Me-ouch!

Charlie, my cat, loves me and would never hurt me. Intentionally. But things can happen, and they did earlier this week.

It was late at night, and I was on my desktop computer upstairs, looking at some websites or working on letters. I heard “Meow-wow!” as Charlie hopped up on the chair next to me and then stepped over into my lap, where she curled up.

This is standard operating procedure for Charlie when I’m on the computer late at night. She will sit for a while, then hop off and go elsewhere. Or she may stick around for a while. Or she may go into orbit around my monitor–climbing up onto the desk, then strolling around the back of the flat-screen monitor (picking her way through some of the junk back there), cycling back to the front and stepping back down into my lap. Or she may go for another orbit. Or another.

It’s rather distracting when you’re trying to concentrate on your writing. But she can get away with it. She’s got me wrapped around her paw, let’s admit it.

Anyway, I was just wearing shorts–it was late, as I said–when Charlie climbed up, as usual, then went around the back of the monitor, as usual, and climbed back down into my lap, as usual. But I may have moved my leg, and that startled her. She started losing her balance. Charlie doesn’t have front claws, if you don’t know, but the ones on her rear paws still work. As she battled to keep her balance, she dug in … and left two long lines at the top of my right thigh …



Me-ouch!!!

I didn’t swear or yell. Charlie fell to the floor and ran off, letting me alone to clean up the blood.

A few minutes later, I went to bed. Soon Charlie hopped up on the bed, next to me. Purr, purr, purr.

****
Outside of that misadventure, I have been doing pretty well while my wife has been gone on her trip. Since I am a novice in the kitchen, you may want to know about that.

On Monday, I baked some frozen twice-baked potatoes. (Does that make them thrice-baked potatoes?) Tuesday, I bought a foot-long chicken sandwich from Subway–had half of it for lunch and the other half for supper, before heading off to a volleyball match. Wednesday, I had got a pizza pasty for lunch from the pasty place next door.

That afternoon, I drove out of town to visit a friend–we had pizza for supper, and I stayed overnight, driving back Thursday morning. I had yogurt and some grapes for lunch–supper was taken en route to another volleyball match, another stop at Subway.

The kitties didn’t get their canned food while I was gone last night. Aside from tha,t they have been fed regularly and their dry food and water is kept in good supply.

As for my wife, she is having a great time, seeing the shows down in Branson. “Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked during our phone call Thursday morning. “Oh, you bet!” she answered.

We have talked every night except last night (no cell reception at my friend’s place). She has been updating me on her adventures, while I tell her about my day. Each day down there has been very busy. This is her last day at Branson–they start the long bus trip home Friday morning.

I will not have to drive to Ironwood to pick her up Saturday night–one of the women from our town who is also taking the tour will drive her home. That’s fine–we’ve got an early deadline because of the Labor Day holiday, and Saturday will be pretty busy for me.

Yeah, I miss her, all right. It’s too quiet at home, though I have managed to keep myself busy. The kitties miss her, too, especially Maggie. But she will be back home within 48 hours.

And she is having a good time, which matters most of all.

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Charlie's toy box

While looking over all those blog entries I copied from Efx2 (all 294 of them), I noticed a few things. When I wrote shorter entries, I wrote more often. When I made fewer photos, I included photos more often. Interesting trends.

So I'm thinking maybe I should go back to the more frequent though shorter entries. You know that some of my posts get kind of long, since I have a lot of things to share with you. So maybe if I go for shorter entries ... I'll have to think about it.

****
One thing I don't like about Vox is that I can't get the font I like (Georgia) for my entries. I have tried to change them bodily here, but they seem to want to switch back to the default for the particular design I am using. (Sigh) Blogger, by the way, doesn't do that. Hmmm.

I know some of the Vox designs use Georgia, but when I tried to find some of them last night, I didn't have much luck. How to burn an hour or two.

****
One thing I didn't mention before is that we are going to take a little vacation next week. A short jaunt down to visit my son, who lives about 525 miles away, in the northern Detroit suburbs. It amounts to four days and three nights on the road. Better get that iPod all charged up.

David is coming along, and we're going to see if it's possible for him to stay with his older brother. My wife and I will stay at a motel.

Apart from his daytime job (at a bank corporation), my older son is into improv comedy, and he has been learning about it. He has been part of improv shows before, and he recently told us that another one will take place on the last Saturday of July. So my wife and I started talking later and agreed this might deserve a trip from the parental units.

After all, we haven't visited him during summer for years. Our only visits have been around Thanksgiving, since the trips were paid for by the paper--I was going down there to cover our football team playing in the state finals in Detroit.

We'll pay for this one ourselves, even with gas hitting $4.29/gallon up here. It will cost some money, but seeing your son do his improv thing: priceless.

****
OK, now it's time to show what Charlie has been doing. An explanation first.

I had a pair of athletic shoes I used for many years. Finally the laces wore through the eyelets, and I decided to get a new pair. The laces I had on the old shoes were virtually new, so I took them off the shoes, which I forgot to throw out.

Enter Charlie. Lately, she has been playing with marbles in the living room, batting them around from one paw to another as she runs across the floor. On this night, the marble managed to get inside my shoe, and she wanted to get it out ...

That's MY marble!

She was pawing around inside the shoe for a while, rocking it. Because she heard the marble inside, down by the toe. But there it stayed--until she got the bright idea to tip the shoe up ...

An A in physics

Sure enough, the marble was freed from its prison. Charlie played for it a while ...

Success!

Charlie picked up the marble in her mouth, walked back to the shoe ... and dropped it back in there, so she could play with it again. In and out ...

I'll get it again, too

A week or so ago, we had Charlie's exotic cat toys spread out on the floor of the living room ...

Her toy box is in back

They consist of both of the shoelaces from the old shoes (tied together), the plastic ring from a jug of milk, a larger plastic ring from a jar of applesauce, the inverted top of a stack of DVDs (with two marbles inside) and a plastic bag.

Charlie knows enough about physics to understand how to get the marbles out: Simply tip the plastic DVD top on its side, and there you are ...

Playing marbles

Her attention then turned to the bag. She started pouncing on the bag, wrestling with it. What's going on now?

Well, if you look closely in the next photo, there's a half roll of candy inside--Smarties, I think--and Charlie is wrestling with the bag to get it out ...

A Smartie kitty

Then Charlie and I decided to go fishing. My "line" was the tied-together shoelaces. I would throw it out, Charlie would catch an end and start wrestling with it as I slowly tried to pull it back. At one point, she wore both shoelaces on her back atop my mom's old old sewing chest--much to the puzzlement of Maggie, watching in back ...

All strung out

Maggie, who is nearing her 16th year, is getting thinner all the time. Unfortunately, she still won't get along with Charlie. So, some time after our trip to Detroit, we will visit the animal shelter to see if we can find a playmate for a kitty who would dearly like someone to play with.

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The rescue of Bobo

Who is Bobo? We'll get to that eventually. Along with an explanation of why Bobo is really lucky that I drive a small car.

First, background for those who are just getting to know me. If you know all this stuff already, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

My mom went into the nursing home about two years ago. She lives about 50 miles away. This summer, my wife and I have been cleaning all the possessions out of her house, so we can sell it. It's been a lot of work for both of us (and we have found a lot of crazy stuff; plenty of photos to come), but we are nearly done now.

Our plan this Wednesday was to take a pair of pole lamps and two typewriters home with us. The thing is, I drive a smallish car, a Mazda Protege, and they don't have a lot of trunk space. We could only take the lamps home by folding down the rear seat. That was our plan.

But we also planned to visit my mom, and we guessed (correctly) that she would want to go out to supper with us: We normally drive to the Hardee's in Iron Mountain, about eight miles away, because she loves their chicken sandwiches and strawberry shakes. She is 85 and doesn't eat too much. So we have them cut in half, and I (and my wife) team up on the other half.

We couldn't put the lamps in the car right away because when we take her out, my mom goes in the front seat, and my wife sits in the back. That doesn't work if we have lamps in the trunk, poking into the back seat. Besides, her wheelchair also has to go into the trunk. It's a lot of wrestling around, but we're getting fairly adept at squeezing that thing into the trunk and closing the lid.

So, we agreed, we'll leave the lamps in the house and return after supper to pick them up before driving home. No problem.

Sure enough, my mom broadly hinted that she would like to go out, so before long we were all in my little car, heading for Hardee's. We had our supper, took her back to her room, kissed her good-bye, stopped at K-Mart (my wife needed new shoes and cat food--not for herself; for our cats) and then drove back to the house to get the lamps.

By now, it was getting dark--the sun was already setting. I turned the car around and backed it towards the back door, in order to put the lamps in the trunk easily. We saw a cat next to the garage, just sitting there and looking at us. The neighbor has cats, and they roam around, so maybe it's one of hers, I thought. After I stopped, I went around to unlatch the back seat, while my wife went to make friends with the cat.

Then she called me over. "It's caught," she said.

Sure enough. The cat was wearing a collar with a chain attached, and the chain had managed to get itself snagged on some broken concrete near the corner of the garage. It was caught in two places. The cat didn't seem to be stressed about it, but it clearly couldn't get free, either. I tried a tug or two on the chain, but it didn't work. By now it was getting pretty dark.

Whose cat is it? We looked at the tags on the collar, and I was able to make out the name of a city in Wisconsin, about 150 miles away. I tried tugging again, got nowhere, and told my wife to get the neighbor over--and a flashlight. She left.

I tried wiggling the chain, turning it this way and that. No progress. Then I tried the other end of the chain and turned that while pulling it up and out. Suddenly, it got free, and soon it was free at the other place, too. Freedom!

I picked up the cat and the chain and walked over to the neighbor's back door, where my wife was waiting. It was a pretty big cat, a good armload, and I noticed that it didn't have a tail. For its part, the cat was quite content to be carried.

I arrived at the same moment the neighbor got to the door. When she saw what I was carrying, she started laughing and crying at the same time. "That's my Bobo!"

Bobo is a Manx cat who has been a part of her family for about 16 years. Besides not having a tail, she has been declawed, the neighbor said, so she would have been defenseless if some mean critters had come along.

But now Bobo was safe again in mom's arms, and she hugged her. She also hugged both of us. We got our lamps, put them in the trunk/back seat. Locked things up, got in the car and headed out into the night. "You made a friend," my wife said. (Well, she was a friend already. In fact, it's her son and daughter-in-law who want to buy the house.)

As I was driving home, I was thinking: If my car hadn't been so small that we had to return to the house to get the lamps, we wouldn't have been there to rescue Bobo from his predicament. And then what would have happened?

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