Liz Williams: journal

They frighten the hell out of me. Especially near feeding time.

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samarcand.livejournal.com

I don't blame you! I've had several and they ALWAYS ruled the roost.

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footlingagain.livejournal.com

powder puff that's been attached to a bellows (WHOOOMF!)

Wiping tea off the screen now. Just as I was congratulating myself at being able to suppress it in the Pippin escapade.

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Hey, I just tell it how I see it! ;-)

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Be careful or I'll tell how the Late Great Merlin met the skunk.

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You HAVE to tell us now!

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I've only had one cat in my life. I got him the same time I got my dissertation started, and they were both Merlin.

NEVER name a cat Merlin, especially not a Polydactyl. (There's a lot of polys in New England and up in Canada as far as Halifax. Apparently, when the Tories left the 13 states after the war, they took their polydactylous cats with them. They're mutants with a kind of hybrid vigor, large, intelligent, and wicked.)

Merlin was a 17-pounder, perfect tuxedo with a malicious intelligence and 7 toes on each forepaw. I was much alone at the time and spent a lot of it talking with the cat. It showed. He was a one-woman cat, too.

Anyhow, when I was teaching in upstate New York, I was near Cornell, which has a notable agricultural school. Some grad students lived in my apartment complex. They had two cats and a de-scented skunk.

NEVER fool yourself that skunks are de-scented. They still stink, and you have to get a wildlife permit for them, and I don't know why they had a skunk, except they were both applied math types, it was upstate New York, and it was all very weird.

We brought Merlin over for a playdate. At the time, he had started going outside, where he'd met the complex's alpha cat, a ring-tailed red even bigger than he, and assumed executive officer status (he was the brains of the feline unit). He was raised with Siamese, so he rather liked the one Siamese they had. The tortoise shell cat, Holly, ignored him. And then there was the skunk.

The skunk was raised with cats and liked them. The skunk saw a cat that looked remarkably like the skunk, down to butts the size of a VW beetle, with long tails protruding. So the skunk scuttled up to Merlin and touched noses with him.

My fastidious Merlin looked at this creature, SMELLED this creature, backed up indignantly, and whacked him across the nose.

If you've never seen a crestfallen skunk scuttle away...we fell on the floor howling, and then we had a highly irate black-and-white to placate.

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Oh, this was superb. Thank you. What an image!

Britain is skunkless, but we have a lot of badgers. Not quite as stinky.

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My G*d, it's like a Pepe le Pew cartoon scenario! All that was wanting was the skunk speaking bad, amorous Franglish to Merlin.

Esther

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The more I think back, Merlin was a damn weird cat who got into some astonishing situations. Rather like his human.

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gigica.livejournal.com

Sid's no dummy, it appears. It's a good thing he has a bit of respect for his elders. And so sorry that your Giant Guard Dog of Doom is getting her butt handed to her on a plate by a kitty.

*giggle*

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I quote: "But why won't he be my FRIEND?"

She really is quite pathetic.

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Because she's a DOG.

Merlin was being subjected to the shame of having his claws clipped. This required wrapping him in a bathsheet (NOT a towel -- too small). Then, I'd hold him immobile (difficult) while another brave, and gloved, human clipped his claws.

That was when the Weimeraner walked by. Merlin went still, stared at the Weimeraner who regarded him during his humiliation until he was released from the towel, and then flung himself at the dog, who was certain he was about to be devoured by a cat about a quarter his size.

He did a similar thing, while sitting next to me on a couch, when a Belgian shepherd came up to me and put his head on my knee (Belgians are about 80 pounds). Then the dog walked over to the window.

Merlin thought about this: you could see the thoughts passing in his wicked green eyes. Then, quite composedly, he got up, walked over to the dog, and whacked him, fore and aft, on the nose, as if to say "that's MINE."

What he did to dates and armchairs and shoes...there is a reason why I didn't get another cat after he went home to Bast.

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I had a Chesapeake Bay Retriever with the same problem. She'd been raised with cats and couldn't understand it when the new tom wouldn't have anything to do with the 90 pound bundle of energy.

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I have a scar on my lip from the time when I was the size and weight of a standing Chesapeake Bay Retriever who thought he could waltz with me. He leapt and raised his paws to put them on my shoulders, but being not the sharpest scalpel on the tray, got my lip instead.

NICE dog. Dumb, but nice.

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Yes, well, Penny was very sweet and very loyal and also not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In her mind, anyone *outside* her fence was a bad guy. Anyone *inside* her fence was her best bud. The poor meter readers were always sorta taken aback when six-year-old me would go out and hold her collar while they read the meter. :-)

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Middle-aged lady cats are *SCARY*! Rottweillers are just *dogs*.

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Tchah. Middle-aged LADIES are scary. Says the woman who is one. We have put to tap into our Mystic Powers to fully realize this.

That, or hit someone with our purses. [g]

Esther

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Actually, I think it's menopause. It empowers you to say all the things you only thought before, without giving a damn.

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Mostly menopause makes us just not give a flying...uhm... right. This is a polite LJ, so I'll just leave it there. ;-) I must admit as my ovaries are shutting down, my reticence, such as it ever was, is shutting down along with them.

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>This is a polite LJ,

It is?

News to me! ;-)

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Silly Liz. :-)

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Yeah, you see those "thought" balloons coming out of your mouth and you watch while they explode, thinking "how very interesting. I must do this more often."

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