Oct 29 2008
Catnip
This morning, I discovered that there are worse ways of being woken up than the alarm clock, the phone, or the eternally barking neighborhood dogs. June bit my toe! Really hard! And despite being swathed under blankets, it was both painful and surprising.
Really. Biting the toe that feeds you.
I hasten to add that this was not an attempt to wake me up to make breakfast. The kittens’ first vet gave me an excellent piece of advice, almost exactly a year ago, which was never to feed them when I first get up. So I always make coffee and read my email before giving them breakfast. They know they won’t get fed right away, so they let me sleep in on the days that clocks, phones, and dogs don’t wake me up.
So it wasn’t a “wake up and feed me” call.
I honestly think June has some kind of eating disorder or syndrome, like those people who eat soap. She has chewed the fabric covering the metal side supports right off my desk chair. She chews the ~shudder~ metal door stops built into the walls by the closets. Lately, she has taken to chewing CD cases, which, being plastic, shatter in a horrifying manner. I’m convinced that she’ll accidentally eat the shards and disaster will ensue. Granted, I pretty much always think disaster is around the corner, but still.
In an attempt to stave off potential catastrophe, I bought her some small dog sized chew things. She just batted them around. I gave her a demonstration (I’ll pause here while you finish laughing at the mental image), and even dipped them in chicken broth, but she just licked the broth off and then batted them into oblivion*, the place where cat toys and socks vanish, never to be seen again.
*That just reminded me of a book I loved as a child, “Attic of the Wind”, where a little girl visits the title place, where all lost things eventually end up.