I will attack Jeremy’s post suggestions on the Patreon later, but those of you who played in my Monster Mavens game at last year’s ACNW know how I feel about K-Pop contracts, but the music’s not bad, and the videos have some amazing production values.

Anyway, Cats.

I have cats in common with so many people I have absolutely nothing else in common with.  My mom and I can talk about cats when we’ve exhausted conversation about knitting or my nephew (the other two subjects we can talk about.). And if you find out you have the same kind of cat, or have named your cat the same thing as a complete stranger: Instant Friends.

The Geek Husband What Rules and I frequently ask each other why we have cats.

The answer is nearly always “Masochism.”

He posited in a reply on someone’s Facebook post the other day that the domestication of cats (or their domestication of us) must have looked something like: “What are these weird little predators? They won’t go away, but they’re eating mice and stuff so that’s ok, and OH MY GOD! LOOK AT THEIR FEETS!!!!!!!!!”

Toe-beans are a common topic of conversation in our house.  The Enemy of Sleep loves having her feet played with, and will purr and fall asleep while I’m trimming her claws.  The Fuzzy Cats (Moose and Ayla) hate having their feet touched, which makes me want to play with them more.  We have an entire toe-bean-related nomenclature of body parts in this house.

Toes – Toe-beans or just Beans
Foot pads – Bean fields
Cat feet – Bean Farms

I acquiesced quietly to my Crazy Cat Lady-dom a long, long time ago.  I have no shame about this.

Also, I spend a lot of time observing my cats, because cats are hilarious.  From the “Ew!” face the Enemy of Sleep makes if you hold down garlic bread for her to sniff (she loves toast and hates garlic, so garlic toast is cruel hoax), to the fights the Fuzzy Cats have over the latest iteration of “Fort Asshole.”

We frequently refer to the cats as “Weird little predators who shit in a box,” “Fur-bearing couch vultures,” and “Jerks.”  As in, “You need to hit the store and pick up Jerk-food tonight.”

We hold with the belief that every cat has many names.  The Enemy of Sleep’s real name is Jimmy Superfly Snookums (I named her, thank you very much), she is also “The Kitten,”  “the Cuddle-Bunny,” and “Princess Pretty-Paws.”   Moose is also “Kevin J. Moosington of the Seattle Moosingtons,” the “Moose on the Loose,” and when he’s chasing his sister, “The Cats of War!” Ayla is the “Babycat,” “The Grubby Cat,” “Grubberella,” “Rotunda,”  “The Calico Menace,” “The Extortionist,” and “Lassie.”

Lassie because whenever she can see the bottom of her food dish she runs to one of us like Lassie running to get help whenever Timmy was in trouble.  The appropriate response to the cat running up to you, meowing frantically, and trying to lead you to their dish is, “What’s the matter, girl? Is Timmy in the well?”

Cats are collectively “Thunderous Elephump cats” and “Stinky-potomuses.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I like dogs, too.  But I do not have the time nor the patience to own one right now.  Cats are, not less hassle, but different hassle.  I can leave a cat with big pan of water, a clean litterbox and a heaping bowl of dry food for a weekend, and when I get back there will still likely be food and water left, and it may not even be urgent that I change the litterbox.

A lot of my co-workers laugh about my cat stories, and tell me my cats have “so much personality.”

So do yours.  You just need to interact more and pay attention to them.

All of our cats have had something that made them special.  Potemkin (Punkin, Rat Face) was my baby, allergic to grass and afraid of the dark.  Ronin (The Apricot Menace, Death from Above) was a skinny, nervous cat with eyes that matched his fur and a penchant for perching on the tops of doors.  Diana (The Grrrsl, the Princess, part of the Black Bed-Cat Mafia) was a cranky, aggressive black cat who hated kittens, but then raised the Enemy of Sleep and would swat at people who annoyed me. Longshot (the Bear) an abandoned kitten we bottle raised who died at two from a congenital defect that we couldn’t see, but was likely why his mother abandoned him.

I can tell you countless stories about the weird ass shit our cats do/have done, for hours.  They are hilarious little predators who poop in boxes.

Ok, one Grrrsl story: one of the many housemates in the revolving door that was the fifth bedroom in Nerdhaven, had a feral cat, Toe, she had tamed that only liked her, and wasn’t real fond of other cats.  Occasionally when you’d walk down the hall in the dark to get to our bedroom, the stupid thing would dart out and slash at your ankles.  One night, Toe lunged out at the Grrrsl, who, at 16 years of age, reared up on her hind legs and slapped Toe repeatedly in the head so hard we heard it in the living room.  Toe shot back into the housemate’s bedroom, and never bothered the Grrrsl again.

We always expected that instead of dying like a normal cat, the Grrrsl would just explode one day.

She didn’t much to both our relief and disappointment.

She lived to be 20 years old.  I still miss the hell out of that angry, vain, rioting cat.  She was something else.

So, yeah, pretty much when I run out of shit to write in the future, you’re just getting cat stories.  I keep talking about collecting them into a book of essays called, “Real Cheetahs Don’t get Kissed by their Mommies.”

Maybe some day.

If you like what you read here, or want to help fund the cats’ gourmet diet and constant stream of catnip superhero toys and cardboard scratchers, please consider donating using the link at the top right of the page:  Keep Us Geeking, or checking out my Patreon.  Thank you!

Also, if you’d like to see what sort of fiction I write when left to my own devices, please feel free to check out my fiction Patreon, Nothing Nice Comes Out of My Head.