It’s Advantageous for Cats to have 9 Lives

It’s a good thing that Alex has nine lives. The way he has been behaving this week, I have been tempted to relieve him of a couple of those lives.

The only thing that the cat who owns me hates more than water is cold. Unless, of course, one counts my not giving Alex the type of cat food his taste buds crave at the moment. It’s been cold outside: at the moment it is 23 F with the “wind chill” down to 14F. The forecast calls for the possibility of the thermometer dropping to as low at 10 F before the sun rises tomorrow.

This has two affects on Alex: cold inside and cold outside!

Because this 101 year old house of mine is insulated about as well as a wooden crate, the cold comes in very easily. Since the house has also been expanded in two directions from its original shotgun design, the furnace ducts seem to literally leak heat before the warmth reaches the rooms. (Maybe that’s why last year’s heating bill exceeded $800.00 for two months—something I definitely cannot afford this year).

The way this distresses Alex is that the rooms are not nearly warm enough for him. Thus I find him (1) sitting on a heating vent when the heat in coming through it and (2) when the furnace blower ceases to send heat through the vent, clawing me to force me up from whatever I am sitting on so that he can have a spot in a place that I have warmed for him with my own body heat. I am not happy when I feel cat claws sticking into my body!

As I have discussed previously, Alex is keen on catting around outside. This afternoon I went to yet another job interview— one more insurance company who, as with the one who has screwed me out of my commissions on about $2500.00 in annual premiums, wants me to be an “independent agency.” (I may write about my thoughts on this later; however, I used too much, uh, ink—if you can call the words typed on a blog “ink”—bitching about my circumstances yesterday to do so again today). When I arrived home from the interview, Alex demanded to go outside. I opened the front door and he sat in the doorway for at least three minutes (and probably $3.00 worth of escaping heat) before he decided it was too cold outside for his pleasure.

Less than ten minutes later, as I was trying to put a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner, my crazy cat stuck his claws into my leg and demanded to go out the back door. If I didn’t love the little pain-in-my-ass-and-other-places-in-my-body feline so much, I would have attempted to place kick him through the sky light. Of course, I didn’t. I walked to the back door, opened it for Mr. Alex, where he sat for another three minutes (and $3.00 worth of natural gas) before he decided it was as cold out on the deck (which also has an inch or so of snow on it) as on the front porch.

At the moment Alex and I have a truce. After I finished my pizza (during the eating of which I had to push Alex away so I could eat any of it) I left the plate on the table, onto which Alex immediately jumped, and finished off the pizza delicacies I had not eaten. Now, well fed and (I think) warm, he is asleep on a chair next to mine, nesting in a sweater that, before he clawed in down, had been draped on the back of the chair.