawl space and is sitting in the kitchen.

Clue #2: Our human came home with three cases of stinky goodness saying she didn't want us to starve while she was away.

How considerate of her.

IT turns out she "HAS" to go away for "WORK" and "HAS" to take our blogging computer with her. Apparently, several of the humans from her office are driving north on Saturday to get to where something called "meetings" are starting on Sunday. (We guess it's like their own "work" version of the Catolympics but doesn't sound nearly as fun.)

Still, they are driving through Catlanta and spending the first night in Cattanooga. This doesn't sound too much like "WORK" to us.

Our other human says we don't need all that stinky goodness because, except for Alberta, we are all too fat.

Minimal stinky goodness? No blogging computer? Only one human to serve us?

We have some concerns here.

--
Alberta, Sky, Blackie and Charlie

Disclaimer: the Oligarchy is forced to use a "file photo" of Alberta in a packed suitcase as OUR human would never be so organized as to actually HAVE a packed suitcase in advance as to when she has to be out the front door.

The Human Gyrrl's Room

Come on in, Charlie, the human gyrrl left the door to her room open so we can explore, hang out and sleep on all her clothes and knock anything we want to on the floor without anyone even thinking of blaming US. -- Blackie

P.S. We actually LOVE our human gyrrl. Sometimes our other humans go away or get busy and she comes over and makes sure we don't starve or perish of loneliness.