Outnumbered
Now that GF is in law school, and living a couple of hours away during the week, it's just me and the cats.
The first week GF was gone my parents were here, so entertaining them kept me busy. Next week I'll be back in school (and teaching a 5 day a week schedule) and, therefore, really, really busy. But this week, I'm out of sorts. I have stuff to do. Syllabi. Conference papers. Research. But I can't focus. I wander from room to room in my seriously lovely apartment and it feels like too many rooms, too many places to sit, too many books I could read, too many movies I could watch, too many channels on the tv, even.
But mostly, it feels like too many cats. They're everywhere I turn. On the newspaper I'm reading; between my feet when I try to walk; in the middle of the bed when I try to sleep; crying by the front door when I try to write (Manfred) or rolling pens off the desk and settling herself on top of the books I'm trying to use as I write (Margo). And they're vocal. I knew this about the breed, but thought, "how bad could it be?" Answer: pretty bad, given that siamese sound kind of like crying babies. I've invented half a dozen games for them, such as:
--dangling the elastic from a conference name tag. They love that, love to grab onto one end and walk away, turning and batting the tension between my end and theirs. They love it for a few minutes, that is.
--gathering all the sparkly puff balls from under the furniture and putting it in one of the drawers in the hallway table. Then I open the drawer and they pull the balls out, one at a time. This works until the balls are gone.
--combining above activities by tying conference tag elastic around a sparkly puff ball. Margo, especially, likes to play kitty tether ball with this. For a few minutes.
--building a fort out of a magazine rack and an old knit blanket. Manfred starts crying for this as soon as I get up in the morning and then immediatly burrows under the blanket until his head pokes out the end. Once he's safely wrapped in the blanket, with the tassles on the end draped over his ears, he's happy to just sit there for a while.
Manfred also has his own favorite game of jumping onto the tops of doors and riding them as they bang back and forth. Margo's is following me into the bathroom and trying to sit on my lap while I'm on the toilet.
Daytime isn't too bad, since that's when they sleep. But night and morning, when there's only one of me, two of them, and endless puffy balls to be dropped on my lap, or wrestled with on the bed at 4am, things feel a little overwhelming.
The first week GF was gone my parents were here, so entertaining them kept me busy. Next week I'll be back in school (and teaching a 5 day a week schedule) and, therefore, really, really busy. But this week, I'm out of sorts. I have stuff to do. Syllabi. Conference papers. Research. But I can't focus. I wander from room to room in my seriously lovely apartment and it feels like too many rooms, too many places to sit, too many books I could read, too many movies I could watch, too many channels on the tv, even.
But mostly, it feels like too many cats. They're everywhere I turn. On the newspaper I'm reading; between my feet when I try to walk; in the middle of the bed when I try to sleep; crying by the front door when I try to write (Manfred) or rolling pens off the desk and settling herself on top of the books I'm trying to use as I write (Margo). And they're vocal. I knew this about the breed, but thought, "how bad could it be?" Answer: pretty bad, given that siamese sound kind of like crying babies. I've invented half a dozen games for them, such as:
--dangling the elastic from a conference name tag. They love that, love to grab onto one end and walk away, turning and batting the tension between my end and theirs. They love it for a few minutes, that is.
--gathering all the sparkly puff balls from under the furniture and putting it in one of the drawers in the hallway table. Then I open the drawer and they pull the balls out, one at a time. This works until the balls are gone.
--combining above activities by tying conference tag elastic around a sparkly puff ball. Margo, especially, likes to play kitty tether ball with this. For a few minutes.
--building a fort out of a magazine rack and an old knit blanket. Manfred starts crying for this as soon as I get up in the morning and then immediatly burrows under the blanket until his head pokes out the end. Once he's safely wrapped in the blanket, with the tassles on the end draped over his ears, he's happy to just sit there for a while.
Manfred also has his own favorite game of jumping onto the tops of doors and riding them as they bang back and forth. Margo's is following me into the bathroom and trying to sit on my lap while I'm on the toilet.
Daytime isn't too bad, since that's when they sleep. But night and morning, when there's only one of me, two of them, and endless puffy balls to be dropped on my lap, or wrestled with on the bed at 4am, things feel a little overwhelming.
posted by Margo, darling at 2:49 PM
2 Comments:
This sounds so familiar to me. Only we have dogs. And AntsyPants isn't gone for days at a time, just hours. But they're very long hours when there are things to do and the pups aren't sleeping.
I wish you serenity in these times.
Eee! A cat fort - I love that.
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