So Much to Blog, so Little Time

My Avid Fans (all four of you) may as well chat amongst yourselves for a while. I'm a bit busy right now. I'm also trying to calm down enough to blog rationally about the recent developments on the free speech legal front in this country.

I'm looking after a housefull of teenagers. They're fun to have around, and generally polite and well-behaved. I'm clearly building a rapport, too. The youngest yesterday showed me pictures he posted online of the pot plants he grows hydroponically at home. He says his parents don't notice because his marvellous tomatoes cover the smell. He got the seeds by mail.

Part of me says I ought to rat him out. But the other part says that if his parents are ignorant of what he's up to, then they clearly don't care. I guar-an-friggin'-tee you that my mum would have discovered pot plants if I had been raising them in my closet. Or even if I'd constructed a carefully-concealed cultivation bunker under the compst heap. She has, to this day, hearing described by health professionals as "batlike." And from experience she could see the contents of a desk, school bag, or laundry basket even when she'd never ever looked inside of it (so she told me herself. And she's my mother ... you want me to believe she was lying?) One day I'll tell you why my sister tore up the signed picture of the stripper.

Mme Metro fled to the city yesterday, leaving me to cope with three teens and two cats, one of whom is allegedly ill and the other of whom is malevolent toward me, on my wits alone. It's a wonder no-one's starved to death yet. Mme says it has something to do with a medical appointment, but I don't believe her--the timing's too convenient.

Before leaving, she tried to instruct me on how to deliver a pill to the digestive system of a cat. In the case of Brown Cat, one simply seizes his head, covering his nostrils with a finger, and shoves another finger in between his teeth. This causes him to gape repeatedly, like a baby bird, at which point one is supposed to shove the meds down the hatch. However, I've never been able to get past the whole "teeth" thing.

So I adopted a subtle approach. After several unsuccessful attempts, which seemed to stress Brownie out almost as much as they did me, I brought to bear the full might of my intellect. I'm dead certain I have at least six IQ points on that cat ...

So smuggling it must be. We tried wrapping the half-tablet of kitty drugs in a sliver of roast beef. It almost worked, but the tablet squirted out when he bit down. Both cats willingly eat cheese, but they like it in such fine portions that concealing the tiny pill inside it wouldn't work.

Eventually, I bored a hole in a kitty treat and shoved the pill into the hole--a sort of cat Certs, if you will. I gained Brownie's trust by feeding him a couple of undoctored ones, then abused it utterly.

He didn't seem to notice. I fed him one more to take the taste away (I don't know, but my experience makes me think that there is no medicine with a nice taste [unless your owner is dosing you with salmon oil and you happen to be a cat, I guess]).

This morning I repeated the joke. He mowed down three treats, then I fed him a stuffed one. I put down two more and waited. He licked one of them, then sniffed them both with deep suspicion. But eventually he ate them.

I'm counting on his fuzzy brain having little by way of enduring memory to speak of.

Blackie is far more forthcoming. Upon Mme's departure she expressed her feelings about the state of affairs in her usual way: She urinated on everything in sight. And probably several things that aren't in sight too. This morning the black bitch was up at 5:45 loudly informing me that the recession was hitting home and stocks of readily available tuna had plummeted to the point where a cat might soon get thin and waste away. Truly an excellent jest.

At the moment it's running about fifty-fifty on the question of whether Mme gets a new pair of fur-lined slippers for Christmas.