Christmas with the Cat

My cat hates Christmas. She has a long history of destroying things - for example, she is doing her best to kill the only houseplant I've ever been able to keep alive for more than a month. But with the addition of the Christmas tree into our living room, she is having more fun than a cat should have causing chaos.

She loves the satin tree skirt, and she has developed quite a routine. She pushes all the presents aside so that she can lurk comfortably and enjoy the silky texture, and then she claws at the fabric until she ends up underneath the whole thing. Once she finds herself there, she freaks out and bolts across the room. All this activity usually causes the train that goes around the tree to jump its track. I'm just glad it's only little Lego men on that train, because many a rail-related disaster has been caused by the cat's careless actions.

And of course she can't leave the ornaments alone. There is one kind in particular that hangs and swings just right that she loves to bat around and chew on. After I moved all of those ornaments higher in the tree, she started attacking anything that is low hanging. We've gotten to the point where the only decorations that are less than three feet off the ground are the plastic ones she can't break. Most of those just happen to be covered in glitter, so the cat is twinkly most of the time now, too. She's a black cat, and it's quite entertaining to see her walking around, full of cat-like dignity, with blue and white sparkles all over her face.

The worst part is how she deals with the tree itself. When she started chewing on the branches I wasn't too worried; after all, how much damage can she do to a fake Christmas tree? Then, she started climbing. She learned how to maneuver herself into the tree and hang out on the nice, evenly spaced branches. At first, she stopped at the bottom row, but lately she's been getting bolder, going about halfway up and then just sitting there. She watches us from between the fake fronds and twinkly lights, secure in her new lair, planning world domination or whatever it is that cats think about. I'm just waiting for the inevitable moment when she tries to jump out of the tree and ends up tipping the whole thing over.

So, I guess maybe the problem isn't that my cat hates Christmas. Maybe the problem is that she really, really loves all the lovely new Christmas-themed toys I've put out for her, and I just don't appreciate the ways she shows her holiday spirit.

Drug Addled Writing

My boyfriend is making me feel like a slacker. Here I am, trying to do a month's worth of blogs, and only getting entries written about half the time, and he's clacking away on his iPad every night night showing me up. While I'm reading before bed, already guilty because I'm consuming the written word rather than producing it, he's sitting next to me making the guilt worse.

He recently discovered that anyone can create a wiki, and he's hard at work creating a community based on the elaborate stories he and his friends have been making up for and about each other for the last 20 or so years. It's pretty interesting stuff. Even though I'm jealous of his productivity I'm having fun reading it all. Because I haven't been thinking about this stuff for years, I like to think I provide a valuable outside viewpoint.

The really irritating thing, though, is that he's doing all of this while he's drugged up. He takes ambien to help him sleep and, as anyone who's taken that drug knows, after a certain point in the evening you can be awake and (apparently) functioning but you won't remember anything about what happened the next day. Every night after he takes his pill, he writes for a while and creates pages on the wiki. And then, every morning he gets to open it up and see what new things he wrote while in the ambien blackout. It's like he has a ghostwriter doing all he work for him.


Although, now that I think of it, having someone else do all the work for me sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Especially since it would be me doing it, so everything would be done the way I like it. I wonder, maybe he'll loan me one of those pills and I can try it out...