There are a lot of cat videos on You Tube. I mean a lot. Perhaps the most famous one of all is the Keyboard Cat which has over twenty million views. Twenty Meeeeellion! Dag nab, that’s a lot! I also happen enjoy the Keyboard Cat Redux starring Ron Livingston (Peter from Office Space).
Olive and Hazel may never reach the same levels of fame as the freakishly talented Keyboard Cat, but by golly, they’re gonna try.
Yes, it’s true. Olive used to have a bad habit of digging her claws into the couch and leaving trails of tiny little puncture marks. It was really annoying and we weren’t sure what to do.
Then one day, I was searching the worldwide interwebz for a solution and read about tin foil and how badly cats hate it. If there’s an area you don’t want cats to go near, just lay down some foil and they won’t be able to stand it, said the interwebz.
Turns out that it was completely true. The second Olive laid one paw on the foil, she shot two feet strait in the air and ran for her life. We felt a little silly because we had scotch taped foil all over the couch and had to hide it when people came over. Then there would be days we wouldn’t even bother hiding it. We’d be like, “Yeah, we’ve got foil on our couch. So what? You probably do weird things in your house.”
Oh the things you go through for your pets.
Approximately one year ago, Meghan and I were getting ready to have Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Company was about to arrive and we were scrambling around making last-minute preparations. Suddenly, the flicker of a pumpkin-scented candle caught Olive’s eye.
The candle was sitting on top of the dining room table, so in an attempt to get to it, Olive yanked on the tablecloth. As the candle came crashing down, hot wax splashed all over Olive’s tail and the carpet. To this day, there are some small scorch marks at the site of impact - I don’t think those will come out.
So we cleaned the wax up from the carpet as best we could, but every time we tried to clean Olive’s tail she would yelp and run away. I think she suffered a minor burn, so we decided to leave the tail alone for the time being.
But as the hours passed, Olive’s wax-tail began to harden into this stiff, clumpy mess. We weren’t sure what to do. Luckily, the issue kind of resolved itself as Olive had eaten all of the wax clean off by the next morning.
Is there a moral to this story? Maybe. I guess if you’re putting on dinner tomorrow and are a little stressed, just be thankful Olive’s not there to make things more difficult.
What is it about corners that drives cats crazy? Hazel is all about scratching her chin on them. I’ll get home from work in the afternoon, pick her up, and she’ll find a corner on my watch to go to town on.
She also likes to find the corners of books and usually ends up knocking the book out of my hand, causing me to lose my place. Or even worse, she rubs her face on a comic I’m reading and “gasp” bends the pages!
It’s just one of the many strange instincts that cats have. You certainly don’t see people rubbing their chins on random objects … do you?
