Sleeping with Cats.

The cats sleep wherever they want. Sometimes that's on me.

The Hellions are fine, but occasionally Evilcat decides to sleep on me. Sometimes she suddenly gets offended and claws my face. That's a fun way to wake up.

Sometimes she doesn't seem to notice or care that I'm not Z.

And then we both wake up and come to the same realization at the same time.

My Cats are Stupid: Exhibit E

Tortie Hellion is in perfect health. She can see and hear normally as far as any vet has been able to determine. The reason I tell you this is so that you can understand exactly how ridiculous it is when Tortie Hellion gets lost.

Our cats live indoors full time because there are cars and coyotes and our cats are way too stupid to avoid these and the many other hazards outside the house. Our house is fairly small, two bedrooms and maybe 900 square feet at most. We've lived here almost two years now, and Tortie Hellion still gets lost.

It's a lot less heartbreaking when you realize that Tortie Hellion often gets lost while she is in the same room as us. She's just dumb as toast.

Bedmaking.

There are few things that can bring together a house full of animals like stripping the sheets off a bed and putting on clean ones.

The cats like to get buttoned inside the duvet cover and they all like to race around in circles on the empty bed, but the most exciting thing is crawling under the fitted sheet and getting made into the bed.

Claws.

I don't trim Evilcat's claws because I like my skin, but I do keep the Hellions from getting too pointy. Tabby Hellion likes having his claws clipped. Tortie Hellion hates it, fortunately she is very slow. I keep the claw clippers in between the couch cushions so I can catch her by surprise when she climbs in my lap.

Then I can start clipping while she tries to process the situation.

I can usually get 3 or 4 feet done before she finally figures out what is happening and what she should do about it.

Christmas Tree

I love Christmas trees, and so do the Hellions, but for different reasons. The tree is basically a cat playground, and since we acquired the Hellions four years ago we haven't put anything breakable on the Christmas Tree. We could probably take some extraordinary measures to keep them out of it, but they have so much fun I actually feel a bit guilty depriving them of their seasonal escapades.

I am hideously allergic to real trees (pine, fir, oak, any trees, all trees) and so we always get fake ones. I like to get free fake trees on Craigslist of Freecycle and then give them away after the holidays so I don't have to store them all year. This past December I decided to get a 3' tall tree, both to save space and to maybe discourage the Hellions from enjoying it quite so much. It's too short to climb, so they can't climb it, right?

While they can't technically climb it, they can wrestle it into submission, which they did at every opportunity. The poor tree never spent more than five minutes upright for the entirety of its career here. The Hellions still had fun, though.

The snake-feeding bag

A lot of people feed their pet snake in a place other than the snake's normal enclosure. This prevents the snake from associating hands and opening cages with food. Some people have a specific feeding box or tupperware, but for smaller constrictors a really common method involves sticking the snake in a plain paper grocery bag with the food.

Since neither of my snakes is huge, this would be an ideal feeding method. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to keep a paper bag in the house for more than 30 seconds without it becoming occupied.

I'm pretty good at keeping the cats out of my gift wrap though. I hoard gift bags so that I can reuse them, and I have one that is exactly the right size and shape. It's nice a sturdy, and the top can be secured with a large chip clip. It's the most cheerful place I've ever tossed a warmed-over dead mouse.

The Cat Room.

The tiny dining room off our kitchen is the Cat Room. It didn't start out that this, and it's really all a matter of coincidence. We never intended to have a designated cat room, it just turned out that way.

We never really eat at the dining table, the room itself is super-tiny, and trying to fit more than a couple of people in there is a little silly. We do, however, feed the cats on the table, and although it is tiny, the dining room has two extremely sunny windows that are usually open. Evilcat's litterbox issues and pawprints on the table led to a few more additions.

The stools we keep under the table turned the tablecloth into a perfect place to hide. When the dogs decided to start raiding the litterbox, we put a tall babygate across the door and ended up with this:

It's a perfect dog-free cat habitat, complete with food, water, litterbox, places to hide, and sunbeams. Someday I'm going to add some shelves so they can climb/fall a bit. Yes, the dining room also has a doorway with a rounded top. It is way too cute. (When I'm outside I like to poke the cats through the window screen.)

My Cats are Stupid: Exhibit D

The Hellions are not allowed outside for a variety of reasons. We live in a very urban area with a lot of traffic, I don't want them getting into fights or picking up parasites or diseases, and I want to protect the local wildlife; however the primary reason is that the Hellions are far too stupid to survive out there for more than five minutes. They have had brief encounters with the great outdoors, I take them outside on leashes, and once in a while they escape. Right after we moved to our current place they pried open a window. I came home and found them in the driveway.

It's worth noting that our front yard and therefore our front door are enclosed inside a chainlink fence. Instead of a backyard there is another house with another family, and the driveway runs alongside our house and back to the garage that we share. The cats had emerged from a window facing the driveway and once they descended to the ground they could not get back in. Tortie Hellion was sprawled on the driveway so I just crammed her back in through the window. Tabby Hellion was frantically running in circles, and when I went to grab him he fled in terror towards the only recognizable route back into the house: the front door.

Of course, there was a chainlink fence between him and the door, and neither of the Hellions is particularly good at solving problems. After running facefirst into the fence he backed up and tried again, then ran a few feet down the fence and did the same thing. I watched him bash his way all the way around the fence and then followed him while he bolted around the house. Once he was within sight of the front door he again ran facefirst into the fence and repeated the entire performance. While he was dashing around the house for a third try I helpfully opened the gate, allowing him to reach the front door and run indoors to safety.

Of course, the first thing he did was try to jump out the window again.

My Cats are Stupid: Exhibit C

The Hellions do not appear to have any sort of consistent skeletal structure, and I'm pretty sure they are filled  with the same sort of goo that can be found inside a Stretch Armstrong doll. This is quite fortunate, as they lack the self-preservation instincts found in higher forms of life. 

Not that regular animals don't occasionally get squished in doors, it's just that the Hellions neither notice nor car. In one of our previous houses the bathroom door didn't stay closed reliably and occasionally required some force to get it to latch. Hence my first reaction when the door didn't shut properly was to try slamming it a few times.

If I was very sleepy or distracted it sometimes took me several slams to realize I was squashing the hell out of a cat. The cats, however, are apparently immune to massive internal organ damage and were entirely unconcerned no matter how hard they got smashed in the door. Our current house is even worse because there is a high counter beside the back door where they enjoy sitting and looking out the window. Occasionally when someone opens the door they take the opportunity to get a screen-free view of the great outdoors.

Every time this happens I am astonished they aren't decapitated, particularly when I've just attempted to kick the door shut behind me. The Hellions don't just fail to sustain serious injuries, they don't even bother to move their heads out of the way so I can close the door properly.

Crane flies aren't scary.

I used to be absolutely horrified of these fucking things:

They look like flying spiders, they fly unpredictably, and you never know when one is suddenly going to decide it absolutely must land on your face. They're called mosquito hawks or skeeter-eaters or daddy longlegs, depending on who you ask. They don't bite, unless they do, or maybe only some of them bite.

Actually, they are called crane flies and they don't bite at all. Some of them eat nectar, but for the most part by the time they get to a recognizable phase of life they are just looking for another crane fly to mate with before they die. Armed with this knowledge, I am no longer scared of the little flying freaks. Also, they make really excellent cat toys.

Sometimes I even open the screen door and shoo them in from the porch light just to give the cats something to do.

Rugs.

We have a couple of long runner rugs that are perpetually rolled up, wrinkled, and very rarely stay where they belong. Both rugs have heavy rubber backing and are designed to stay put, so their continual disarray was something of a mystery.

Meow.

This happens every day.

Everything is Full of Cats

Everything in my house is filled with cats.

Every drawer, every cabinet, every box...

Not that I keep all of my storage devices filled with the little bastards, they just sort of flow in to fill any available space.

This just adds to my theory that cats are actually slow-moving liquids, or possibly some sort of furry slime-mold.

My Cats are Stupid: Exhibit B

Every morning I wake up to a chorus of meowing and feed the cats. This is pretty easy to accomplish.

I usually give them more kibble than they can eat, so they can nibble on it later if they get hungry. When Evilcat is full she wanders off to lurk horribly elsewhere. When the Hellions are full, they attempt to bury their food.

It is very difficult to convince my poor, stupid cats that they do not need to bury their dishes for safekeeping. Anything movable on the table is likely to end up covering a cat dish. A total lack of things to drag around does not dissuade the Hellions even slightly. They will cheerfully continue to air-scratch around the dish until the inevitable happens...

Despite this happening on an almost daily basis, the Hellions have yet to learn that pretend-burying their food makes the food go away. This is also why I must keep Awesomedog's food allergies in mind when buying cat food.

Everybody's Cat

Evilcat is Z's cat.

Tabby-Hellion is my cat.

Torti-Hellion is...everybody's cat.

She's particularly fond of new people.

My Cats are Stupid: Exhibit A

While they are very nice little creatures that are always happy to be petted, the Hellions are really, really dumb. 

It's true, they eat ribbons and fall off furniture and are generally stupid in the ways that all cats are stupid. However, they occasionally do something really epic that reminds me just how much intelligence they lack. The first clue that we might be dealing with impaired animals came the day Z coaxed Grey-Hellion into the shower.

A regular-dumb cat might get coaxed into the watery torrent once, but it takes exceptional-dumb to be coaxed in again moments later.

Tablecloth

We have a dining table. Actually, it's a tall bar table. The height makes it utterly dog-proof, so it's the perfect place to feed the cats. We never eat at the table anyway, so it's pretty much always set for cats.

When we moved we started having friends over and occasionally using the table for real, actual people. This mean we had to scrub the cat food and fur off the table every time we used it. I decided that tablecloths were the solution to this problem. We could have a cat-tablecloth, and then when people came over we could swap it with the clean people-tablecloth.

I ordered my tablecloths online, and they finally arrived. I immediately cleared the table and applied the cat-tablecloth. The cats came to investigate. You know what's stupid? A cat hiding under a tablecloth.

The jury is still out on whether or not the tablecloth idea is going to work.