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Friday, March 16, 2012

Sox and the Kitty, Continued

Django the Art Cat, as regular readers of this blog (all 2.4 of them) will know, does not consider the day officially underway until some article, preferably something highly absorbent, has been placed in the dog's water bowl. In a pinch he'll dunk hair elastics, but he really prefers paper, particularly paper towels and napkins.

Socks are a recurring theme, mainly because they are not only very portable for a cat but also because there exists a reliable source of them: the laundry basket of clean clothing in the hallway that the resident teenager is supposed to take upstairs right away.

Said basket actually sits in hallway for weeks unless thunderous ultimatums are issued. The result is that we actually have about a dozen socks that never, ever are worn in between washings. They go from the dryer into the basket, where the cat seizes one each day and transports it to the water bowl.

There it soaks up water and, if not retrieved and hung to dry in time, eventually becomes a magnet for dog/cat hairs, crumbs, and other debris. Then it is flung down the basement stairs to go into the washer again. Such is the cycle of life for these footloose socks.

There is a long sock striped in emerald and lime green that often ends up in the drink, but right now it's hanging out somewhere in limbo-land between hallway, water bowl, washing machine, and dryer, so I couldn't get a picture of that. Hence, I've substituted Django's installation entitled "The Cat-tain and Chenille: A Study in Pipecleaners, Hair Elastics, and Water."

He appears to be celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Did he actually foresee this holiday? Is the cat known amongst my daughter's friends as "Fat Looie" and "Mr. Stupid" actually smarter than he lets on? Unlikely, as he's not only mostly colorblind but also illiterate. Heck, it took every speck of his gray matter to become litterboxerate.

2 comments:

  1. A wonderful piece, Christina, which made me smile. I'm sure I'd like Django the art cat. We had a cat many years ago named Shadow. She had a thing for rubber bands and hair bands and would deposit them in her food bowl for safekeeping. She never ate the rubber bands, just seemed to enjoy chewing on them. Sometimes we'd hear one twang and realize she'd found another one. She also liked jumping up onto the counter in the bathroom and then meow impatiently until we turned on the faucet ever so slightly, just a steady drip, so that she could drink!

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  2. Shadow sounds lovely--Django likewise puts toys into the food bowl, he often carries sodden items from the water bowl and puts them into the bowl next to his food while he eats, then leaves them there, puzzling the other cat, Pebble, when she checks out the bowl for a snack.

    I've never had a cat with this sort of fascination. Our felines have included Whiskers (irritable, vengeful, and terrified of aluminum foil), Ceili (scrappy, stubborn, talkative calico who menaced visitors with a creepy stare and a slow, threatening hiss, preferably delivered from a high vantage point), numerous foster kittens (all with their weird personalities in place even at 3 months), and the current crew, clueless Django and sweet, straight-out-of-a- Beatrix-Potter book Pebble (who is the only cat I've had who deliberately asked for games of fetch).

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