Trinket, the polydactyl candle-lovin’ kitty chewed up my laptop cord, severing the power cable. I guess you can scratch off one of her 9 lives.

This IBM cord is riddled with teeth marks and has exposed wiring.

I took the old chewed cable, which is for an IBM T61, and cut off the connector that fits into the laptop and spliced it onto an old Dell laptop cord that I had lying around left over from an old laptop. Both had a 20 volt output, so it should work.

My new Frankenstein cord.

The electrical tape is gawdawful ugly, but it delivers juice to my IBM laptop, and its charging back up to full now at a pretty good rate. The cat better leave this one alone because I’m all out of spare laptop power cords.

I got home late last night and helped put a cranky baby to bed. My wife and I then went to sit on the front porch of our townhouse to enjoy the first warm evening of the season. Rogue, the tiny fraidy cat, came out to nibble shoots of grass and keep us company.

Also keeping us company from the corner of the garage was what I thought at first to be the neighbor’s cat. Then I saw the white striped tail. That was no kitty. “No sudden moves!” I urged my wife in a hushed, yet firm tone.

“Oh my god! I’ll grab the cat!” she declared, scooping up Rogue suddenly and rushing inside.

Luckily the skunk went back around the corner without uncorking her defenses. I need to have a discussion about what constitutes “sudden moves” with my wife.

So its Christmas Morning, and Cartney is pretty tired from having spent so much time opening gifts and playing with his new toys.  So he grabbed the kittys’ feather stick.  The stick has a cork on the end to prevent him from putting his or the kittys’ eyes out.  And it makes a nice thumper to use to smack the kitties.

Our cat Trinket is an amazing and frustrating animal. First of all, she is polydactyl, which means she has extra digits on her paws, like Hemmingway’s cats in Key West. She uses these extra digits to her advantage to drag her favorite toys all over the house, and to tip over every can of liquid she encounters. We can’t leave any soda cans or beer bottles or wine glasses anywhere unattended or it gets tipped. Did I mention we had new carpet installed before we adopted her?

Also, the cat is absolutely fearless. Not even the vacuum cleaner bothers her. Hot stove tops fascinate the cat, and candles are just something else to toy with. She recently burned off most of her whiskers by playing with a candle. I prove this with this ridiculous video below. Watch as the kitten singes her foot-fur on the candle before snuffing it with her paw.

I think LOLcats are kinda funny. And cute. But nowhere as cute or funny as my wife thinks they are. She laughs hysterically at any picture of a cat doing anything remotely silly or funny. Sites like Icanhascheezburger.com and stuffonmycat.com are her go-to places on the internet.

A picture like this below puts her in stitches for ten minutes!

But LOLcats have been around long before the internets was invented. Click the video below to see.

http://view.break.com/392548 - Watch more free videos

Trinket the cat loves water.  Its often a problem.  We have to keep the toilet lids closed so she won’t play in the water and she likes to soak in the sink with the dirty dishes.

Below is a video of us soaking her with water squirted from a baby bottle.

My wife discovered this website last night and laughed so hard and for so long I thought she was going to make herself sick.

So this video is for her.  Remember the Dramatic Prairie Dog?  Well, here’s Dramatic Prairie Cat.

Thanks to Neatorama for the pointer to the Youtube vid.

A doctor at a nursing home had an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting a phenomena whereby Oscar the Cat sucks the souls out of his patients.

Sensing weakness, the furry feline pounces and then feasts upon the soul of the sick elderly, like the dementors in the Harry Potter films.  And then it simply walks away to hack up a furball or lick its butt.

From the AP here:

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
 
The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof.  Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his “compassionate hospice care.”

Seriously, why anyone would want a four-footed grim reaper is beyond me.  I say put this animal down before it kills again!

We went out to dinner with a vegetarian friend of my wife’s today.  She works part time as a dog walker, and one of her customers recommended an amazing veterinarian who paracticed holistic medicine.

She went on to detail how this doggie quack diagnosed and proposed to treat her sick cat.  Part of the diagnosis was a series of questions and answers about the cat’s homelife-  its likes, dislikes, sleeping schedule, eating habits, and really odd personality questions.  One of the questions was “If your cat had a human career, what job would he have?”

This kittten would be a professional stalker.  Or maybe an astronaut.  Like crazed stalker Lisa Nowak!

This sham of a vet prescribed several herbs based on the stress of the type of job she thought the cat would hold in life.  Our friend paid this quack his fee and never went back. 

But it got me thinking about what my cats would be if they had a career.
Considering they fight often with each other, but in a cute way, they would be wrestlers.  Or gang members.  One’s a Blood and the other is a Crip.  But since they are mostly non-violent, its more like the Sharks versus the Jets from West Side Story. 

Individually, I would guess serial killer for the older cat, Rogue.  She always looks at me funny and tries to trip me when I walk downstairs.  The kitten is a stalker.  She sneaks up on me and watches me when I take a shower.  And sometimes when I take a nap and roll over she is there, just looking at me.  And she reads my emails when Im not at home.

What would your cat be if it was allowed to get a real job?

My wife is about to have our very first child, so it would have been wise to get my wife a little Trinket for her very first Mother’s Day.  So I went out today and got her a Trinket.

Trinket is a medium haired tuxedo kitten who is very affectionate, brave in her exploration of her new surroundings, and friendly enough to get along with the current feline resident, Rogue.  She also has six toes!  Just like the Key West cats of Ernest Hemingway, this kitten looks like she has opposable thumbs.  I think her feet look like a chameleon’s feet, especially when she walks.

I have a slight problem with carpenter bees. Carpenter bees are the big bumbly bees that appear this time of year to hover menacingly around your garden. They don’t sting, and they also burrow into unpainted wood, and if this wood is on your house, it becomes quite a hassle to get rid of them. I have such a burrow on the back side of one of the eaves next to my front door.

I thought I had destroyed the burrow at the beginning of fall last year, but those bastards came back. Right now I deal with these bees with a tennis racket. They hover right at eye level and a good forehand smash can send one to the end of my driveway- stunned and spinning around like Curly of the three stooges until I get there to squish him. I must have killed a dozen of these critters this week that way.

But what do big ass bees like, anyways? How about big ass flowers? Our peonies have bloomed. These flowers are huge and weigh almost a pound each and the big bees are fighting over the nectar rights.

Our cat also enjoys helping me to exterminate these giant bloated buzzers.

Mr. Squirrel is neither happy about the bees, nor the fact that the cat is prowling the front yard.

The kitten got fixed today.  When she got home from the vet, she still had problems walking from the nerve block the vet applied.  Below is a pic of her shaved butt.

But I also got a cool toy in the mail today.  Its a little articulated walking raptor dinosaur.  I put batteries in it and set it loose on the kitten.  Kitten no like!

There is trouble brewing down in Key West, Florida. The Hemingway House, where novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel “A Farewell to Arms” is famous for its lineage of cats, each of which have six toes. All of the cats are descended from Hemingway’s cat Snowball. A neighbor down the street from the Hemingway House and museum became upset when one of the six-toed Tomcats started mating with her own cats. So she called the Federal government to do something about the Hemingway cats. If the Museum loses, there could be fines and the cats could be confiscated.

Here is a picture of Ivan, the orange Tomcat who is getting aggressive with the other kitties.

From USA Today here:

The legendary American novelist Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West for a decade in the 1930s, in a stone mansion on Whitehead Street with his wife, Pauline, and a six-toed cat named Snowball.

Hemingway divorced Pauline in 1939, but Snowball stayed on. Today, about 50 of Snowball’s descendants roam the grounds, to the delight of many tourists who visit the Hemingway Home and Museum. But the cats won’t be roaming much longer, if the federal government has its way.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has cited the museum for violating a 1966 federal animal welfare law, and has threatened to impose stiff fines or confiscate the cats if the Hemingway Home does not do more to control the felines.

The cats “are born and raised and live their lives in Key West,” she says. “They’ve been doing so for over 40 years.

The dispute began when a USDA inspector showed up at the museum in October 2003 in response to a complaint about the cats.

Much of the dispute revolves around the wanderings of Ivan, an orange tomcat born in 2004, the year Hurricane Ivan killed dozens of people in the Caribbean and the USA.

“I saw Ivan many times loose,” she says. “Ivan is a very unneutered, very macho male cat, and in each case, he had one of the street cats pinned down,” she says. “We have an ordinance that says a nuisance cat can be removed.”

I don’t know why the Feds are even involved. A city ordinance could easily clear all of this up. If you want to go the official site of the six-toed cats, click here.

We are getting ready to send out Christmas cards and wanted to buy some nice Holiday themed stamps from the US Post Office. They have one for Muslims. They have a cute dradle for Hanukkah. But they have lame snowflakes for Christmas. So I decided to make my own stamps for Christmas cards this year. You can do that at stamps.com. The image on mine will be the picture below.

Rogue the Christmas kitten. I was shocked that she let us put that teddy bear sweater on her.

Rogue the kitten is beginning to acclimate to her new surroundings. And by “acclimating” I mean keeping us up all night. She plays a game where she attacks our feet through the blanket whenever we move them. And if that gets boring, she takes ‘Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’ flying leaps off the bed onto the floor with her paws splayed in the air. I think she usually hits belly first, and then she gallops around the room at full tilt speed, taking tight corners by digging in with her sharp claws. On the new carpet. **Sigh**

The older cat, Domino, is no longer snippy with Rogue. They often share the same room together now, and sometimes even tolerate each other on the same couch. But when Rogue begins to do her acrobatics at night, Domino quickly jumps down off the bed to find a quieter place in the house. Usually in the basement. Which is where I am going to be sleeping too if that kitten doesn’t quit clawing at my feet.

The kitten has a cute white slash on her head. I wanted to name her something computer related referencing the slash- perhaps root or “SU” but my wife would have none of that. We settled on Rogue. Like the comic book mutant hero. ‘Cause she’s got a white streak of hair on her forehead too.

Yeah, we’re geeks.

We got a new female kitten today. We havent settled on a name yet. It has the cutest backslash on its forehead and is still very skittish in her new surroundings.

The older cat is not at all happy about the new kitten either. She is hissing and voicing her displeasure at the little one’s presence.

Thanks to Hart for the adoption services. If you are in the Northern Virginia area and are looking to adopt a cat or dog, check them out. They are great people who work very hard to rescue animals and provide good homes for them.