bad kitty

Naughty Llama-Monster loves the alpaca.

our animal friends

(at the Golden Guernsey Bed & Breakfast)

that cat

The cat's been on a roll these last few days.

Sunday morning just before six o'clock, in the midst of our deluge, I woke up to her perched on the windowsill next to the bed caterwauling at the top of her lungs into the vent of the not-even-turned-on air conditioner, apparently undone by the noise of the rain on the metal outside.

Last night at half past one she had a run-in with a full glass of water on the night table, sending glass and water and ice cube remnants crashing to the floor and under the bed. I jumped out of bed, heart racing, and promptly stepped on broken glass and started shrieking as she tore around the room yowling like a crazy thing.  (I guess we both were yowling like crazy things by that point.)

So the next twenty minutes were spent looking for band aids and crawling around the floor, armed with paper towels and collecting dust bunnies and bruises from the underside of the bed, salvaging cardboard boxes full of nothing but crap from college anyway.

Needless to say, this all makes for a sore-footed and rather cranky Emma on what otherwise is a beautiful Wednesday morning.

in which the llama-monster discovers the new air conditioner (and likes it)

bad morning noises

The cat, so often sweet and adorable and funny, went on one of her pre-dawn rampages this morning, howling and yowling and skittering and crashing, taking flying leaps off dressers and closet shelves and flying leaps onto the bed, whinging and whining as if the very gods were torturing her everlasting soul.

We finally locked her out of the bedroom.

She spent the next hour alternately scratching and clawing at the bedroom door or mewling so pathetically it both broke my heart and made me want to wring her (not so) scrawny little neck.

Then there was the woman on the street corner below, shouting her rage presumably at her boyfriend into her cellphone, flickering through my semi-consciousness gesturing maniacally and flinging her head about, long hair flying in the early morning breeze.

Then it was 6:45, cell phone alarm clock vibrating violently against the wood of the bedside table, and time to wake up for real.

I think I really need a second cup of coffee this morning.

a lap cat is a happy cat

 

the Llama-monster gets her purr on...

water, 3.20.11

(Outside Rawhide, 8th Avenue & 21st Street)

cat in a box

Llama-monster wants to go back to the CSA

the spitters

llama's namesake

pigeon, 113th Street

restless nights, or, llama can't handle the reindeer

Llama, at the ripe old age of four (give or take), seems to be going through something of an acting-out adolescent phase.  Just in the last few weeks she's taken to rampaging around the apartment at 4am, crashing into radiators and doors, skittering across hardwood floors, jumping up onto dressers and upper closet shelves and generally wreaking havoc on our ability to sleep through the night.

Two nights in one week she sent water glasses, sadly full of water, cascading down from bedside tables.  None of us were happy about these incidents, least of all Llama, who spent the remaining pre-dawn hours howling out in the living room as we tried to go back to sleep behind the now-closed bedroom door.

It is largely because of the reindeer.  I don't even know where they came from now:  wrapped jauntily around a Christmas present, probably, from some unknown gift-giver with a heart set on revenge.

We have taken to hiding said reindeer (pictured below) at odd hours of the night, and finding them days later tucked beneath a bed pillow or curved into the folds of a cloth shopping bag.

Last night I rediscovered the reindeer after several nights of blissful undiluted sleep and thought that perhaps Llama would be able to behave even with the reindeer out and about, that perhaps she had learned a lesson.  I was of course woefully mistaken, and am regretting it now as I wait for my morning coffee to finally kick in.

Perhaps we will have to establish a strict reindeer routine along the lines of not feeding a mogwai after midnight, but much, much earlier.  This has, after all, been going on for weeks now (see below), and has got to come to an end before she or I, one or the other of us, fails to make it through the night.

September 6th, 6:45am.  Rudely awakened at five o'clock by the Llama-monster crashing around the bedroom with her reindeer toy, which was eventually confiscated and hidden away under a pillow.  Watched the sunrise pooling warmly up against the red brick buildings to the west.  Now, coffee and the NY Times.  And the Llama-monster? Curled up in a ball on her favorite orange couch pillow, snout demurely tucked under front paws, all innocent-like.

nikhil & the llama monster

"Come down, cat.  Please."

lounging llama

ode to miss pig

It's been a bad year for the McNeil cats, beginning and now also ending with their loss.

Miss Pig, presumably, is dead. There is no physical evidence, only her unprecedented failure to appear at my mother's kitchen door last Wednesday morning, mewling her ridiculous little mew in the hopes of obtaining foodish delights.

There are coyotes in Anacortes and, on occasion, they have been known to nab unwary felines. My mother fears the worst.

Miss Pig (also known affectionately as just Pig, as in, "Where's the Pig? It's breakfast time!" or, "Oh Pig, what have you got into now?") was a homeless cat, a raggedy muffin stray of a cat, who adopted Mom and Paul five or six years back. She quickly squiggled her way into their hearts through her furriness and funniness and sweetness. She earned her name not by her size, as one might imagine (she was big, no doubt, but much of that was mere fluff), but by her propensity for rolling around in the dirt. Literally. No one was happier during Mom and Paul's house renovations than Miss Pig, who rapturously took advantage of the dirt piles scattered over the lawn. Rumor has it that cats are fastidious in nature, but Pig put that rumor to bed.

She was a funny cat, and made the oddest little chirpy noises, and had the softest (if also the knottiest) fur of any cat I ever knew, and we'll miss her. And for all the horribleness of being eaten, presumably, by a coyote (or perhaps more mundanely, if less colorfully, hit by a car), I am glad that she got to run around in the sunshine, and roll around in the dirt (even if Mom and Paul's comforter sometimes bore the brunt of this slovenliness), and live a life she loved, even a life cut short.

lounging llama

before & after the Milford the Dog Incident

lizard love & other tales from the animal kingdom

Harvey the tuatara gets it on in southern New Zealand.

Also in animal news today, the population of lowland gorillas in equatorial Africa is apparently much higher than previously estimated, despite the ravages of war, predatory humans, and outbreaks of such fun diseases as Ebola and hemorrhagic fever.

And lastly, on a more personal animal note, Llama has made a new friend in Houseguest Marcos, who returned to New York recently after a year abroad. Marcos has been staying with me & the Llama while searching for an apartment and has been generous with his catsitting skills while I was traipsing around upstate.

I suppose I should clarify, though, that in typical feline fashion, while Llama has found a new friend in Marcos, the interaction is more than a little one-sided, and Marcos has not necessarily found a new friend in Llama.

llama needs a friend, or, all i want for christmas

-tail?
-what tail?
-calisthenics
-caught in the headlights
-caught napping

llama in action