Sallyacious

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July 21, 2008

'Helping'

This is my assistant.

Polyphemos has taken it upon himself to "assist" when I am working. As you can see, he's very good at it.

Thursday morning, I wanted to take pictures of my latest book. Because the kitchen table was covered with supplies for my latest project (it's better now, but still art project central), the coffee table was the obvious space. I cleared it off. Poly took that as an invitation. Since he does not like to be moved once he has found his place, and will defend his right to lie where he is with teeth and claws should I try to move him, I had to work around him. You've seen the pictures I got of the book. These are the shots that show you what I was dealing with.

I know, he looks too sweet to be any trouble at all here, doesn't he? And yet, here's what was going on in the rest of the scene.

He "helped" for the entire photo shoot. When I was done taking pictures, I took the book back downstairs to Dave--it's his, after all, it goes in his office--and returned to this:

It looks benign, but really, it isn't. Look closer. See the tooth?

And also, the claws?

Why is this an issue, you might ask, since I was done using the table for pictures? Because I wanted to put things back onto the coffee table. And I couldn't. There wasn't room on the table for the both of us.

This is how Polyphemos sleeps. Large. Right now, he's on my desk, taking up most of the available surface area. The other morning, I walked into my office to find my camera (in it's very padded case, thank God) lying in a box of paper next to the desk. Because he'd shoved it off in order to get more room to sleep in.

And when he's not sleeping? He's demanding either food or a playmate. I wish one of the other cats would play with him, because he's clearly bored, and I don't have the time to be his only toy. Plus, he is not very good at playing by himself. He wants the things he plays with to be unpredictable like they are when I'm at the other end of the string.

The food thing is the most frustrating, though. He gets up with the sun. Which around here right now is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5am. Dave and I do not get up with the sun. Unless it just happens to be getting up at the same time we are. But Poly wants to eat when he wakes, so he has discovered the best alarm clock ever. He stands on the television in the living room and scrapes his paws on a picture we have hanging above it. The combination of scrapescrapescrape along with the bangety-bangety-bangety of the frame against the wall is impossible to sleep through. So Dave usually gets up and feeds him. And is then awake. Whether or not he wanted to be. I may have come up with a solution last night, though. I took the picture off the wall.

I do kind of wish I'd been awake when he hopped up on the tv and the picture wasn't there anymore. Just to see his response. Just to watch the wheels turn in his head as he figured out what else to do.

About an hour later, he got onto the dresser and started doing the same thing to the picture that hangs over it. I ignored him (Dave was out of town last night, so it was just me with the cats). Then he got up on my suitcase (I'm travelling so much this summer I just opted to leave it in the bedroom rather than shlep it up and down the stairs every other week or so) and tried it with a different picture on the bedroom wall. I still ignored him. I did not feed that cat until 7:30am. I'm hoping that if we can keep it up, we can retrain him to bloody well wait until it's time for breakfast, rather than live with what he's done, which is to train Dave to get up and feed him whenever he bangs on the damn picture.

They're not supposed to be this much smarter than we are.

Posted by sally at July 21, 2008 10:48 AM

Comments

Posted by: inlandempiregirl at July 21, 2008 11:33 PM

Posted by: Sallyacious at July 22, 2008 01:03 PM

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