Sunday, April 14, 2013

The Life of Lula (and Ilsa)

As you all know, I love my cats.  I probably talk about them too much, and I definitely take any and all opportunities to share the video of Lula sitting on command.  It's pretty impressive.  I have become accustom to the fact that loving your cats makes you a crazy cat lady but somehow having your little dog in a purse that you take grocery shopping is socially acceptable behavior.

But, I digress.  My cats have an evil side, I have discovered.  Maybe EVIL is a bit too strong, but they certainly have a sinister side.  This malfeasance most often presents itself immediately after I take the load of laundry out of the dryer.  There is something about my warm clothes that sends my cats into Ecstasy.  You may be asking why I call this sinister.  It's because of one simple fact, they make a specific and deliberative choice not to just lay in the warm clothes, but to lay in the clothes that are most opposite of them.  For example, Ilsa is solid black.  In retrospect I should have named her Darth Vadar of the Black Mamba instead of paying tribute to my favorite movie of all time and naming her Ilsa.  As most people do, I will do a load of light colored laundry and a load of dark colors.  Inevitably Ilsa will dig and burrow herself into the lightest possible section of the laundry basket.  It's awesome.  Don't think that Lula doesn't find any piece of black or dark colored laundry to quickly shed all over.  It's almost like they have a game plan, like they huddled before the laundry was done.  You take the white sweater, Ilsa...I'll cover the black slacks....Ready? BREAK.  They are usually in the clothes before the basket even gets to my bedroom.

Ilsa can hear the floss come out of the box in a dead sleep from 1000 yards away.  As soon as I start flossing my teeth she is on me like white on rice.  She LOVES to play with used dental floss.  At first, I didn't think much about it.  However, one day things went a little too far.  I had flossed my teeth in my living room (I'm single, I am allowed to do anything I want in any room of my house that I want) and I tossed the floss into the trashcan.  Later that night, Ilsa came tearing out of the bedroom where her litter box was kept.  She was freaking out and all I could see as she sped past me was a black blur followed by a streak of white.  I managed to wrangle her in and realized that the floss was hanging out of her butt..... so while I got to floss both my teeth and her ass, probably not the best thing for her to do.  This has happened so many times that I have to put my floss in a covered trash can because she will carefully sift through all of the trash to find that piece of floss that she knows is there.

There is nothing that Ilsa likes more than when I am working on my computer.  For some odd reason, she loves to sit on the laptop....while I am trying to use it.  And she's sneaky about it too....she sneaks up behind me and then leaps on the keyboard....all the while giving me that little squinty eyed look that tells me she won that battle and I lost.  She does this in bed too.  No matter where my feet are, she needs to be there.  I hate to sleep with covers on my feet- really I hate to have to wear anything but flip flops on my feet- so when I am trying to sleep she will quickly jump on the bed and actually bite my feet until I move them.  And then she will get up, walk around, nudge my face with her head, and then go back and bite my feet.  This is the nightly ritual for about an hour each night- thank heavens for Ambien!!!

While most of the shenanigans that happen in my house can be attributed to Ilsa, let me not forget to talk about Lula.  She's a little sickly kitty, constantly battling one sort of infection or ailment or another- not unlike my boss!  Anyhow, her new ailment is clearly kitty dementia.  She's only 7- so not old enough to be fully bat shit crazy, but she is well on her way.  She will sit in the bathtub and stare at the tiled walls of the shower and meow.  There's nothing there, mind you.  She just paces back and forth and meows.  She also does this when the heat comes on in the living room.  My vents are near the ceiling, so she will simply sit below one of them and meow.  It drives me crazy!

But at the end of the day, I still believe that the love between a pet and her owner is a rare form of truly unadulterated love.  My cats love me unconditionally, no matter what I have done, or what I look like, who I disappointed, they love me.  They love to torture me, but they love me, and I love them!!  Whenever I am just about to strangle one of them thinking to myself that Ilsa is why animals in nature eat their young, she looks at me, squints her eyes, tilts her head and meows at me.  It gets me every time!

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