After doing three paintings, Tora lost interest and a blank screen was just sitting there for a while until Ronin wandered by. He normally couldn’t care less about the iPad, other than that he occasionally likes to take a nap on it, but tonight, he jumped right in and played too! Why, he might have even burnt a calorie or two!

Myu is still completely lacking I interest in anything iPad related. She pretty much hates the thing, because it takes up valuable space on my lap she feels could be better put to use for cat naps. LOL!

And now I have to go set up her game again, because she’s pestering me for more. LOL!

I must have been out there about 30 minutes, and once Lin didn’t need me to bring him more bricks, I decided to amble back into the house to do dishes (i.e. avoid any real work). I got around the large bush near the back door, and there –looking completely freaked out– was Ronin. Behind him cowered a bug-eyed Myu. I pointed my finger at the door and informed the cats they needed to go back into the house. Myu immediately ran inside, because she’s smart (and very cowardly). Ronin turned to head toward the door, but then he got it into his head he might like to make a run for freedom. I was standing right over him as he tried to decide if he could get by me or not and where he’d go if he did (’cause he’s a coward too). He’s a 22 pound cat. Running isn’t exactly in his vocabulary. He knows he can only outrun me for about five feet. He finally chose to return to the house, after I gave him a little nudge to get him going.

Having gotten Ronin and Myu back into the house, I checked the house for Tora. No Tora. Back out I went, and there she was hiding behind the lawn tractor. She sat up, squeaked at me, and did her best to look completely adorable … which isn’t hard for her to do. She’s really got being cute down. I pointed at the door and said “Inside!” but no … she just squeaked at me again. I picked her up and carried her into the house. I do not have the time or energy to train cats today. I was just thankful she didn’t bolt for a tree, because Tora is a) fast and b) has endless supplies of energy. I’d have never caught her.

All the cats securely back in the house, I went out to laugh with Lin about the cats totally failing to properly escape. It probably took them 30 minutes to get one foot from the door, because “OMG!!! OUTSIDE!!!” Except for Tora, who started life outside. Who knows where all she ambled about while the other two cowered near the back door. I imagine she was looking for that lizard she stares at every afternoon and would very much like to eat. The other two cats think they’d like to be outside, until they are. Tora would probably like to be outside all the time, but I’m not having it, mostly because the outdoor cats are all monsters and excellent fighters. I don’t have the cash for lots of vet bills to sew ears back on, you know?

Then I came back into the house to see if the cats were having a temper tantrum about their plans being spoiled. Years ago after the last escape attempt, there was an evening long temper tantrum. No temper tantrums in progress today. All three of them were lounging on the kitchen floor … casually as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had just happened. I have never seen such a casual collection of cats, and upon seeing me enter the room, they all three yawned simultaneously and rolled over on their backs for belly rubs. As if! It’s not like they don’t know they aren’t supposed to claw open doors or go outside. No belly rubs for you lot (until later, when I won’t be able to resist)!

And of course, I didn’t have any sort of camera on me, because the cats only do silly funny things when I have no camera on me. I’d have loved to have some photos of the wild looks in their eyes when they finally experienced the great outdoors. LOL!

Last night, I massacred the fire ants that had taken up residence in two of my large pots, so this morning, I transplanted the last tomato plant into an antless pot and put it in it’s new home on the front porch. I’m hoping it gets to stay there and has enough sunlight, because if I put it back in the back yard, it will only become an ant condo again. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve had tomatoes in pots on the front porch before, and they seemed to do well enough.

The peas have started to come up in the two planters I already had on the front porch. I’m really late getting the peas started, but they do well enough in partial sunlight, so maybe we’ll get some snow peas before it gets too damn hot for peas to do their thing. Not that it isn’t already too damn hot out in the Texas sun, because it is, but by late afternoon the porch doesn’t have sunlight on it anymore, and late afternoon is when it gets REALLY hot. Anyway, here’s hoping the peas do OK, and if it looks like they aren’t, I’ll pull them up and plant something else there.

The first self-seeded basil of the season has begun to come up! This is the sign I was waiting for. It tells me the soil is now warm enough to plant anything I want to plant. Of course, it should be noted, we have not yet plowed up the new garden area, so if I want to plant anything today, it’ll have to be carrots, basil, radishes, lettuce, and things in pots. I’ll probably stick a few seeds in the ground later today when it starts to cool off again, and hopefully tomorrow we will get up off our collective butts and work in the yard. I need tilled soil … and a lot of it!

While I was working out in the back yard and running in and out of the house with large pots of ant-killing boiling water, two of the outdoor cats were doing their best to both annoy and entertain me. Sasha was being entertaining by trying to catch one of the many anoles (lizards) that hang around the back door. She had no success. She’s fast, but they are much, much faster. And they can climb walls. Meanwhile, Grumpy was busy deciding the area containing the walking onions was the perfect place to make a new cat napping location. None of the cats were at all interested with that particular spot of earth until I put bricks around it (to keep it from getting accidentally mowed over). Now, all the cats LOVE that spot. What gives?!

Speaking of Grumpy, he’s finally beginning to catch on that cuteness, niceness, and showing humans a little love gets his feeding needs fulfilled much sooner than being a mean old cat. He actually ran up to me the other day, meowed sweetly, gave me an adorable look, and rubbed against my leg. Naturally, I immediately went and got the bag of food. That sort of behavior deserves immediate rewarding! I’m really worried about him though. He’s quite old, and now he’s looking rather skinny and ill. There really isn’t much I can do about that. Trapping has been tried, and he’s quite clever (has to be to have lived so long on the streets), and even if I did manage to catch him, I don’t really have the money to spend on finding out what’s wrong and treating it. He doesn’t appear to be suffering, but I suppose if the day comes when it’s obvious he’s in really terrible shape and is suffering, I’ll have to find some way to make the right choice for him, which will be sad. He may be a grumpy, mean old thing, but he’s sort of family.

I’m not even going to tell you what the indoor beasts have been up to today. Let’s just say if I were the sort of person to beat animals when they are being insufferable pains in my butt, there would have been beatings today. It’s all Ronin’s fault today, because Ronin is apparently in a mood. A bad mood. He likes to spread his bad moods around, so basically, there are three annoyed cats milling around being somewhat evil. Hopefully, they will get tired soon and go sleep on the bed together like good kitties. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on that though. Some days, the cats are just major pains in my butt ALL day long.

Now I suppose I should go finish the dishes I started an hour ago and forgot about and stick a few seeds into garden beds. Probably wouldn’t hurt if I did some laundry too. OK, it will hurt, because I don’t feel like doing laundry at all, but it needs to be done. Clean clothes (and clean dishes) are nice things to have on hand. LOL!

Then Ronin took his turn…

I’m sure Myu had a nap on them too, but I sometimes have better things to do than policing the cats’ napping habits (like having a nap myself).

If you’ve ever had a cat or know anyone who has had a cat, you likely know that most cats do not take kindly to a change in food. They get a little set in their ways, and once they decide they really like something, they are loath to eat anything else. Most sources suggested mixing the old food and the new food and gradually getting them onto the new stuff, but my experience with this particular set of cats is that it doesn’t matter. As soon as there is a speck of new food in a bowl, they are UNHAPPY. Therefore, I totally just switch it when I need to and press on, because the other thing I know about my cats is that no matter how unhappy they are about the food in their bowls, they eat when they are hungry. These cats aren’t the sort to go on a hunger strike to prove a point. They enjoy eating far too much.

So I took away the automatic feeder and dished out three bowls of the appropriate amounts of new food one day last week. The result was exactly as I expected: a total and complete mental breakdown and a day of whining, crying, and bad cat behavior. Then … after 36 hours of not wanting to eat, they ate and ate and ate. The whining and crying stopped, and now everyone is begrudgingly eating the new food. Oh, they still give me the stink eye when I feed them, seemingly to say “This crap smells of chicken! Where’s the stuff that smells of stinky dead fish?!” Poor, poor kitties.

All in all though, they have settled in well with the new food, and I suspect in another week they’ll stop giving me the stink eye about it. The added benefit of them being a little hungry and not having food on demand is that I am getting all sorts of cat attention. Yes, we are once again back to the cats all attacking me the moment my alarm goes off in the morning, which doesn’t suck, because it gets my lazy butt out of bed. I asked Lin if he noticed the cats jumping around on the bed this morning, and he hadn’t. Not surprised, seeing as their method for getting me to move toward the kitchen in a timely manner is to leap back and forth between the chest of drawers and my side of the bed … mostly landing ON ME. It’s very effective.

Of course, once I get to the kitchen, I have to get the coffee started first, which means I have three cats waiting impatiently to be fed. Ronin, being the fastest and most hungry, headbutts my legs and attempts to knock me down. Myu sits on the kitchen table and whines pathetically while staring holes in the back of my head. Tora dashes around threatening mayhem. Then I reach for the bag of food and all hell breaks out! Some time ago I saw a video of a woman in Japan who had like a hundred cats, and feeding time was insane with cats jumping and leaping and meowing like crazy. Yup, it’s just like that, only thankfully, I don’t have a hundred of the beasts. Three is more than enough!

I’m hoping this works to get the two largest cats’ weight down without Tora getting any slimmer … with a minimum amount of outright anger about it. While I personally don’t care how much the cats weigh, an obese cat is one guaranteed to have health problems later in life, and that could get expensive. I can only afford to have healthy cats, and I want them to all live really long lives. These are the last cats I think we’ll have in our lives, so I don’t want it to end prematurely.

I’m looking forward to having a weigh-in next week at the two week mark to see if there’s been any improvement at all. I think there will be. I may be imagining it, but I would swear Ronin is already losing a bit in the gut area. Hope so, because he seriously needs to drop some pounds. LOL!

Extra added bonus to the food change is they are all too busy being cranky about that to bother arguing amongst themselves over whatever it is they have been arguing about the last month or so. I’m still going to get some Feliway, but it’s nice not having to referee cat fights every damn day.

We’ve been having some cat issues this week. Heightened aggression. A couple of actual fights. Kitty tension and stress. It didn’t start this week, but it’s certainly been coming to a head the last few days. I don’t make many demands on my animal companions, and I usually prefer letting them sort their own issues out all by themselves, but I also don’t want to be running to an emergency vet due to someone getting an eye scratched out, and I do prefer having peace and quiet in my household. The cats know if I get agitated enough and can determine who is to blame for the lack of peace and quiet, the guilty party will be blamed. This is why they have become exceptionally good at acting up at the furthest point in the house from the humans and dispersing quickly when humans approach.

Now I had been able to determine, through careful observation, that the parties involved in the latest cat spats are Tora and Myu. Tora isn’t a kitten anymore, and she’s beginning to question her position at the bottom of the pecking order, and she wants to partake of the best cat napping locations alongside her –in her view– equals. Myu has determined this doesn’t please her one bit.

I’d originally suspected that Tora was the actual instigator of the fights. This surprised me, because of the three cats, she is the sweetest and least aggressive one. So I watched some more for any sign of which cat was actually picking the fights. This morning, I got my sign. Tora was in the kitchen, and she squeaked in that way she does when she wants attention. I called her name, and she came running for head scratches. Myu was lying on the floor beside my chair (one of those prime cat napping locations), and as soon as I had dispensed the appropriate measure of kitty loving on Tora, Myu hopped up and jumped all over Tora. Well, now I know who’s to blame for the lack of peace and quiet in my household.

I can’t say I am terribly surprised. Myu is really a bitchy little cat. She’s never been happy with the fact that Ronin is the top cat, and there isn’t anything much she can do about that. She’d love to be the queen of the house, but he is a big fat bully, and he’s not afraid to put other cats in their place if need be. With my help, we all worked through that little situation, and now the two of them begrudgingly share the best sleeping and hiding spots, but Myu has never been happy about it. Therefore, she’s got to make sure she keeps the new (as in over two years ago) interloper in her place … and she’s become a bully too.

So now I have to get involved again, because like I said, I do not want to be running to an emergency vet with a ripped up cat at some ungodly hour of the night. It’d be stressful and expensive, and then there’d have to be decisions made about whether or not all three cats get to continue living here. That’s a decision I don’t want to have to make, but I also am not going to have cats fighting and ripping each other up in my house, especially not over something as stupid as who happens to be snoozing on the couch or getting head scratches at any given moment.

Therefore, out comes the Water Bottle of Doom. Unlike Ronin, who is capable of looking completely innocent before launching an assault, Myu is very easy to read. I can tell she’s about to have a fit of aggressiveness several minutes before it happens. She does not hide her emotions well. Unfortunately, during this morning’s incident, I did not yet have the water bottle handy, so when she trotted over to kick Tora’s butt (within the area of my ability to physically intervene), I smacked her lightly on the butt. I wish I could have gotten a photo of her face, because she was quite shocked by that. Physical punishment is a rare, RARE thing around Casa de Orb. So rare, it just about never happens. I can only think of a few incidents in the last four years (both times due to Ronin thinking it a good idea to attack me when he was having a bad day – he doesn’t so that anymore). This also makes butt-smacking effective in the short term. I bet Myu doesn’t jump on Tora for the rest of the day. At least I certainly hope not, or she’s going to find herself doused by the Water Bottle of Doom and sitting in the bathroom for a while to think about her transgressions.

I do think we need to try Feliway at some point, but the stuff isn’t exactly cheap. Money is always tight, and it’d be better if some sort of peace could be achieved without the need of another monthly expense (and essentially drugging the whole household with cat pheromones). But if this hasn’t worked itself out with my help and guidance in a month or so, more drastic measure will have to be taken. The cats may believe we humans are merely their servants, but they’ll may be shocked to discover that we are, in fact, the rulers of the kingdom … and dammit, some of us are getting really tired of being awakened by the howling of angry cats. It’s going to stop, or it will be stopped.

NOTE: Ronin is currently occupying the precious floor space beside my chair, and Myu is sitting on the edge of the desk glaring at him with a death-stare. She knows better than to even try to take him on, so she’ll just sit there and be angry until he toddles off to sleep elsewhere. And Ronin’s reaction to the recent scuffles between the girls has really been somewhat humorous. I am going to have to try to catch a photo of him when they start getting snippy with each other, because he totally has a look of “WTF is going ON?!?!” on his face (with a little bit of “See, wasn’t me this time! added).