See? I told you I was sick...

[desperance]

Indeed, I am not just sick, I am Sick. Injections and pills, thank you kindly. Whole new ways to feel sore, also light-headed.

Also, some villain hath tried to kick my door in. Unsuccessfully, but they have knocked the frame askew, which makes it actually quite hard to get in and out of the house, and harder to leave it locked securely behind me. Buggrit. Sometimes I love living here, out in the wild west end; sometimes - well, I just wish my bestseller would hurry up, y'know? Or my big lottery win. One or the other, I ain't proud. I just want a big house somewhere else.

Also, the aspidistra has been blasphemed, and you only get two guesses by whom.

I have had this aspidistra as long as I have lived in this house, which is just exactly eleven years now. It came to me as practically a monoleaf, a bare twiglet; now it is rampageous and triffidic, and we are the best of friends.

This summer I moved it out of the window, because its leaves were getting crispy and browned off even in the north light; I moved it into high Victorian gloom, on a top shelf where it could aspire towards the ceiling.

Barry also has aspirations, and one of them is to make it onto that top shelf; he likes height. His most recent discovery was that from the stereo speaker, if he stretched all the way up the bookshelves - and he is a very long and stretchy cat - he could just about hook his claws over the rim of the aspidistra-pot. And dangle, and try to haul himself up that way.

It is a heavy pot, but he is also a heavy cat; he has lead in his bones, he was remarkably heavy even when scrawny. He is no longer scrawny. And he puts all that weight on one side of the pot, it's hardly surprising, is it, that the pot tilts?

For a week, two weeks now he's been trying this on a daily basis, and then backing off fast when the tilting started. This morning - well, either he was too slow or too stubborn. Or too curious, I suppose. Whatever.

Big crash, Barry vanishes, pot on floor. In shards. So now I must repot the aspidistra, and I suppose find somewhere else to put it. Then I must hoover. If he comes anywhere near, I swear, I shall hoover the cat. And then, then, finally, I shall take my copy edit to town.

If I can get out of the door.

This has not been a good day.

And it's only half-past ten. In the morning.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I once made the mistake of trying to catch the cat, rather than the pot.

Result: one smashed pot, one siamese hanging by one claw from my thumb.

Blood. Screaming. Trauma.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Owwwch...!

And yet, even as I wince in sympathy, I am also laughing. Your pain hath cheered me up. Humans are weird...

I only got halfway across the room (he had, as I said, been doing this for weeks; I was bored with going to the rescue unrequired, and hence slow off the mark for the real emergency), so I didn't need to think about cat vs pot. As it was, he dematerialised. The pot fell straight down with Barry underneath it, and yet, when I looked - a little anxiously - beneath the leaves & shards, he was nowhere. And came sauntering in a minute later, "what's happened here, then...?"

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My siameasle, Hubble. Aka Hubbsie baby. Much, much missed.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Aww. I really should get icons of my girlies - but I wouldn't know how to use them. They are still my wallpaper, even on this machine that they never got to see.

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

Oh, I feel bad about my earlier gloating over you being curtailed in the writing stakes, now (is there a word for feeling guilt over schadenfreude? There ought to be).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I think guilt is inherent in the whole position, isn't it? That's why it's so pleasurable, because it has that bitter hint of quinine. "To be truly happy in life, it is not enough to succeed; it is also necessary that one's friends should fail."

[devonellington.livejournal.com]

Feel better soon, sweetie. HOpefully both pot and door will recover quickly, which will help in your recovery.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Augh! One of those days. May all soon be mended.

Reminds me, I have to buy some plastic cat plates. The other ones were china. We have to feed them on top of the freezer in case the dogs eat their food. Predictable results, really.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. I was just looking at china cat-bowls today, thinking to trade in my plastic ones. After eleven years, three cats, Barry is perhaps entitled to something nicer. There's nothing wrong with 'em; I would post 'em down to you, but - well, plastic cat-bowls...

[julesjones]

Ye gods. If ever there was temptation to hoover the cat in reality rather than metaphor...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

'Zackly. Alas, he is wise beyond his years; the hoover is the only thing in this house that he utterly hides from. I do know where he hides (he's found a gap behind a bookshelf, and slyly knocked a few books out from the neighbouring shelf to give him access. The extraordinary thing is not that he can slither himself into this amazingly narrow gap; it is that he can turn himself around in there and slither out again head-first, the same way he went in...), but it's way too much trouble to haul the hoover up there when I'm sick and wheezing, just to give him a real reason to be scared of it...

(oh, all right - there is also the other reason, that he wouldn't like it...)

[julesjones]

That cat has you wrapped around his little claw. It could be worse, you could be slave to *two* of them, like predatrix. Her cats always get an awful shock when I come to visit -- I like cats, but I also believe that they come below humans in the household pecking order. :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Foolish person. These outmoded beliefs have been shown time and again to be false superstitions, when not downright fraudulent. Ask the cats, they'll tell you.

I was previously slave to two - but they were quiet home-loving girls, who wanted nothing more than to sit on me and purr a lot. Barry is, um, something else...

[julesjones]

Foolish person. These outmoded beliefs have been shown time and again to be false superstitions, when not downright fraudulent. Ask the cats, they'll tell you.

O reely?

Me: Get off my computer chair, Marco.
[Marco gets off chair]
Predatrix: why does he get off the chair when you tell him to, but ignores me when I do?
Me: Because I tell him to, in a tone that makes it clear that his choice is getting off now or being tipped off as soon as I reach the chair, and you ask him to, pretty please with sugar and cream on top, in a tone that makes it clear that you will do nothing if he ignores you.
Predatrix: Oh...

However, as I am quite prepared to be sat on without notice, do not attempt to restrain him when he decides he doesn't want to be a lap cat, and know exactly the right spots under the chin and behind the ear for scratching, Marco likes me anyway.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

He's a practical cat: prepared to swap the odd semblance of obedience (hah!) for the far greater benefit of underjaw scratching. Which will also reduce Barry to meltdown status, those times he deigns to permit it.

As you say: cat-claw, Chaz. Windingness. S'okay, I have no pride.

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

Feel better soon. And Heh, at hoovering poor Barry. But really he's only doing his job. It's right there in paragraph 3, subsection C of cat-employment: cat shall whenever possible tip over, smash, chew on, root up or otherwise decimate any and all houseplants in cat's domain, especialy ones that are highly favored by cat's human.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You are right, of course (and could substitute 'any old breakables' for 'houseplants' in above rubric, without wandering from its meaning or its truth). Though I'm not sure they count it as employment. Lifestyle choice, perhaps?

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

He's going to have to try a lot harder to get rid of the aspidistra. We've got one that's over a century old (in the way that the hammer with three new shafts and two new heads is a century old) and its sitting out in the garden laughing at the weather. Is that the best you got? Bring it on!

No sane cat, of course, is out of doors. You might be, but not a cat (you see, I have had a cat, just never again)