Bringing Party Favors to Hell

Last weekend the kidunit and I were at PetSmart and saw a kitty drinking fountain that was a new design, very slim, and quite inexpensive.  We'd always wanted to get one for the cats but were stymied by the fact that all the ones we'd seen were all too big to fit in the space where they like their water dish (in the bathroom between the toilet and the wall, yes, we've tried moving it other places and they don't like it), but this one was a lot narrower and we figured it would fit, so we bought one, took it home, and it fit in the space just fine and once hooked up was a lot quieter than we'd thought it would be, so yay!

Now, both our boys are complete wusses.  They freak out at the slightest change to their environment (OMG a piece of paper!  OMG a wrinkle in the bedspread! OMG your PANTS!!  OMG the pizza guy!!!) so needless to say they were a bit weirded out by the fountain at first.  But after some encouragement they both were eventually persuaded to drink from it and we thought all was set.  Oddly, Riku (the gray one in my icon) who's normally the more skittish of the two was the first to accept the new dish.  Probably because he likes to drink out of faucets so running water was a Good Thing. Sora on the other hand was Very Suspicious of this new device, no doubt some sort of Fiendish Human Plot.  He took to sitting on the toilet staring down at the fountain like this:

(You can just barely see the edge of the fountain down on the floor between the toilet and the furnace grate. And yes our bathroom is a hideous shade of turquoise.)

You may notice in the above pic that we have a covered toilet-paper dispenser. This is because when he was a kitten, Sora used to play with the TP, unrolling it and shredding it so we installed the covered dispensers in self-defense.  Once he outgrew his fixation with TP, we got a little... lax... about putting the cover down (see below).  You see where this is going, right? 


We went to bed that evening thinking all was hunky dory, because both kitties had, if reluctantly, drunk out of the new fountain.  When I woke up the next morning I could hear the fountain making a lot more noise than it had been the night before.  I just figured it was low on water, and got up to go fill it.  And proceeded to step into a huge puddle. ARGH!!!!

Apparently one of us had left the TP cover up, and to express his displeasure with this new Infernal Device, Sora unrolled about half the roll into the fountain which made it overflow and clog.  The floor was wet, the bathroom rug was soaked, it was a complete mess.  I cleaned it all up, dug the wet TP out of the fountain, discovered he hadn't actually managed to break it, and reinstalled it.  Needless to say, since then we have been very careful not to leave the cover up on the TP.  Sora still spends quite a lot of time lurking on the toilet seat staring at it, but he is actually drinking out of the fountain regularly now, so we have hopes he'll eventually stop trying to destroy it.  All I can say is it's a good thing he doesn't have opposable thumbs. ;D

(Sora, grumpily getting a drink from the new fountain.)

Sora, our younger cat (see icon) has discovered toilet paper. More specifically, he has figured out that humans use toilet paper when they go to the bathroom. So now when he goes to the bathroom, he tears off several sheets of TP and drops them in the litter box. The roll of TP in the downstairs bathroom by the litter box is looking rather tattered, since to pull off sheets he has to claw them off.

Too bad he can't teach himself to use the toilet instead of just the paper.

I guess need to look into getting one of those covered toilet roller things.

We picked up Sora this morning. He loves to nuzzle, he's obssessed with it (marking us, I expect) and also has a very cute squeaky mew. Riku is massively annoyed by this intruder. He won't get within 3 feet of him without growling and hissing. Sora doesn't seem very intimidated, but is keeping his distance though he's obviously curious and wants to make friends, so hopefully that will happen as Riku settles down. Here are a few pix of the new baby, and a couple of the old baby just to be fair. :) Most of the pix were taken with my my phone, so they're not the greatest.

Sora, face shot. Unfortunately you can't really tell that his eyes are about the color of Kham's sleeve.
( all the others cut to spare those on dial-up )

Riku is a inveterate shoulder-sitter. We think he thinks he's a parrot-- between the chirping, the eating of cashews, and the shoulder thing. :) Both khamryn and I have scratched up shoulders because we'll be standing or sitting there minding our own business and he decides he MUST be on our shoulder and suddenly BWAH!! There he is. Scares the crap out of us every time. Nothing we do seems to discourage him, either.

Last night there was a moth in the office and he was so freakin' excited by trying to catch it that he was caroming off furniture AND me trying to get at it. He jumped up on my shoulder, crawled onto my head and from there jumped onto the top bookshelf. Of course, I'm LMAO so hard I can't even tell him what a bad cat he was.

Insane beast.

Today is absolutely gorgeous here on the Front Range. Blue, blue sky, sunny, a little breezy, and 63 degrees at almost 6pm. I actually went for a walk. With my daughter. (Yes, this means the world as you know it may come to an end shortly.) It was really nice. The ex finally came and got a bunch the crap out of the garage that he promised to get three months ago. I've written a little today. I have fresh steamed asparagus, cheese and crackers and a nice kabinett, and jazz standards on the cd player. Days like this are such a nice change of pace from the normal routine. :)

Now, if only someone would pay me to write gay smut. :)

ETA: My cat is officialy weird. He likes chocolate, brie, and he just ate several spears of asparagus. Without butter.

Yes, I am going to be nauseatingly mushy over our new baby. He's downstairs in the laundry room. The humane society told us to keep him in there for the first 12 hours or so, so he learns where the potty is and isn't too freaked by all the space. We've been going in to check on him regularly, and so far he seems really happy, though he wants to come out and explore. We've had him in there since about 1. He's being very good about it. We have already learned that he's a climber, and a leaper, and he has a thing for shoulders, and he loves to headbutt. And he purrs like a cat twice his size. If you wanna go drool over him, I put up some pix here.

We got to see Mika today for the first time in 3 weeks. He's doing really well, and they said he'll be out of isolation in just a few days. The vet wasn't there to ask, but one of the aides said she thought we might be able to take him home in just a couple of weeks. (They still have to do the ritual removal of the yarbles before we can bring him home and they want to make sure he's 100% before that.) He seemed very healthy, only a couple of slight sneezes. And extremely playful and happy to be with us. If we put him down for more than a few moments, he'd literally climb the nearest leg to get back up. And he was so sweet and nuzzly, and purring his little face off and playing with necklaces, earrings, and anything the slightest bit dangly. Just the sweetest little guy. :)

Who me? Sappy?

I promise, no kittenfic. ;-D