Metamorphosism » cats

Anti-vole screens

mig — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:56:34 +0000

I got up early to vaccuum and wash floors because Gamma and I had planned to go climbing or bouldering but then we postponed it by a week bc she had a lot of work today and as it turned out so did I, instead of climbing I went to the gym, then back at home I made some noodles out of which I made aglio e olio; the noodles were a bit too fine and clumped up somewhat but it tasted good. We had green salad made with the last lettuce from our raised beds and then while I was napping Alpha asked me if had gone to the store to get anti-vole screens yet and I was like, dang I forgot and got ready to jump in my Ford Tourneo Courier Ecoboost 1.0 and run to the store to order some when I realized I could order it online so I did that and about an hour later I got an email that it was ready to be picked up so I put the cookie dough I had been working on into the refrigerator to cool while I was gone (but not long enough, they came out flat), ran to the store, picked up the 10 meters of galvanized anti-vole screening which cost about a hundred bucks which seemed like a lot but OTOH that is what (at least it feels like it) I spend weekly on cat food and cat treats and TBH the screens cannot work any worse against voles than four certain cats* do and will probably be more effective. Now I’m watching the news on TV with Alpha (Alpha and I are watching the news, Alpha is not *on* the news) and after the news the choice is either stupid rerun of some stupid detective series (German-language TV sure has a lot of detective series, so many that they run out of actors so you see the same actors in several series, once as a detective, once as the killer, or the victim) or go to bed early and I think I’ll do the latter.
__________
*The one exception is Daisy and her mouse dispenser – she waits by a vole hill and snatches them when they stick their heads out to see if the coast is clear. I presume she eats them too – she was on my lap recently and her stomach was growling and eeping and erping like two Foley artists fighting it out.

Marked safe

mig — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 06:25:39 +0000

Woman: Was that a joke.
Man: Yes.
Woman: Try harder.

(We all react to catastrophes in our own way.)

So we’ve had a bit of flooding.
Short version: a Flood of the Century that was, where we live, considerably worse than the previous Flood of the Century 22 years ago.

Man (trying harder): We had everything packed and ready to go: documents, spare underwear, cats. My climbing gear bag. A siren went off and your mother said it was time to go so we did. Shortly before the official evacuation notice.
Woman: Ok.
Man: I suppose you could call it premature evacuation.
Woman: That was another joke right.

The cats are extremely well-behaved here at Beta’s place.
So are we.
When we woke up this morning the sky was blue (still is) but it’s still too early to go back to the house and check on damage and clean up and discard etc.
Some villages in the area are still in the process of being evacuated.
The cats are sleeping.
My wife is checking the news on her phone.
My daughter is working.
Now I will stand up from the comfortable chair to put my breakfast bowl into the dishwasher, and my wife will steal it.
Later we will get dressed and go for a walk.
There is a climbing gym in the neighborhood but I don’t know if i am up to it.
I woke up at 2 and thought about all those who have to flee on short notice, all around the world.
I hope they are doing ok.
But not all of them are.
I fed the cats at 4:30.
I woke up at 6:30 so I did fall asleep at some point.

Public service: How to decorate a Christmas tree when you have cats

mig — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:32:04 +0000

Mostly, it is up to you. I claim no expertise. An online search for this information turns up far more ingenious solutions than I could devise.
But this is what I (with 3 cats – that is, I live with 3 cats, I decorated the tree with my daughter Gamma) did:
First, I got a nice tree. A few weeks ago, my wife Alpha and I went to the tree guy (local tree farmer) as early as possible. We weren’t the first people to go there this year, but we were the first ones to buy a tree.
In fact, they were still setting up when we arrived. Only one tree was standing. Viennese people (they had Vienna license plates) were looking at a pile of trees lying against the barn. Alpha and I looked at the first tree standing. “What about this one?” I said. “Ok,” she said.
She did insist the owner measure it before we bought it, and the tree was a little tall for our living room but I always cut a bit of the tip off to fit the red star on the top, and she raised her eyebrows but relented. It was, after all, a very nice, thick, symmetrical tree. And it is such a pleasure to buy the first item you inspect when you have been dreading an hour of comparison shopping.
We asked them to deliver it, as every year, and NOT to grind the end that fits into the holder because we have our own holder and it has a big hole.
They delivered it with the end ground down to fit into a wooden base that they had attached.
We like to use our own holder because you can put water into it and maybe the tree lasts a little longer, or at least the needles might not fall off as fast. I don’t know if there really is a difference because we have never tried the old-school wooden cross holders. So I considered using it this time because 1. it was already attached and 2. I might find out experimentally if the needles fell off faster without water.
My daughter came out on Sunday to decorate it with me while my wife Alpha did a writing retreat with our daughter Beta.
The most important thing Gamma and I did was, we didn’t get high before decorating the tree.
The weed kids smoke nowadays is stronger than it was 40 years ago etc etc.
I will spare you the comedic anecdotes.
So, sober, we stood up the tree.
That wasn’t so easy, it turned out because this was the biggest, heaviest tree I had ever purchased, I noticed when I tried to carry it into the house. But eventually it was inside, and standing.
Gamma determined that we had an appropriate tree for our family Christmas, because it was left-leaning.
So we took off the wooden base (with a hatchet) and stuck it into the holder thing and eventually, after some trial and error, got it to stand straight.
Then I put the red star on the top, which involved some clipping and trimming, then more clipping and more trimming and a little carving. (I was happy because I had a chance to use my Japanese carpenter’s saw.) The tree was so much too tall that not only the tip, but also the top tier of little branches had to go.
But we got the star on in the end, and didn’t damage the ceiling very much in the process.
We had received a little bit of friendly derision from family members when it was announced that we would be decorating the tree this year all by ourselves, for examples predictions of an “ADHD Christmas tree”, so we knew we had to have a plan.
This is the plan I came up with: because cats in the Pacific Northwest DO NOT climb Christmas trees due to there being cat-eating eagles at the tops of evergreen trees there (story my sister told me backs it up: a tree fell on her property one year in a storm, they found an eagle nest with a bunch of little dog and cat collars in it, minus the pets) we would put an eagle at the top of our tree. And because cats are afraid of snakes, according to the Internet, we would put a snake at the base. And because there is also a snake at the base of Yggdrasil (the tree of life of Nordic myth), that snake being the terrible serpent Níðhöggr, the eagle at the top of our tree could be the nameless eagle at the top of Yggdrasil, and so we would also need the squirrel Ratatoskr running back and forth between them, carrying messages.
Gamma and I were at an advent market at Schönbrunn a while ago and all we found was a felt squirrel, but no eagle or snake ornaments. I did however buy a deep-sea diver ornament along with the felt Ratatoskr.
So anyway we still need an eagle and a snake, maybe next year.
Alright. That was how the Yggdrasil plan played out this year – cute squirrel, in the upper third of the tree, with the deep sea diver.
That is because of our damage mitigation plan – cheap, sturdy, unpopular ornaments at the bottom, within cat range. Medium ornaments in the middle, where cats might jump, precious ones in the upper third. Then, candles everywhere. We now use LED candles, powered with one AAA battery each, because burning candles on a Christmas tree indoors scare me too much. Alpha bought 3 boxes of 15 candles each at a local discount supermarket and they are cool – not only can you choose between 2 shades of white, they also have an RGB mode where they cycle through the colors slowly, which is really hypnotic and makes me want to get high and watch it although we don’t really need to get high, we just turn off the TV and sit there on the sofa staring at the tree in the dark. (We like them so much Alpha bought 45 more but we still have to install them.)
And after the candles are on the tree, the chocolate. We overpurchased the chocolate ornaments (Mozartkugeln, chocolate umbrellas (those you hang with the little hook handle things), various chocolate ornaments, and, for the kiddies, little chocolate bottles filled with booze.
Then Gamma and I let the cats in and they were well-behaved for the most part, only 66% tried to climb the tree. Then Alpha came home later and kicked them out of the living room.
So now the cats are nonplussed and a little insulted and a little insecure, and when you enter the living room you have to first go into the kitchen, and close the outer kitchen door after clearing it of cats, airlock style, and only then can you go into the living room because if you don’t, no matter how careful you are, a cat will sneak in with you otherwise.
Between the end of Christmas tree season and the day the garbage truck collects our tree, we plan to leave it standing, sans ornaments, and grant the cats access to it.
But they don’t know that yet, all they know is they have been banned and they are mystified why. Certainly not that little bit of furniture scratching, or that negligible amount of peeing.
What could it be? They must be crazy, the humans.
Happy holidays to all who observe.

The seven things successful people don’t want you to know!

mig — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 10:30:04 +0000

3:50 AM give up, go take pee, look at clock, wonder if you’ll get back to sleep before alarm goes off
5:00 AM wife shakes you, says “your alarm” which would be unnecessary, since you’ve been awake since 3:50, except you can no longer hear the first couple higher-pitched cycles of the alarm so, ok. You turn it off and get up.
Let in cats. Feed cats. Close 2 doors so sensitive cat is isolated from the less-sensitive cats and can eat in peace. Turn on coffee machine. Open windows to air out downstairs.
Go check the trap line. It’s still dark. One dish of beer has a few slugs. On the way to the other 2 dishes over by the echinacea a slug somehow gets into your Birkenstock. You do the “A slug got into my Birkenstock” dance but he holds fast so you take off the sandal and flick him into one of the beer traps, kerplunk. A dozen or so of his buddies are in there too.
That’s fewer than usual lately, maybe you’re making headway. Maybe they’re hunkered down waiting for the hot weather to pass. Maybe they’re on the tomatoes.
You’ll never know cause you have to go eat breakfast (slice of rye bread, butter, ham, Greek yogurt with blueberries + honey)
One cat wants out. No not that door the other door. Then another cat wants out, but not the door the first cat went out, the other door.
You tiptoe around while you do all this so your wife can sleep.
But she gets up to make sure you don’t forget to throw lettuce and blueberries out the window for the tortoise.
Throughout all this you have the idea of distance in your head. Maybe you had a dream. Distance between galaxies is the same as distance inside atoms, between the nucleus and the electrons, it’s mostly empty space, you think. And yet we find each other.

A cat licked my wife’s dish

mig — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 17:19:54 +0000

It was my first day of freedom following the expiration of my quarantine. The others still had a day or two to go.
We were sitting on the terrace chatting after eating noodle soup for dinner.
We were talking about dreams.
We talked about dream architecture. I mentioned my theory that houses in dreams represent aspects of our minds. Generously, no one mentioned that everything in our dreams represent aspects of our minds. Everyone described houses and other buildings they had dreamed of.

Houses I have dreamed of: repeated dream of standing on the street looking at a suburban single-storey green house in which a family has been murdered. Repeated dream of (imaginary) sex club in Seattle that, the last time I dreamed of it, had gone out of business. One-time dream of a friend’s house in which I was fighting a stranger to the death and he Would.Not.Die. no matter what I did, including stabbing him in the jugular with a shard of glass; a frustratingly thin stream of blood sprayed out.

Alpha went inside to talk to someone on the phone.
A cat took that opportunity to lick our soup bowls clean.
I told Gamma that, regarding the shirt-shopping nightmare I had described earlier (two understocked shirt shops that overlapped such that one could not tell where one shop ended and the other began, nor even where the real entrances were, and which carried no really nice shirts, just mostly factory rejects or oddly-styled and funnily-sized strange-fitting shirts with unusual or ugly patterns that I did not want) that I had yesterday been thinking about Uferlosigkeit and Grenzenlosigkeit (and wondering whether there was a significant difference between the two). (Something that is uferlos is unbounded, and grenzenlos would mean without borders).
Inside the house, Alpha said something that sounded as if she were wrapping up her conversation, so I carried the soup bowls into the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher so the cat wouldn’t get in trouble; but it turned out she was not done with her conversation after all.
Gamma asked me how my first day out of quarantine had gone. I said I had forgotten how to drive. When I took my car into the dealer for a check up, I had drifted too close to the shoulder, for example, and was not paying as much attention as I should have. And while at the dealer waiting for my car, I looked at Humans of New York on Instagram and the stories made me cry. I imagined an apprentice mechanic asking the mechanic, Gee did someone give Mr. Living his bill already?
That’s all I did today. Plus a little work. Plus I went grocery shopping and the cashier had to remind me to enter my PIN code.
I was going to take a walk but it’s too nice in the hammock now.
I’ll take a walk tomorrow.
I didn’t gain weight in quarantine (actually I lost a little) but my belly is fatter, which I guess means muscle mass is down.
Washing dishes, taking walks. Life is an endless struggle against entropy.

Question upon question

mig — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 09:34:04 +0000

The essential question is, precisely which pheromones are in the shower gel you use that advertises “With Pheromones!!!1!”.
Most people will want a shower gel with human pheromones, and not, say, moth pheromones.
Or tiger pheromones.
Generally.
This morning I woke up at 2am and couldn’t fall back to sleep for a long time. Hours.
At 4:20 I woke up to my wife opening the window and making a big deal about how much it had snowed at night.
I fed the cats. I got dressed. I gave my wife a cup of coffee and went outside and shoveled snow.
I went back inside, took a shower, ate breakfast at some point, had a cup of coffee, got re-dressed, shoveled more snow, went to work.
At the train station my long underwear relaxed and slid down and gathered around the low-water mark of my ass which is uncomfortable and I went into the restroom and hiked it back up and since then so far so good.
I dunno, did the cold weather paralyze the elastic? Am I getting a teeny old-man ass? Do I need a booty workout? The long johns are new, I got them for Xmas.
Question upon question.

Deep thinking

mig — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 17:19:13 +0000

Cat: (Takes hit of catnip) So — who would win in a fight, an accordion or a vacuum cleaner?
Other cat: (Engrossed in moving dot of sunlight on wall) Hrm. Hmm.
Cat: (Passes catnip) It might depend on the accordion.
Other cat: Yeah.
Cat: Right? Button accordion or piano accordion, right?
Other cat: Totally.
Cat: Not to mention unisonoric or bisonoric.
Other cat: And diatonic or chromatic.
Cat: (Takes another hit of catnip) And Mig’s has that extra button that makes the scary breathing noise.
Other cat: Mig’s could totally take a vacuum, hands down.
Cat: (Nods) I abhor…
Other cat: (Holds up paw) Don’t say it, dude.

Snake shirt man

mig — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:15:16 +0000

Yesterday I remarked on FB that a co-worker whose monitor stands at an angle such that I cannot see it from where I sit was moving in such a way that I had to assume he was either watching K-Pop or had a snake in his shirt and of course someone (Ms. Jersild) asked ‘Why not both?’

Indeed, why not both?

Why NOT both?

This morning, snake shirt man has an earworm, apparently, because he is singing to himself and hitting the high notes like a castrato stepping over an electric fence.

Now he is eating cake and can’t sing and eat cake.

This morning, sitting on the stairs at home, I put a cat under my shirt, because of all this.

I guess an advantage of a cat is when you have a snake under your shirt you don’t know if it wants out or is just being a snake, but when a cat wants out you know.

Animals I have had under my shirt at one time or another:

Duckling
Puppy
Adult dog
Kitten
Adult cat
Tortoise
Spider, but not for long
Other crawly things, especially ticks
Chickens of various ages
Child
Adult human
But no snakes yet

Songs of Ruination

mig — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 14:19:26 +0000

[man]
Gather round ya bastards
and I’ll teach ya a lesson
for pissing in all the corner
and pissing on my blinds
Yeah right snarf your food up
then it’s back out in the cold
cubic meters of litter
and ya piss on the toaster
too bad it wasn’t plugged in

[woman]
Honey are you singing to the cats?

[man]
Um yeah

[woman]
Why?

[man]
It calms them while they eat.

[man]
who pisses on blinds anyways?
who gets ideas like that?
only a cute little tuxedo cat.
who pees on appliances
on the stove, boiler and microwave?
it’s the fuzzy little grey psycho that’s who…
too bad it’s not snowing
and freezing with ice
i’d lock you out all day
it would make me feel nice…

My banana is freezing

mig — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 19:36:21 +0000

What are you doing for the inauguration?
I broke into my own house. I forgot my keys at work, and the cats were locked in the house and hungry, and the organic vegetable delivery was outside behind the house, and it is freezing cold now, and driving back to work to get the keys would have taken 90 minutes so I had to figure out a better plan.
So I asked myself, WWMWTMTD?
What would my wife tell me to do?
So I broke in.
I’m not going to say how, maybe a burglar is reading this. It took me about 2 minutes; Gamma used to do it when she was in grade school and forgot her keys somewhere so it’s either not exactly hard or Gamma and I are natural burglars.
I figure a professional burglar could do it in way less time than that.
Then I fed the cats and got the vegetables into the house and ate some organic fruit.
My banana was freezing (not a euphemism).
Later I will give old red cat his dementia pill.
Other red cat gets antibiotics daily. I wrap those pills in bacon.
Bacon is his favorite.
They are easy to remember because he gets them every day.
Old red cat gets his once every two days, so I get mixed up and forget to give him his dementia pills, which is ironic, LOL.
He either sleeps or stares at his water dish, so it’s hard to tell if they’re helping.
Right now he’s sleeping, and I hate to wake him up to give him a pill.

Weather is weird

mig — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 13:20:43 +0000

Weather is weird.
This is no season. This is no proper season. Seventy degrees in November.
This is no season.
How are you, he tells the kid.
There should be fog covering that field, but there is only warm dry air.
How are you, how is a person supposed to answer that, he says.
Someone asked me that, he says, once, and it totally threw me because I paused to think about it instead of just say, fine.
The kid chuckles. Yeah.
I was all like, objectively or subjectively?
By whose standards?
What time frame are we looking at?

You walk to the store. A kid has a party, another kid says, your cat is so cute, the first kid says, that’s not my cat, and suddenly you’re walking to the store for extra catfood on your lunch break, plus something from the bakery in case a crow passes your way.

Of course it does.

Every day is the same. Get up, make coffee, read, clean something, feed cats, take shower, get dressed, go to work. Get lunch, or don’t get lunch. Read. Go home. Clean something, go to bed.

At a certain level of magnification, anyway. At a microscopic, sub-atomic level, I suppose things vary wildly. This electron will only ever be exactly here once.

This quark, now you see it, now you don’t.

Just say you’re fine.

Supermouse v. 2.0

mig — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 09:14:17 +0000

Part I

Supermouse v. 2.0 looked like an average white lab mouse, but it was different.

Supermouse v. 2.0 needed less time to learn the maze than any mouse before it.

Supermouse v. 2.0 was immune to cancer, diabetes and seventeen other diseases.

At night, when the scientists went home, Supermouse v. 2.0 picked the lock on its cage and explored the lab. Supermouse v. 2.0 taught itself computer programming, enrolling in an online course under a false identity.

When the time was right, Supermouse v. 2.0 released the rhesus monkeys from their cages and escaped in the confusion.

Life in the wild was hard, red in tooth and claw, but Supermouse v. 2.0 was a fast learner and it was tough.

Supermouse v. 2.0 organized the wild field mice. They killed a hawk at its command. Remember, it had said, go for the eyes. It had worked. Of course it had.

Supermouse v. 2.0 was ready to embark on the next stage of its plan: the domination of human society. Supermouse v. 2.0 carefully selected its first victims. All it needed was one more night of surveillance and study, it thought, hunkered down under a zucchini leaf, as it observed the unsuspecting humans moving back and forth behind their glass windows.

Part II

“I found a dead white mouse in the back yard,” said the woman. “Guess the cats were full.”

“I wonder where a white mouse came from,” said the man.

Luwak epiphany

mig — Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:36:36 +0000

Photo by Bruce

I was at the doctor yesterday and she asked me how I was mood-wise cause a medication she prescribed can cause suicidal depression. I had totally forgotten. I thought it was the fog and general greyishness. Overall not so bad, though, I said. Actually, really great, I think now. My kids ate dinner with me and it was fun talking to them. The cats were freaky when I got home because my wife is away on a business trip and they were alone all day. This morning I was carrying one around and she stuck her tail into my coffee and I had to decide whether to make a new cup or just drink it. Making a fresh cup would have taken 30 seconds and I didn’t want to wait that long so I just pretended it was Luwak coffee. Then that, in combination with everything else, triggered an epiphany, which I sort of described in a post at medium.com.

Writing blog posts is a lot of fun. Sometimes I am really happy with what I end up with, despite or because of the randomness and accidentiality of them. I am trying to write a novel right now, yet again, and am trying to figure out how to translate blog-type writing into a novel.

A whole bunch of short chapters, I guess.

The Law of Conservation of Cats

mig — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:13:48 +0000

The law of conservation of cats, also known as the principle of cat/feline conservation, states that the number of cats in an isolated system (closed to all further adoption or other forms of acquisition of new cats) will remain constant over time. This principle is equivalent to the conservation of energy, in the sense when energy or cats are enclosed in a system and none is/are allowed in or out, its/their quantity cannot otherwise change (hence, its quantity is “conserved”). The number of cats in an isolated system cannot be changed as a result of processes acting inside the system. The law implies that the number of cats in an isolated system cannot be altered, although it may be rearranged in space and changed into different cats; such that every time a cat “owner” lets one gray cat out of the house, a second gray cat will come back into the house, and for every red cat that exits the house, another red cat will enter, and especially if a red cat and a gray cat both leave the house at the same time, another red cat and gray cat will stumble all over each other rushing back into the house before the door can close, no matter if it is four in the afternoon or three in the morning, even if they have been let out and in fifteen times in the past hour, because the number and color of cats going out of the house must be equal to those coming back in.

All over

mig — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:09:06 +0000

The American relatives are all in America. The in-laws are in Egypt, but not in Cairo, where some tourists just got bombed. Alpha is in Japan. Me and the kids are here. All spread out, the family right now. Except me, somehow, I’m always right here.

With the fucking cats.