Almost Daily Cat Haiku

I am sooooooo sleepy. I cannot keep my eyes open. Coffee isn’t doing the coffee thing. Pleeeeeease let me go back to bed.

I can’t send Floof into work for me. My boss is allergic to cats. And Floof can’t drive. Or answer phones. And she hates 97.3% of humans. Actually, now that I’ve listed some of her impresive qualifications, she’d be perfect for a customer service position. Work from home, hiss at people when they call, ignore their complaints, nap on the clock. Employee of the month, right there. She could probably be a manager for any tech support I’ve ever called.

But seriously, why am I so tired? Is this just part of being old? I’m starting to think being old isn’t as much fun as 14 year old me thought it would be.

Well, since I can’t send a cat to the office in my place, I suppose I should go put on pants and pack a lunch. Have a Monday, everyone.

So, we get a visitor from time to time. His name is tiny and he lives across the street. Sometimes he stops by to visit, and it seems he most frequently visits when Marmalade is in the window. Sometimes he seems lost, like maybe he thinks this is his house. But mostly he just stares through the window while Marmalade goes screaming-eagle-shit crazy. Her tail gets all big and fluffed, and her fur goes up along her back like a full-body mohawk, and she has this growly-howl of a scream that sounds a bit like an out of tune chainsaw mixed with the queruling of an angry cow. Everyone else in the house goes full panic mode and war preparations begin and eventually I have to go outside and ask Tiny to go home. He usually tries to come inside when I open the door, and then reacts quite violently when he discovers I am not anyone he knows. As long as I can avoid the sharp pointies, its just some overly dramatic hissing and he’s on his way home. Back in the house, and Marmalade will have found another window perch to stand watch, since the object of her affection was no longer at the previous. And from there things usually settle down. Unless, or course, Tiny did not actually go home and is now sitting on the back porch where Marmalade happens to notice him and the whole scene unfolds once again. Like an theatrical encore, her aria echoes from the vaulted ceilings of the opera house. Or at least off the kitchen cabinets.

And once again, I am a couple minutes late posting this. But this time it was not a cat’s fault. This time a human is to blame. You know who you are….

Happy Saturday, everyone. Have some waffles.

No, Lady Marmalade does not actually drink coffee. Caffeine is bad for cats, which is why they spend so much time napping.

I was actually trying to get a picture of her in said napping state, but I am not as sneaky quiet as I think I am, and she woke up. She frequently looks surprised to be here when she wakes up. I often wonder where she goes when she sleeps. Is she off on grand adventures, knocking priceless artifacts off the shelves at the Louvre? Or maybe napping indulgently atop a mountain of silk piled within a towering antechamber at the Taj Majal. We shall never know.

What we do know, is she is apparently scared shitless every time I wake her up. So, sorry about that Miss Marmalade. I did not mean to frighten you so.  But it made for a cute picture! And now you’re a famous Haiku Model (that’s totally a thing).

Anycrud. I’m gonna go mow the lawn before it rains. Drive safe, everyone!

Madame SweatPants was enjoying some neck scritches, until she wasn’t. There was probably a telepathic effort to inform me of her rapidly approaching limit, but my psychic receivers must operate on an inverse modulation. Maybe there’s a drug for that.

Her paw, at one moment soft and tenderly kneading biscuits, was abruptly bristling with porcupine hypodermics, a dozen or so of which passed effortlessly through my flesh and bone, skewering my arm to the sofa. As suddenly as this mutilative assault began, she withdrew, and her eyes bore into me as deeply as her claws had. Upon examination, the extent of my physical injuries was far less than it should have been. There was no gruesome exsanguia, no tattered remnants of rent flesh, the cushions to which I was previously pinned showed no sign of penetration. My clothing appeared unmarked as I pulled back my sleeve to reveal my arm, which likewise was unmarred. There was no evidence of the brutal battery I had endured not moments before. But that look. Those searing, piercing eyes. Imprinted on my mind, etched into the surface of those little grey cells. That scar, I shall bear for the remainder of my mortal life.

Anyway. It’s Thursday. Garbage goes out. Plants get watered. Sorry this is a couple minutes late. One of the other cats stepped in their own poo and tracked it all over the room I was sitting in and I paused my writing to clean it up. Fun!

This is how I feel every morning. Do I emerge from the cozy blankets and pillows? Or do I retreat deeper into them? Eventually a hungry cat makes that decision for me.

I don’t think I could stay in bed forever anyway. There isn’t any coffee in bed. Or snacks.

And even though all the bad crap in the world exists outside of bed, there’s a whole lot of good things out there too! Even more than just the coffee and snacks! There’s books, and Haikus, and cats, and flowers, and sunsets, and family, and cheese, and art, and trees, and board games, and pretty rocks, and sea otters, and movies, and toast, and Legos, and snowmen, and music, and wood, and cool breezes on hot days, and warm sun on cold days, and more, and more, and more that I can’t even think of right now!

So get out of bed! Go find a good thing!

Staring at my phone, waiting for my thumbs to do their thing, and I find myself short of words. Again.

Perhaps the prose will better flow upon the morrow.

This is an older picture, I don’t actually have a sunbeam this morning. I do have some coffee, though. And that helps.

It is Monday, and that means…. something, I’m sure. I know it does not mean I can make words happen. I am definitely struggling to make the words do the sentences and the telling of things. There are fragments of rambles in my head. But none cohesive enough to make it from my noggin to my thumbs. Perhaps I should go back to bed.

Soooooo, these aren’t cats. They’re not even catfish. But they are pretty! However, you may want to double check my translation. My Latin is a bit rusty, mostly on account of I’ve never taken Latin.

I found these wet dudes hanging out in a pond (duh…) at the Fredrik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. However, they are not a sculpture, and the pond is not a garden. So I call shenanigans. Ok, maybe the pond is part of a garden. Maybe I’ll rescind my shenanigans calling.

We spent the better half of a day walking around there. Lots-o-walking. The gardens were great, lots of pretty flowers and trees and fish and rocks and stuff.  The sculpture were definitely art.

It’s Sunday (I think… I’m in a different timezone, so who knows) so sleep in! Whenever you do wake up, I hope you get to see some pretty flowers or trees or fish or rocks or arts today.

Popo is at the upper limits of the pumpkin’s capacity. But he fits.

Short ramble today. Busy schedule. Lots of stuff. And things.

Why isn’t there any people-nip? Sure, we have all kinds of substances designed or discovered to alter the senses, body, and mind. But they always require some form of ingestion. Why don’t humans get a plant we can just roll around in to make us happy? Why can’t we just stuff a pillow full of special leaves and stone ourselves to sleep just by rubbing our face against it? How come we always gotta eat the magic leaves. Or smoke them. Or distill them into a crystalline substrate that can be pulverized into fine powder and then inhaled through the nose? It’s just not fair.

Interestingly adjacent info, my five year old niece learned the word “mental health” today. It’s good to get an early start, I suppose.

Anywho. Have a day.