The Mysteries of Simple Cat

Very recently, the little cat taught me how to play fetch with him. Middle Sister had left a couple of sparkle balls (think pompoms with tinsel) , and little Hob is quite taken with them. One day, I was in the kitchen when he came in with a ball in his mouth, and he dropped it at my feet. I picked it up and tossed it into the dining room, thinking that it would get Hob out of my way. (He gets stepped on in the kitchen at least once a week.)

He tore off after it, and then, to my surprise, he brought it back to me and deposited it at my feet. I threw it again and the same thing happened. And thus, a monster was born--I have to hide the sparkle balls at night or he would want to keep playing. It's ridiculously cute, especially since every once in a while, he will bring the ball to me, and realize as he drops it that it's a sparkle ball and sparkle balls are the most fun ever and then there's five minutes of batting around the ball and chasing it before he finally brings it back to me to throw.

The most interesting thing about the sparkle ball, to me, is that it's made me re-conceptualize how I think about my cat's intelligence. Hob has developed a reputation as "The Simple Cat", largely because he spends a lot of time doing this:

Or getting swallowed by the couch like this:

Here's the thing, though--he's not simple. Our adventures with the sparkle ball have demonstrated a much greater capacity for reason and logic than I would have thought possible. He brought the ball up on to the bed one night (it was about this time that I realized I would need to hide them at night) and accidentally knocked it down the side of the bed, where it fell underneath. He looked at where it had fallen for a few minutes, jumped down, and fished it out from under the bed. A few days later, he knocked it under the stove in the kitchen. Unfortunately, it's too far back for me to fish it out without moving the stove, but every time I go in to the kitchen now, Hob tries to herd me over to the stove, and he shows me how to get the toy out. It never occurred to me that he had that kind of capacity for memory.

He has also taken to putting the sparkle balls in his water dish when I won't or don't play with him. This is fascinating to me because the only other fetching cat I've ever known also did this, although her toy of choice was hair elastics.

A pictoral explanation of the cats' relationship

Yes Virginia, There Are Things More Boring Than My Posts About Knitting

I love having cats for pets. I've had cats all of my life--my mother has stories about how Spike and Muffet would "babysit" me very carefully when I was a newborn--they always wanted to be where I was, watching what I was doing. We owned several cats over the years, usually choosing to have them in pairs (and on one particularly ill-advised occasion, in quads). Leaving the cats behind when I went away to university was very difficult for me; the world always seemed like a much lonelier place without a cat to come home to.

(an early shot of Dorian being worn as a hat)

So I was pretty excited when Mat agreed that we could get a cat when we bought the house three years ago. Mat was raised as a dog person (owing largely to his mother's allergies) and he had always maintained that he was totally uninterested in having a cat. We went to the Humane Society here in town, and the cat chose us, as is the tradition in my family.

Bad Cat participates in tabletop role playing.

Dorian, so named because he was somewhat grey at the time we adopted him, grew into an enormous cat: nearly 17 lbs. at his peak. It seems quite obvious now that he would do so; just take a look at the size of those paws in his kitten pictures. Much to Mat's surprise, he found that Dorian had a lot of personality, and he found himself quite enamoured of our Bad Cat, as we'd taken to calling him. The cat, it turned out, was not at all like he'd imagined: the cat was affectionate, playful, and frequently a bit silly. He also has a fiendish craving for vegetables that makes it nearly impossible to do much food prep without a massive paw reaching up to beg for bits of pepper or lettuce or cucumber or...

Enormo-tron with Youngest Sister.

Over time, Dorian grew into himself, and then overgrew himself, tipping the scales at 16 lbs. 8 oz. Our attempts to feed him less food were initially successful, but when the hot days of summer hit, his activity level dropped so low that he re-gained most of the weight we thought he'd lost. He also grew lonely during the days when we would both be at work for several hours. We eventually realized that it was time to add another cat to the mix: my parents' reasons for always having pairs of cats were actually pretty solid. Dorian needed a friend.

Enter Hob.

Hob (named after Hob Gadling, a minor character from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series) came home to us in January. In an unintentionally hilarious contrast to Bad Cat, Hob is what we call "little". We had a hard time picking out a name for him (his shelter name was Jean-Luc, which I thought was awesome and Mat hated purely on the grounds that it wasn't a name that we picked for him) so he actually spent the better part of about ten days being called "the Little Cat". Hob was a stray for a while, which has resulted in a couple of fairly curious behaviours: he eats everything he can find, and he is a wool sucker (likely caused by not being nursed for long enough). It has also given him an overbite--his incisors hang out of his mouth like little fangs.

Tiny vampire cat being groomed by Middle Sister's cat, Jerkwin.

Dorian and Hob get along pretty well, although I'm not sure Dorian has quite forgiven me for bringing the tiny interloper home. They chase each other and play fight (16 lbs cat vs 7 lbs cat is hilarious, in case you were wondering--sometimes Dorian literally holds Hob off with a single paw). Dorian has lost enough wait that he's now appropriate for his frame. There's no sleepy snuggling together just yet, but I imagine it will happen in time.

It's good to know that there are always two things that are going to be happy to see you when you come home--even if it's only because they think you're going to feed them.

Cats are most helpful

In a corner of the world on election day...

Well, the election happened, and I was wrong on pretty much all of my predictions: Harper got a majority; the NDP took the Opposition; the Bloc Quebecois went down in flames; the Conservative candidate here won by a scant fifteen votes. The only things that I got right were 1) that Helena Guergis would be drummed out of office¹ and 2) that the voter turnout would be higher.

Watching my social network respond to the election was fascinating. Because Canada encompasses six different time zones, there is supposed to be a media blackout on reporting results from the eastern half of the country until all of the polls close. Violation of this blackout can earn you a $25000 fine or 5 years in jail. The ban is, in theory, a logical thing: news of an NDP landslide in Quebec could well affect how things fall out in British Columbia. Unfortunately, in the day of the internet, this isn't really feasible. #tweettheresults became the most popular hash tag on Twitter during the election, and people from other countries started to gather and retweet the early polling information. It was very neat to watch it happen.

On the not-so-neat side of social media, my Facebook page was a total clusterf-ck. I should have anticipated this, having just discovered how many 9/11 truthers I am apparently friends with, but I didn't. Seeing people's reactions to the election was really eye-opening for me: on one hand, a good majority of the people on my friends' list voted (including some for the first time), but on the other hand, some people became very belligerent and pouty when the results didn't work out to their satisfaction. A few people actually asked that their friends who had voted Conservative to identified themselves so that they could delete anyone who voted for Harper from their friends list. A few others have changed their profile pictures to upside down Canadian flags, and pledged to leave them there as long as the Conservatives are in power.²

I just don't understand this. I mean, I understand the emotion, I guess³; I just don't have the energy to sustain that anger for the next 4 years, nor to perform that anger publicly. My friends (and family) who voted for Steven Harper are still just that--my friends and family. As much as I wouldn't vote for Harper, I recognize and accept that some people would.


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¹ and she was, coming in third after the NDP candidate (my elementary school French teacher), a loss that I find enormously personally satisfying in a way that says bad things about my character.
² Little Hob, who has been nothing short of a holy terror all day, having knocked over the spinning wheel, the humidifier, and a glass of water all over a stack of books, has now decided to be extra cute by sitting on the back of the couch with his front paws on my shoulder, as though he's reading what I'm typing here.
³ And then he jumped off my shoulder and managed to hit the "Off" button on the remote control on his way down.

Frakking cold

I would estimate that, in my lifetime, I have owned approximately 20 000 yarn needles. That's probably a conservative estimate, even, to say only 20 000. I own a lot of those things. Do you think I can find one right now? The answer to that question is obviously "no."

There are usually at least two or three floating around the computer desk, whether it's on the shelves or in the drawer, but I am currently coming up short. The drawer has an interesting assortment of other stuff (all of the American candy my parents gave us for Christmas, a small book of Oscar Wilde quotations, a diaper pin from when I was a child) but no yarn needles.

It is cold here, gentle reader. Yesterday it "warmed up" to -27 degrees Celsius; today things are currently sitting around the same temperature, although it should actually warm up this afternoon. The only good thing about the cold like that is that it doesn't snow here when it gets really cold because it is just too dry. We had a small incident in which the little cat decided to make a break for freedom and the great outdoors, only to come running right back in to the house before he made it off the front porch.

For the last few months, a few of my friends from the guild and I have been going out for "Fancy Ladies Night", which essentially means that we get dressed up and go out for dinner. One of the Asian fusion restaurants in town does a seasonal feast menu every few months where you are served a variety of dishes family-style, so we started there and are intending to make our way through the finer dining establishments of NBRC. This month, however, we decided to try "Fancy Ladies Stay In," where we stayed in and had fondue. It was a delectable feast.

We made pizza for dinner last night, which turned out really well. We used a dough recipe from one of the cookbooks I gave to Mat for Christmas, and it was pretty darn tasty.

Our house is a very very very fine house....

It has, as they say, been a hell of a week.

We have adopted a new cat. His shelter name was Jean-Luc, which I loved and Mat disdained (apparently only because it wasn't a name that we gave him). After spending a few days being referred to as "The Little Cat" (an apt moniker given that he is literally less than a third of Dorian's size), he is now Hob, after Hob Gadling from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman:

The adjustment has been interesting. It's gone better than I would have imagine in some respects, but Dorian is definitely a little sad about the whole thing. He has hardly snuggled and has not purred at all since Hob came. They have been wrestling each other and chasing each other around, but all of those moments are punctuated by moments like this:

The weekend was particularly stressful. The old roommates were in town to celebrate Ian's birthday. We wound up moving the festivities back here, and I was very excited to try out the ice cream maker attachment for my standmixer in making strawberry daiquiries (amazing, in case you were wondering). As we were standing around in the kitchen, I could hear something in the basement that sounded like a tap running. Assuming Mat had left the laundry room tap running for some reason, I went down to shut it off...only to discover that it was not the laundry room tap at all, but the bottom of our hot water heater, leaking water all over the basement.

This is not the sort of thing that's good to discover at 11:30 at night when you've been drinking socially with friends.

We couldn't get the intake valve on the tank to shut off, which meant that the tank kept trying to refill itself, and we wound up having to shut the water for the whole house off for the night to get it to stop. Thankfully, the tank was a rental, and the company came the next day and replaced it with a newer and more efficient model.

Then our washer broke on Monday. Like I said, a hell of a week.