Me, at the keyboard: *THUD, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble, HEAVE". Hi Mum! Can I help type, too? Can I? Huh? Huh? Puleeese?
Me: Shoves Ming onto the floor......"Get off, idiot!"
Light spring onto the desk, frantic scrabbling of claws as Mactavish tries to gain traction on desktop. *Crunch*! Bashes head on the computer box. "Hi Mum. Whatcha doing? OOOOoooooOOO! Pens! I love pens".....proceeds to hook pens one by one onto the floor.
Me: GERROFF fool! *Hoicks Buggerlugs onto the floor*
.......gentle tap on my leg....."Er, pardon me, would you mind lifting me onto the desk? It's a little high up for me to jump & you can't admire me from down here".
Me: Shoves Lilah aside with my foot & shouts,” GET OUT, you IDIOTS"!!!

Three cats look at me with disgust & reproach in their eyes & then, as if by some weird spell, converge on me in a body. I now have one on the mousepad, purring busily away, making sure I admire her....(if I don’t, she taps me with her paw).....another is draped around my neck like a scarf, but that's ok...I'm SURE I'll get the feeling back in my head by morning.....the third little fu....er....darling is rapidly reducing my desk to a pile of rubble. Pens are being flung all over the place, he’s tossed all the paper out of the printer & now....NOW...he's measuring the distance between the corner of my desk & the CD stacker. Bastards. Can't live with 'em.....Can't live with 'em. I'm going to bed! That'll fix 'em!

I don’t know if anyone who will read this story will be familiar with HTML coding, but to me, it is a whole different universe. An unintelligible, lunatic breed of verse sent to test my brain & send me to the borderline of insanity. As a sideline to my writing, my passion is collecting Trading Cards. Consequently, when I was offered a job with an Online Collectables company, I leaped at the chance to broaden my horizons and swell my ever increasing card collections. The only snag, so far, in this delightful arrangement, is that I was also stupid enough to offer my services in writing the monthly Newsletter that goes out to over three hundred clients! And, of course, the blasted thing has to be written in HTML code so that the mail server will accept it & turn it into readable text.
Well, what a charming surprise that was!! A whole new language to learn & I’m barely computer literate at the best of times! However, I’ve been struggling along every Month & turning out a reasonably legible and enjoyable and informative read for all our clients. Except for the last three months. Somewhere, somehow, the wretched thing has become corrupted with broken tags, bits added that shouldn’t be, other bits not where they should be and consequently, causing the whole newsletter to be all screwy & out of whack.
My son, bless him, did a crash course in coding (FINALLY, something he didn’t already know about computers)!.. and is rewriting the damned thing from scratch. Completely & utterly.
So I’m busily working away, minding my own business, transposing all the information from one bad newsletter to the lovely clean template that my son had made & still working with the HTML, I might add, when, all of a sudden, I can’t make my mouse work! It just stopped! This is a nightmare!!! NOOOOO!! Please, not NOW!!!
Screaming & shrieking for my son, I leaped from my chair, well lumbered would be a better word for someone my size, and went haring up the hallway demanding & getting instant attention! Did I mention that I’m very deaf & when I’m not wearing my hearing aids, my shrieks of anguish can be particularly piercing? No? Well, consider yourself told. My husband & children assure me of it & who am I to doubt them?
Needless to say, my son & husband came tearing from different parts of the house to see who, exactly, was being murdered. I was in too much shock to give them more than a garbled account of what happened, but fortunately, my son is fluent in garble & was able to understand me pretty quickly and grasped the reasoning behind my shock, horror & trembling body.
I needed that mouse!! I couldn’t do a blind bit of work without it….the HTML requires intricate moves that simply cannot be achieved with the scroll keys! Oh, my GOD! What was I going to do??
Anyway, it was a relatively short while later that my son discovered the reason behind all my troubles. That bloody cat!!
Being the kind & generous mummy that I am, I had permitted the three cats to stay unobserved in my office in front of the radiator so that our granddaughter, who was visiting at the time, wouldn’t pester them endlessly. What a fool I was! What an utter, complete fool!!
Mactavish, it seems, had gotten a little peckish & had made his way up onto my desk where he promptly reverted to his normal disgusting habits & chewed clean through my mouse cable! The little rotter!!!
McVolt lived up to his name, the little beast. He just sat calmly by while I stared dumbly at my computer monitor, wondering what on earth I was going to do now??
Fortunately for him, I have a wireless mouse & keyboard, but I’d reverted to the old mouse because the wireless one is so heavy. I’m sure it could lead to Carpel Tunnel Syndrome after prolonged use. Anyway, James found all the bits needed to get me going again and here I am, venting madly, while the whole crazy situation is still blisteringly fresh in my mind. Needless to say, the Newsletter is taking a back seat, tonight. I need a glass of scotch, but we don’t have any….I need a cigarette, but I don’t smoke in the house & it’s bitterly cold outside….I need a new MOUSE, damn that cat to hell & back & I’m completely annoyed with Mactavish. He still has some peculiar kinks in his behaviour, but I honestly thought he’d gotten over his fixation with cords! Never, ever again will I underestimate that cat. Not ever! AND I’ll never leave the little monster alone in my office again. My granddaughter can annoy him to death, for all I care. He’s earned it.
Just as a matter of interest, do any readers out there have a spare mouse for a poor struggling author? Better yet, do any of you fancy a cat? A funny looking one with folded down ears, a white waistcoat and a penchant for power leads? Anyone? Going cheap!!
© Jo Gray. June ‘07

(Mac’s Unknown Nemesis)

 

If I could remember some sort of victory salute that could be written instead of viewed, now would be an ideal time to use it. Finally, FINALLY I have managed to ‘get’ to my cats. Usually, they annoy me somehow every day. Just little things that build up over the day. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only one cat doing a little niggle every day, but when it’s FOUR of them, each highly individual in their personalities and each with their own ‘take’ on what will bug me most, well then, tempers can begin to fray and nerves, (MY nerves), slowly begin to unravel. It’s like Chinese Water Torture. They just keep plugging away, one after the other, until I usually yell at my son! Yes, poor kid, he’s often received an unfair roasting just because I wanted to kick a cat and won’t. He looks at me in that pitying manner that children reserve for their elderly and rapidly decaying parents as though he’s thinking, “Keep it up, Old Woman. Power Of Attorney WILL be mine.” And I’m only in my forties, blast him! You can’t blame him, I suppose. When I listen to myself ranting away, I can almost understand matricide.

Still and all, I HAVE found a way that bugs those furry little beasts and I am OH, so rubbing it in. One of my few extravagances, my weakness, if you like, is Windchimes. I just love them. Wooden ones, brass ones, silver ones, twisty, swirly ones, bells, anything. And I collect and hoard them all over the place. My husband finally got fed up with them being all over the house, in windows, hanging from ceilings in strange places, some still in boxes, that he demanded that he be allowed to put them OUTSIDE where they’re supposed to be. Now, just wait on a darn minute! Some of those are precious reminders of holidays, birthdays, gifts, all sorts of stuff. Outside? I don’t think so! Then he gently suggested various places where they could hang where I would get the maximum benefit from them. Nope! No thanks! Birds will get them. We reached an impasse extremely quickly. (Funny, that. Take two pigheaded adults, give them a situation that one strongly opposes and it happens)! He kept trying, I have to give him that, but I wasn’t having any. He was NOT putting my beloved Windchimes outside! That’s IT!

James was the one who actually came up with what I considered to be a viable solution. Why not hang them in the Cat Pen? That stopped me mid-rant while I gave this some thoughtful consideration.

Hmmmm…..not bad at all. In fact, it was a brilliant idea. As I’ve mentioned before, the Pen is huge. Our home is built in an L shape and the pen takes up the entire inner L. Three rooms surround it. Windows from the Master Bedroom, the kitchen and the lounge enclose it on two sides, whilst the exterior walls are made of Cyclone Wiring enclosed by shadecloth. Even two thirds of the roof is covered & rainproof and the last third is also wired and shadeclothed. Yes! We’d do it! I could hang all my precious chimes up; they’d be protected from birds and weather, the cats couldn’t reach them & damage them and, best of all, my husband and I, with our room fronting the pen, would derive the maximum benefit from their lovely sounds! It took an entire weekend to hang them. I supervised from the ground, (I’m good at that), directing where each should be placed and admiring each as it was hung and began to gently swing in the breeze & tinkle softly. What I failed to notice was the look on the cat’s faces. What a truly satisfying experience it was when I finally DID notice them. They were not deriving any pleasure at all out of my chimes. In fact, they were glancing up constantly with looks of suspicion & dislike. The more the chimes tinkled the more uneasy & suspicious they became. Hey! Things were looking up. They were definitely getting BUGGED!

Even hubby noticed. “What’s wrong with THEM?” He said, nodding in surprise towards the cats. “It’s the chimes”, I replied, barely concealing my unholy delight. “They don’t like the chimes!” Of course! It never occurred to me before, because inside the house, obviously, the chimes didn’t ring, so they never worried about them. NOW, of course, they moved & danced & sparkled & glittered & made a NOISE! And they were too high to swat, too high to bite, too high to break and too, too, high to jump up & shut them up! Mac, especially, was particularly uneasy. It was as if all the wind he’d ever expelled in his short life was catching up with him. Oh, this was SO good! In fact, it was definitely time for a cup of tea on a chair in the pen. Even hubby thought the show too good to miss and sat with me.

Stupid clowns. Fatty & Ming decided that they didn’t want to be hero’s today, thanks. They’d just stay on their bellies on the ground and pretend they were blades of grass. Lilah was completely unmoved by the whole thing. You don’t get to be her age without learning a thing or two, so she just chose the most comfortable position, other than mine, and decided to watch the show too. In fact, Miss Prissy was thoroughly enjoying the pretties. She was absolutely intrigued by them, gazing happily up at all my chimes and, no doubt wondering what all the fuss was about. I always knew Siamese had class, I just didn’t realize how much, until I saw her loving my chimes like I do. SHE knows what side her bread is buttered on. You could see it by the smug little smirk on her face.

With every chink, tinkle and chime, Fats & Ming flattened out further, becoming as green as the grass they were pretending to be, but Mac, on the other hand was out to kill. He was going to GET them, by golly, you just watch! He tried SO hard. He leapt and cavorted! He jumped and bounced! He climbed tables, chairs, scratching posts and windowsills in a vain effort to murder the noisy things with absolutely no success. He begged & pleaded with hubby & I too lift him up just a LEETLE bit higher so’s he could reach, and when denied that, he sulked and slapped Fatty & Ming and tried to galvanize them into some sort of action. They weren’t having it. It was boring being blades of grass, they were going to pretend to be birds instead, which meant that they’d have to closely study the ones in the yard and hanging out in the feeders if they were going to be successful. Yes, that’s what they’d do. Birds look like they have fun.

Poor Mac. Ever the one track mind, he kept going, though. ALL afternoon. Finally, we got bored & left & the other cats must’ve got fed up with his antics & converged on him in a body to shut him up. The last thing I saw from the kitchen window was one last despairing leap before they all jumped on him and beat him up. Gently, of course, but it served it’s purpose. He slunk off to a hammock & sulked while Fatty & Ming continued their field study & Lilah resumed her contemplation of the chimes whilst basking in the filtering sunlight.

It’s some weeks, now, since the chimes have been hung and they’ve all become quite used to them. Dare I say it? I think they might even enjoy them when there is just a slight breeze. No doubt there’ll be three cases of nervous prostration if a stiff breeze starts up when they’re out there or even, Goddess forbid, a WIND! Never mind. It’ll be worth it just to know that it’s MY chimes that are bugging them!