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?”
I looooooove waking sleeping cats up. Little fuckers. I also enjoy patting just-licked fur when they are cleaning themselves, which forces them to instantly re-clean that bit.
I have one cat that tries to pry my eyelid open with his paw. It’s as if he knows that if my eyes are closed, I’m not available to him. When that fails, and it always does, as I stuff my head in the pillow, he jumps off the bed and proceeds to rustle the dry cleaning bags in the closet. If the doors are closed, he pulls a Wookie and rattles them. This causes me to toss pillows at him to get him to stop. When all the pillows are off the bed and in the closet - it’s time to get up.
The other cat tries to lift my head off the pillow, by grabbing a mouthful of hair and backing up. By 6:00 every morning, I’m hunkered down with my head under the blankets to avoid the assault It’s a good thing they have nine lives.
You mean I’m not the only one harassed by my freakin’ over-intelligent cats?
Good to know other people use the squirt-bottle-in-the-face trick as well. It worked really well when my attention-whore of a cat was a baby and would sit at the bedroom door and cry for hours.
I wish yelling actually worked though, because that doesn’t involve actually getting out of bed. “I’m not letting you in fucker! You just want to eat my toes!”
I had to google ‘Roomba’.
How well do those things work anyway?
Slizzy and I also have a similar routine. She is the queen of making noise in the morning. She also likes to scratch my face, bite my cheeks and lick/suck my earlobes while I try desperately to get that last 10 minutes of sleep. I wish she would just learn to feed her own damn self!
Deanne- Fantastically! We don’t sweep anymore.
lolcats.
I had a girlfriend who had a cat who would sneak up on the bed, and perch on your chest - trick was, the cat was so small, you wouldn’t notice until you opened your eyes, and there would be a gigantic cat face two inches from you, staring and sniffing your nose. Unnerving.
I totally believe you that you call your cats “little douchebags”. That’s hilarious.
Stop feeding your cats in the morning…
We had to change feeding time to supper time and just before bed. We have a Siamese, and she used to drive us nuts every morning until we got up. The other cat wasn’t so bad.
S. Reed- That’s just one of any number of things I call them, most of them vulgar.
My cats do all of these things, as well. And I also wake them up in the middle of their nap…tit for tat!
Good to know my cats aren’t the only ones who are huge doucheholes in the morning with the door trick.
Shit, it’s all over if the fucker learns how to turn on the roomba. He totally will, too, only had it a few weeks (they’re great, Deanne!) and already the fear is gone.
Worse than the wakeup call at 6am is the ‘I can’t believe you’re going to bed already’ running start flying leap at my head, claws out, just as I doze off.
Roomba’s are sweet, but I need one that also does laundry.
We just got new furniture, so our two cats think they’ve died and gone to scratching post heaven.
I’m hoping they’ll learn that trick where they turn on the microwave and hop inside.
I want a Roomba now. And a new kitten. Thanks. Wonder if my pitt bull and chocolate lab puppy would like a snack, er… little friend?
My bastard of a cat just hops up on the bed and bitch slaps me when he wants me to get up. And I mean a serious bitch slap. Then he sticks his face right up to mine and yowls in my face. If I continue to ignore him he finds his idiot counterpart and chews on his head until he makes a horrible screachy noise and I have to get up and break up the fight.
Yeah but Wookie totally saves his shit because he does things like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stVZ7FsS7Nw
Maybe your cat is trying to tell you to clean your damn house. Leave a mop out tonight and see what happens.
“I’m sure he silently resolves to try something different next time, but his plan always involves him staying perfectly still.”
Sorry I couldn’t help but think of Jurassic Park — “Stay perfectly still; their vision is based on movement.”
I used to live with a cat that had mastered the art of producing a meow at the specific frequency that the sound could penetrate any wall without diminishing… and did so every morning at 5am until he got fed. Putting him outside the house would only allow him the ability to sit outside my window and laugh at my ineptness to quiet him as he continued his food call. I hated that cat.
I had a terrier that used to wake us up to be fed at the crack of dawn. I never did break her of this habit, so I trained her to wake up the ex-gf.
The image of the cat finding ways to torture you guys made me crack up. My orange cat used to sleep on my chest, but when he wanted to be fed he would stick his claws on my face and slowly start pulling back wards.
Good cat though.
heh…sounds like my life with Pumpkin and Pooky, sans Roomba. I ended up not letting them in the bedroom at all and putting up a child gate so that Pumpkin couldn’t rattle the bedroom door. It’s worked so far. I have to sleep with earplugs b/c of the horribly crappy thin walls in my apt, so I don’t hear any of the meowing.
Ahhh Clever cats.
I have a three ton Orange tabby that will sit on you and meow until fed. This starts at 5am until I physically get out of bed. I walk sleepily to the bathroom, the cat follows behind me, meowing loudly. All this goes on while my husbands cat lays upon him, pawing at his face. if she doesn’t get pet, she will do it over and over again until she is pet accordingly. While THAT goes on, the kitten we just adopted starts to bat anything she can around the hardwood floors in the room, which of course, makes a lot of noise .
I have NO IDEA why I even set my alarm clock. This all starts PRIOR to the alarm clock going off (which is 5:30am)
I have to be reminded that we even HAVE cats, now that we have children.
I can no longer tell them apart, but one of them, I think it’s Buzz Aldrin, every night finds a finger puppet or a sock or something, picks it up in her mouth, then walks around wailing because she can’t get rid of it, her teeth are caught in it. She’s 10 years old, near as I can tell, and has never figured out how to drop the damn sock.
The other one, St John Bosco, just walks on my husband’s nutsack in the middle of the night. I don’t know why he doesn’t kill her.
Boy, I have little angels compared to everyone else’s stories about their cats! Of course, we can’t close ANY doors in our house (even the bathroom doors) and Booger always brings a toy to Baker while he’s shitting and demands that he throw the toy down the stairs for her. And if he ignores her long enough, she camps out in his pants while he’s still sitting on the toilet.