The Game of Cat and Chaz
Oct. 15th, 2006 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI dunno. You do your best to be a good cat-slave, and somehow it's just never good enough...
What it is, is he's just too proficient at those cat-games like chase-the-string. He has a bootlace, it's long and red and he's very fond of it, he carries it about. But I do my duty and take one end and trail the other for him to pounce on - and he does that, and the trailing end is instantly skewered by a claw, and that's it. He never misses, it never slips through his paws and gets away; as a game, it's really not up to snuff.
What's best is dragging something for him to pounce on, and then snatching it away into mid-air at the moment of his pounce. He over-hurtles, inevitably - but then he turns and leaps and snatches it out of mid-air, all in the same movement. He is genuinely extraordinary as a jumper, I've never known a cat so agile in the air; but again, he never misses, and his claws never let go, so then he's got it. Game over. You can negotiate for the release of the toy, but that usually leads to your hand becoming toy-substitute, which is just a lead-in to his real favourite game, Pouncing on Chaz, which actually he will cheerfully play for ever; it's just that again I let him down, I wimp out too soon, often even before I'm actually bleeding...
In other news: you have a good day, you have a bad day. Yesterday, eleven pages, 3500 words, plus some proofreading, boundless energy; today, two pages, 500 words, and an awful lot of desultory slumping. I am conspicuously Not Well, got up with a headache and the lungs are no better, but I've been like this all week, so that's no excuse. Now I'm going out to commit socialisation, so that really is the end of work for the day. Bleah.
What it is, is he's just too proficient at those cat-games like chase-the-string. He has a bootlace, it's long and red and he's very fond of it, he carries it about. But I do my duty and take one end and trail the other for him to pounce on - and he does that, and the trailing end is instantly skewered by a claw, and that's it. He never misses, it never slips through his paws and gets away; as a game, it's really not up to snuff.
What's best is dragging something for him to pounce on, and then snatching it away into mid-air at the moment of his pounce. He over-hurtles, inevitably - but then he turns and leaps and snatches it out of mid-air, all in the same movement. He is genuinely extraordinary as a jumper, I've never known a cat so agile in the air; but again, he never misses, and his claws never let go, so then he's got it. Game over. You can negotiate for the release of the toy, but that usually leads to your hand becoming toy-substitute, which is just a lead-in to his real favourite game, Pouncing on Chaz, which actually he will cheerfully play for ever; it's just that again I let him down, I wimp out too soon, often even before I'm actually bleeding...
In other news: you have a good day, you have a bad day. Yesterday, eleven pages, 3500 words, plus some proofreading, boundless energy; today, two pages, 500 words, and an awful lot of desultory slumping. I am conspicuously Not Well, got up with a headache and the lungs are no better, but I've been like this all week, so that's no excuse. Now I'm going out to commit socialisation, so that really is the end of work for the day. Bleah.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-15 03:03 pm (UTC)Seriously. The red dot machine is the ultimate cat chase toy -- it's equivalent to an infinitely long piece of string and they can only pounce on the very end of it!
It's less effective on ancient cats, but even so, I've managed to get one or other of the Two Fat Ladies chasing their own tails until dizzy from time to time. With a young cat, it's quite spectacular ...
(One warning: get a low-powered one, and NeverNeverNever shine it directly at the cat's face. But as long as you know how to play safe, hours of fun are guaranteed.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 07:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-16 01:40 pm (UTC)