Brown paper packages

We shipped some things from Virginia since we didn't bring extra suitcases. The packing paper was of great interest to the cats. I love the bit at the very end when Eddie tries to groom Wally.

Why do I buy cat toys?

Clearly I should just wait until something gets delivered and then let them play with the packaging.



Did you hear Chloe crying in the background throughout the entire video? She thought it was 5 PM and that she should be fed immediately. She was wrong.

Eddie thinks the box everything came in makes a perfect cat bed:

He's been working on shredding all the packing paper that came in the box, which will ruin his bed. Notice, too, the fang marks on the top right side of the box. Boxes have short lives in our house.

And right now he's on the top level of the cat perch, biting his toe nails. Cats are so weird.

Milk carton rings

Wally loves it that I'm eating cereal in the mornings again because that means I'm buying milk. And that means he gets new milk carton rings on a regular basis. He carries them around the apartment and will meow at us to play fetch with him.

This morning, he had a blast batting the current one into boxes, but of course that stopped when I got the camera out.

Method acting

Eddie likes to bring us toys in the middle of the night. We’ll wake up and find the hedgehog or one of the little fur mice lying on the bed with us, or worse we’ll trip over a toy in the dark.

Wednesday night, he brought me two toys. I knew he’d brought one because it makes a small, almost cute whistle noise when it’s batted around. The sound woke me up and I knew I needed to get that toy put away or I’d hear it all night long. So I turned on the light and saw the hedgehog and the whistly toy. I guess he really wanted to play.

In the morning, he was going to town playing with the whistly toy so I thought I’d get a video of him. Of course as soon as I turned on the camera, he quit playing.

Bonus post

Plus a kitty video:



What you hear Chloe doing is what she does every single day. I try to make allowances and remember that she's turning into a crotchety old lady cat but holy cow she's annoying.

Do you see what I see?

The window in our bedroom is tiny and looks out into the window well. We’ve painted the concrete walls white so that we get as much light as possible into our room. That window is the only window that actually gets direct sunlight so it’s a very important window in our house.

The cats have been obsessed with looking out that window, which baffles us both. There’s nothing to see except for white gravel (the better to reflect light), a cool hunk of green glass Kent’s mother got us, a couple of tiny, scraggly weeds and the concrete wall. We speculated that maybe they were looking up through the iron grate—which is also covered by a screen—to see birds and squirrels.

Yesterday I looked over Wally’s shoulder to see what he was staring at because he wasn’t looking up, he was looking out. This is what I finally noticed:

Do you see it? At first I thought it was a real mouse corpse until I noticed the tag. Then I realized it was one of our toy mice (this one is from Kent's mother, I believe). But the bigger mystery is how it got out there. We open the window for fresh air, of course, but we don’t open the screen. So last night we amused ourselves by making up stories about how that mouse got out there.

My story involved the Cat Nanny and also explains why Eddie turned against her so violently. In my account, she opened the window, tossed a toy out there and then made Eddie go out. Naturally enough, this indoor-only kitty freaked out, attacked her and the poor abandoned mouse was left to his fate.

Other options include cats transporting themselves through solid objects by way of that alternate universe they seem to favor, but that seems a little far-fetched. Or maybe Wally figured out how to open the screen despite having no opposable thumbs, tossed the mouse out and then closed everything up again.

Feathers and catnip

We buy toys for the cats from time to time, although not as often as you might think. That's because they are very good at taking normal items and turning them into toys. For example, the cats play with the Velcro strips, cardboard boxes, milk carton rings and my make up sponge although the sponge generally doesn't survive being turned into a cat toy.

We'd gotten a feather toy with catnip in it about a month ago, and had saved it for a special occasion. Yesterday was that day and here's how Wally responded to the toy.

Of cats and toys

I forget where I heard or read this: people who buy cat toys are wasting their money. Cats love boxes, milk bottle rings, paper bags and so on and those things are free. Too bad that one of my cats eats cardboard boxes, but they all love to play with the rest of the free stuff.

I'll come clean. We’ve also bought a few toys. I found some “mice” stuffed with something that rattles a little bit and the boys love to bat them around the house. They’ll usually end up swatting one under the file cabinet between our desks (it sits on wheels) and then they'll cry at Kent to slide his CPU to one side so they can fetch the mouse out again.

But what really cracks me up is when Eddie picks up a toy and carries around the house—meowing all the way. We can tell by the sound that he’s got something in his mouth because he can’t fully form his normal sound. Usually he’ll bring the toy to wherever we are and then drop it at our feet. That’s our sign we are supposed to pick it up and throw it so he can chase it and bring it back again.

Here's a picture of some of their toys:

Wally the nut

He loves to get into things.

The pink mouse

I really do not like the pink mouse. You might remember it's one of several toys the kitties have and is one of their favorite toys, probably because it's covered with fur. For a while, the kitties would bat that toy (and others, lets be fair) under the armoire. I solved that problem by having Kent use Velco to fasten a strip of wood between the legs that effectively blocked the opening. He painted it black so it really doesn't show.

My desk also sits quite low to the ground--since it's one of those console desks that you can hide behind doors, the desk isn't like a normal desk. So you see where this is going, right? Yes now that the armoire is blocked, the cats have turned to my desk. And the picture you see on the left happens probably a dozen times a day. Then the boys will circle my desk, roll around trying to get the mouse, cry like crazy, bat at my feet and then pull out my ruler, which is what I use to get the mouse out from under the desk.

This video only shows Wally and he's actually not being too bratty. But multiple this by 12 and ramp up the rolling, batting and meowing and you can see why I don't like that mouse.

It's supposed to be a scratch pad

But instead he's drooled all over it and now he's eating it.

How a cat trains a human

Generally we don't buy lots of toys for our kitties. Well I say that and then I hunted down their toys for this picture--and we have more than I realized. At least the kitties play with all of them, including the small gray cloth which is not a toy. It's the cleaning cloth that came with my HP laptop. Wally hunted that thing down no matter where I hid it, so I gave up, it's his now.


The boys especially love to bat around the small mice you see in that picture. Since they are small toys, it's very easy for them to get batted under the couch, the armoire or my desk. Wally has a solution for that situation. He comes to my desk and meows at me. If I don't respond as quickly as he'd like, he'll pull out the ruler you see in this picture and look up at me as if to say, "Hey! Get down here on the floor and fish out my mouse!"


We also find these toys in unusual places. Last night Kent came to bed after I did and he told me this morning it was all he could do not to burst out laughing because he found the pink mouse under his sheets right about where his shoulders would be. I think Wally thought Kent might be bored. This morning we also found the possum on the counter.

Fun weekend

We are off to Providence, RI to see waterfire (warning, the website makes fire noises which I find annoying). We'll spend the night to avoid parking hassles and also just to have a weekend away from Boston. Thankfully today is beautiful--sunny and warm!

When we were at Ikea, we found a sort of crinkly tube for small dogs or cats to run through. It's flexible, makes a noise like a plastic bag and has a hole in the middle so the animals can get in three different ways. The tube was sitting on the chair when I found Wally in it.




Finally I took this close up of Eddie sleeping on my desk. He loves to stretch out there and snooze away. Sometimes when I watch him sleeping like that, I get really tired too.