ThePoliticalCat: Belated Caturday post

ICHC

Sorry, Caturday celebrants. The health care fight has all the inhabitants of La Casa de Los Gatos involved to the extent of forgetting our duties!

A slow week at mi casa. The heat has been terrible. So terrible, the resident gatos y gata have been lying around like lumps instead of providing the usual daily entertainment in the form of charming antics.

With the sole exception of the doggie. We now have proof that Zingiber is implicated in the bedside positioning of toys. We pulled out their toy crate from under the dinner wagon recently, and some feline liberated four or five woolly white mice (with little bells and red wool tails) and strewed them all over the living room floor. And some other feline brought the stuffed toy doggie (about the size of a small cat) upstairs.

We knew that Gustav used to bring the terrycloth bunny to bed with him, but he appears to have lost interest in it now and prefers to dokhol (a nice Bengali word roughly translated as dominating or appropriating, or otherwise taking possession of) Gojira's pillow.

But the stuffed doggie is too big for Gustav to carry, what with his wonky back end. It's only very slightly smaller than him, in fact. It would be quite the struggle.

So we threw the wretched thing downstairs. Whereupon, who should we spy that very evening, struggling his fat lumpen way upstairs, doggie firmly clamped in his enormous jaws, trying to meowl past its bulk as it dangled, threatening to trip him with every step, but — Zingiber himself. When next we looked, the doggie was carefully tucked into bed, with Zingiber next to it.

For each of the past seven days, the same drama has ensued. We wake to find the unwelcome doggie sharing the bed; fling it downstairs in a fit of pique with some hard words addressed to the sleeping and terminally indifferent Lump; we return to the bedroom at bedtime. And up comes Zingiber making that stifled meowing sound that cats usually use to announce the capture of prey to other cats. Sort of a MRRRooowwwrrr. And back goes the doggie into the bed at some point in the night when the tired hoominz are off guard, or asleep and unable to prevent such mayhem.

To his credit, Bandicoot eyes the dog and his stupid brother with some disfavour, and can often be heard muttering to himself under his breath as he exits the bed for less disrupted sleeping spots. He himself prefers the small woolly mice with their little bells. Fortunately, he likes to sleep so we don't get woken by ringing mouse-bells in the wee hours.

Tonight the doggie is resting peacefully downstairs. Let's see if Zingiber has worked the need for a doggie sleeping partner out of his system, or if we'll have to eject the wretched thing from our bed in the morning again.

Have you ever noticed that a single cat, however small, can easily dokhol a whole bed so that any humans sharing it are squashed into the corners?