The two cats are fine. They're fine. So don’t worry about them, okay? When I say “I blew it,” I didn’t forget the cats. (And, strictly speaking, I'm not the one who blew it. We'll get to that.) The cats got food. The cats got water. The ...
The two cats are fine. They're fine. So don’t worry about them, okay? When I say “I blew it,” I didn’t forget the cats. (And, strictly speaking, I'm not the one who blew it. We'll get to that.) The cats got food. The cats got water. The cats got love. The cats got their litter boxes cleaned.
Fine, okay?
I gave the cats a front-row seat at a comedy of errors. One of them -- a hyperactive black "teenager" called Sway who says "I love you" by applying teeth and claws to everything in sight -- watched me and my girlfriend, Daphne, from various windows. We might as well have been using that bird-on-a-string toy with him.
For hours.
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Sway's middle name? Mischief. Much like this young black cat. Photo by Victor Bezrukov
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Sway laughed at me. He repeated, "You big dork!" I could see the words in his face. He held that "cat look" -- the look that says, "My brain isn't big enough to comprehend why you're out there and I'm in here, so I'll just look at you." But I knew better.
Here are some of the entertaining acts this young ruffian saw me perform:
Dial my cell phone many times.
Sit for hours in the hot afternoon sun waiting for people to call back.
Look for a place to pee outdoors, unobserved, in a big condo complex.
Stand watch for Daphne while she took advantage of the spot I found.
Scale a wall.
Borrow a chair from an agitated British woman so I could scale the wall.
Climb over a high railing onto a second-floor deck.
Persuade a man with a heavy Israeli accent who I could hardly understand to follow me up the wall and onto the deck.
Pay that man about $80 for helping me do something that looked quite illegal.
In the end, it was all okay. (And the cats, fine.) Here's what happened.
The pitch
The assignment came from my old friend Helen. She and I go for long stretches without assembling, but when we need support (drunken catharsis, help moving, long conversations over steak and martinis) we can always count on each other. Last summer, her job was damn near killing her. She proposed a long weekend in Las Vegas with her boyfriend.
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Helen needed a break. Photo by samantha celera
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"Can you watch my cats?"
Can I watch your cats!?
Of course I could watch her cats.
The idea excited me. I've assisted others in kitty-sitting, but I'd never taken the lead. This would be "my first command," as it were. ("I bet I could write about this for Catster!" Oh, if I'd only known!) The first two days went fine. I parked my car, I took care of the cats, I left.
The cats
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This illustrates the best view anyone might ever get of Moxie. Photo by jon a ross
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Helen's second cat is a sweetie named Moxie. She looks to be part Ragdoll and part raccoon. She's older, and she's pretty afraid of people she doesn't know. I was very careful with her and even got to pet her some. The funny thing is (and by "funny" I mean "really not that funny when you think about it"), H
