House Cats

Moving with pets requires a bit of fore-thought. Because pets don't really understand that moving will be better, no matter how much you whisper about it in their ear. So when moving day officially arrives, it's all hell breaking loose for cats. Six cats, to be exact.

A bunch of moving men stomping around the house did not encourage them that everything was going to be all right.

Toby, my big grey tabby, was howling like he was being prison ass-raped when we shoved him in a carrier, and released him in the new house master bathroom.

He promptly knocked over the bowl of water and proceeded to wedge himself into the smallest possible space under the counter by the kickplate, with his tail curled up underneath his belly.

If you look up the phrase "'Fraidy Cat", you'll see his mugshot. 

The others weren't too keen on the move, either. 

A week later, and everyone has found their spot. 

They absolutely love all the windows and the wooded lot. 

Moving wasn't without incident, however.

On the first night, we decided to bring the cats out slowly and get them introduced to the house. 

DJ-the-favored-baby was the first to come out and he proceeded to walk with caution for the first 20 minutes or so.

And then we didn't see him for a bit.

Call it Mother's Intuition, but something prompted me to inquire, "Hey, do you think the moving men left the screen open in the basement?? I haven't seen the baby." 

My Mister hot-footed it downstairs and yelled up, "Yep! They left the fucking screen door wide open!" 

A bird was squawking like crazy, alerting the neighborhood to Cat on the Loose. 

So we were heading outside in search of Curious Cat, who surely had gone exploring. 

I called, "Kitty Kitty" a few times, and then saw a cat head and paw pop up on the top step leading from the ravine. 

We were afraid to go after him, we didn't want to start a game of Chase back down to the ravine, but the kitty was pretty scared out there in the wild, and my calling him prompted him to scoot his cat ass back into the house. 

Where he left a trail of muddy paw prints across the Berber carpet in the basement, but I was happy to have his cat ass back in the house, so no worries. One more thing to clean up. 

That was Incident 1.

Incident 2 was the next morning, when Girlie didn't come for breakfast. 

Girlie never misses a meal. It's her second favorite part of the day, only behind napping in bed with a view out of the window. 

I knew something was awry, and that Mother's Intuition again made me move a stack of boxes and look back into the ungrated cold air return in the living room. 

Ungrated because we are going to paint the grate to match the newly installed floor. But we hadn't gotten to that part yet, so it was just a hole. 

Who would want to scurry into a vent hole?? 

Girlie. And her fat ..er..fluffy (we don't want to give her a complex) self was trapped. 

After a call to Reinforcements, My Mister and Reinforcement was in the basement, in the process of peeling down the vent when the commotion startled her enough that she put two paws up and I was able to hoist her out of the hole. 

We've since covered up the hole. Unpainted. 

Incident 3, well, that didn't have a happy ending.  Our Guest Cat, Mystery, made the move just fine, and even enjoyed several nights in bed in the new house. But on Tuesday morning, I got up and she was sitting on the rug in my bathroom, and wouldn't move much. When she did get up to walk, she couldn't support her back end. And this is a cat who had just jumped into bed two nights earlier. 

She had kidney failure, and I'm not sure if it was the stress of three moves in just as many months, but it finally caught up with her and she was not able to recover. 

I won't go into the details, you can read about it here if you are so inclined, but our babysitting phase ended on Wednesday, and we are back to a 5-cat household.  Which is still a lot of cats.

No, I do not want a kitten. No, I will not take your cat. I don't care that you found a pregnant cat who is having a litter of kittens, who may or may not come out covered in spun gold instead of fur. I'm cat-ted out. Finito. 

It has nothing to do with taking on an additional cat for a temporary time. It has everything to do with the disgusting amount of cat hair and puke stains and occasional poops that we cleaned out of the old house because we have a hoarders-amount of cats. 

Cats are messy. And a little disgusting, when they're not being all snuggly and cute.