I think just about everybody who reads this blog knows I have two cats, Sherlock and Wookie. We got Sherlock about 2 years ago and I stupidly asked Mrs. ACW to pick out the most active cat. I wanted a cat with personality, and when we got Sherlock, I thought she had done a pretty good job. He was playful, fun, and he was pretty smart. He was litter trained in one day, and it didn’t take him very long at all to recognize his name.
These are the only tricks he has ever learned. As tricks go, I think we picked some good ones. I’d much rather he know how to use the litter box than balance himself on a unicycle while juggling flaming torches (though that would be awesome), because no amount of torch juggling makes up for thrice daily urine clean-ups, and twice daily kitten deuces. And although Sherlock didn’t live up to his namesake, at least there’s an ironic humor in shouting something like, “No, Sherlock! Don’t lick that wall socket!” before the house fills with the smell of ozone and singed fur.
Wookie, on the other hand, is actually a pretty smart cat. She likes to lick Mrs. ACW’s scrapbooking stickers and has no problem climbing up on the desk and opening the drawers of the tiny sticker box before plucking one out with her claws and proceeding to lick the ever-loving crap out of it. She’s also more resilient than Sherlock. For example, if they’re chasing each other through the bedroom in the middle of the night, I’ll get up to toss them out. As soon as my feet hit the floor Wookie dives under the bed. Sherlock, on the other hand, stand there dumb-founded as if thinking, “If I just stay frozen, he won’t touch me because I will be cold, like ice, because I am frozen.” Then his ass gets plunked out in the hallway and he has no idea what went wrong. I’m sure he silently resolves to try something different next time, but his plan always involves him staying perfectly still. What an idiot.
Out in the hall he waits until about 6am and then starts meowing to be fed. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a cat dictate its food schedule to me, so I grab the squirt-bottle that I keep near my bed, open the door, and spray him in the face. This usually keeps him quiet until I get out of bed at my normal time.
Wookie isn’t foiled that easily. She starts with some subtlety and just jumps on and off of everything. She knows the sound of her impact is loud enough, and combined with the jingling bell on her neck, can get irritating quickly. I get up to toss her ass out and she darts under the bed. Her next maneuver is even more irritating. She slowly creeps out from under the bed and sneaks over to the closet doors and starts banging on them with her paws. It looks like she’s trying to sharpen her claws like the door was a scratching post, but the result is very different. The doors of the closet rattle and shake and it’s as enjoyable as an unsolicited finger in the anus. At this point she’s too far from the bed to dart back under it, so I toss her ass out into the hallway.
This worked for about a week before she realized she could do the same scratching/banging thing to the shower doors in the bathroom. She also realized that it’s much louder in the bathroom, and even more likely to wake us up. So we started closing the bathroom door as well. She tried it again on the door to the linen closet, but it didn’t produce enough of an effect for her, so she gave it up before we even had a chance to try and discipline her about it.
For a little while things were quiet. She’d try the bedroom closet routine every now and then, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She’d give it up after a few seconds and wander off somewhere to wait until breakfast. I think it was during this wandering time that she discovered the Roomba. She always had a live and let live relationship with the Roomba. The Roomba wouldn’t climb up on the couch where Wookie was sleeping, so Wookie was fine with the Roomba running around the house for an hour each day. I don’t know how she figured it out, but she has managed to turn on the Roomba a half-dozen times now, at around 5 or 6 in the morning. This is the loudest and most irritating thing of all.
It makes me glad that Sherlock wasn’t so smart in the first place, or else I’m sure I’d be defending myself from projectiles being launched from crude catapults and trebuchets.
“Mr. Sherlock! Ready the weapons for a battery of feces!”
“Yes General Wookie, right away!”
“By Jove, tonight we’ll put one in his mouth!”
“SPARTAAAA!”
I get my retaliation though. I usually wait until their afternoon nap to run up to them, shouting and poking their bellies, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Wake up! Wake up! Yeah, it’s not so fun now is it you little douchebags?”
