Animal Insting

Okay, now before you get your panties all in a twist and think that I'm usurping Piper's blog like I did that other time, I will just let you know that this time I got permission first.  That lazy Piper -- sometimes she doesn't even know what topic she wants to write about, so when I asked if I could write instead, she said "Okay, whatever."  But she said I couldn't write anything bad about dogs, so I told her I would try not to write anything too bad about them.  (Wink, wink!)

Anyway, Charlie and I are settling in pretty nicely here.  We come out of our room a lot more than we used to, and we enjoy exploring the house.  Of course, like all cats, we are full of curiosity, so we want to know what kind of place we're living in, and we especially want to know where our foster mom keeps the food.  We found the big bag of that boring kibble that she feeds us, but it's all closed up with clips that are hard to get off.  We can smell the dog food up on the counter, but we can't really get up there to eat any of it.  Surely there is something yummy around somewhere in a nice, accessible location, though, and we are determined to find it!

Wednesday evening I got up on the dining room table where Foster Mom (FM) was paying bills, but there wasn't any food there.  It was just a bunch of boring paper and magazines and stuff like that.  Plus FM immediately put me back on the floor, saying that cats are not allowed on the table in her house.  What kind of stupid rule is that?

Charlie and I like to spend a lot of time napping during the day, but in the evening, we come out of our room and venture downstairs to see what's going on.  Mostly what's going on is that FM is watching TV, and the dogs are snoozing.  And by the way, I will just mention that the dogs have generally been pretty nice to us.  I don't mean that they have been "friendly," but they haven't really bothered us, either -- especially after we threatened to scratch their ugly faces off if they messed with us!

So anyway, Charlie and I go downstairs in the evenings to check things out, and I was able to show FM how clever I am at opening cabinet doors in the bathroom and kitchen.  Or if I can't get them open all the way, I just bang them repeatedly, which usually gets FM's attention right away, so it's an amusing thing to do.  You will never believe this, but those four dogs are so stupid that they have never learned to open the cabinet doors.  Sheesh.  This must be why, on those TV shows about what the earth would be like without any humans in it, they always say that cats will survive and dogs will not.

The other thing I was going to tell you about was what I like to do at night, after everybody goes to bed.  Because what happens is that FM gets up two or three times to go to the bathroom, and I'm always listening, so when I hear her do this, I go in the bathroom so she can pet me while she's sitting there.  This seems like an excellent use of her time, and I guess she agrees, because she always pets me.  And then I follow her back to bed and jump on the bed with her.  The unfortunate thing is that she doesn't think she should continue petting me once we get into bed.  Instead, she wants to selfishly go back to sleep.  So no matter how many times I butt my head against her arm or how charmingly I tickle her face with my whiskers, she won't pet me anymore.  I've finally learned that it's useless to keep trying, so I just hunker down and doze a little, or else I hop off the bed and go find something more interesting to do.

Charlie jumped on the bed one night while FM was sleeping, but he made the mistake of scratching her arm with his claws, so she yelped.  I guess this scared him, because he's never tried it again.  If he wasn't such a big klutz, these things wouldn't happen.  He should take a lesson from me because I am much more graceful in the way I get on the bed, and so far I have not scratched FM.  I told Charlie that it is not smart to scratch the hand that feeds you, even if that hand doesn't feed you nearly enough, but he's a boy, so he doesn't think he needs to listen to me!