Thursday, October 11, 2007

Christopher Houdini

Not too long ago, the kittens that were born under the bed and have lived their entire cute little fuzzy lives indoors began to want very badly to go outside. Living with a large dog means that opportunities to slip out the front door abound, and I'm always very careful to count cute little fuzzy heads whenever I take the dog out for a walk.

One day last week the dog and I came in from a walk to find almost every single cat clustered around the front door. Not an unusual occurence, but they generally disperse once they figure the door isn't going to magically open up again anytime soon. This time, not only did they not disperse, but the dog joined them.

Uh oh. One of the tiny fluffy black cats must have snuck out, under cover of the large fluffy black dog. Sure enough, I tracked the faint plaintive mewing and found the once-adventurous weightless ball of fluff hiding in the groundcover.

This proved traumatic for nearly the entire household, and for now nobody hangs out by the front door, seeing as how it magically sucks helpless kitties into a black hole. But all are safe and sound and happy and Christopher Houdini kitten has taken to blogging as an alternate means of exploring other worlds.

I say nearly the entire houshold. Curmudgeon cat prays very hard, probably to some catly Cthulu, every time the front door opens, hoping that all the other cats will be sucked out into outer space and never return.

9 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Curmudgeon cat is just trying to live up to his name. If you'd named him something else, he might not complain so much about the kittens...

I'm glad everybody is safe and found.

[mtzsui - Japanese matzos, anyone?]

hipparchia said...

curmudgeon cat was i-will-rip-your-face-off cat and was slated for the gas chamber for this little personality quirk when i first adopted him from the pound. jis complaints about the kittens are manageably mild in comparison.

hipparchia said...

also, he'x helping me teyp these comments.

Unknown said...

Poor kitten. Alex, the cat who owns me, didn’t decide to explore the outside (without my permission) until he was almost a year old. Then he promptly found him self on a tree limb some 30 feet off the ground and did not know how to get down. Silly cat.

Anonymous said...

Sox goes out occasionally, but ends up under the house terrified if I don't get him back in immediately, which is absurd as he is bigger than any of the ferals.

Dot eschews the outdoors as uncivilized, but Ringo's escape ended with getting knocked up.

I don't use a screen saver anymore, just a blank screen, because all of the screen savers tend to attract cats.

hipparchia said...

i've always found screen savers annoying and now that you can easily set monitors to turn themselves off, who needs them?

on the other hand, i find scrolling windows and flitting mouse pointers to be indispensable, and the kittens all find them to be irresistible. blogging and surfing have taken on fuzzy new dimensions.

hipparchia said...

all of our family cats have always been indoor/outdoor cats, coming in for the night, but spending most of the day outside. i've never tried having all-indoor cats until a few years ago.

curmudgeon cat, afaik, has always been an indoor kitty, except for those few occasions when he has slipped out and terrorized the neighborhood.

the other rescued "feral" cat that lived with us for a few years [and has since crossed the rainbow bridge] was so appreciative of her safe and luxurious new indoor life, that when any of us went outside -- me, the dog, curmudgeon cat -- she tried to herd us back into the house.

Steve Bates said...

Heh. Your kittens would love what happened to me this morning. I was trying to locate a Rachel Maddow interview I'd heard the night before. I found her page on AAR, located the archive, found the episode I wanted, clicked... at that moment, the whole screen scrolled itself (false or at least not manually generated mouse wheel event), sending the click to a link to a different episode... and AAR apparently gives you only one for free; when I went back and selected the one I wanted, I got a "pay up" form instead. I'm sure the kittens would have loved the jumping around, though.

hipparchia said...

they would have gleefully joined in the jumping around too.