She's a Hunter

This is Freya. She's my cat.


I don't write about her very much - an understatement - because generally, she just hangs out, takes naps in the various boxes I have around the house for her, eats when there are people around to watch, and climbs into whatever lap is handy, as soon as it is created. Very nice, but not all that interesting in terms of blogging.

She loves humans. She purrs as soon as you look at her. She likes a lot of attention, particularly in the morning. Humans love her back. Even humans who don't really like cats say that if all cats were like Freya, they might like cats.

She comes when you call her. Sometimes she makes a weird yodelling sound in the middle of the night, but she usually stops, comes running and jumps up on the bed when I sing "Freya? Freyyyy-ya." She usually only does this in the spring. I think it's because she wants to go outside. But then when I leave the door open, she doesn't go outside. Perhaps fantasy is sometimes better than reality for cats, too.

I have had her for 12 years. She's started to get a little creaky, occasionally missing her leap up onto the couch or the bed. When she gets up after a long nap, she sometimes looks a little stiff. This makes me sad.

She was born male. When she was very very sick with a blocked urethra a couple years ago, she almost had to get an operation to shorten it and open up her penis. During the whole schmozzle, I tried to keep calling her him because the vets I've been to get weirded out if you can't keep the gender of your cat "matching" your cat's hind end. They are particularly weirded out if you switch back and forth.

The only thing that made me smile during those few weeks was the thought of getting my cat bottom surgery.

So she's a sweet nice loveable creature. But not if you're a rodent, winged or otherwise. She's usually pretty good at smacking the bats down as the come out of the basement, and at least stunning them.

Last night I woke up to a noise similar to her yodelling. I singsonged her name a few times. She'd scamper into the room and scamper back out, where she'd meow and jump around more. The last time woke me up right fully, thinking bat bat bat, no, not a bat. No squeaking. No flapping. But I waited another second just in case I'd missed the tell-tale sounds. Nope, nothin doin. Not a bat.

I got up, put on my robe, turned the bedroom light on. There was Freya, dancing around a small furry thing in the hall, tapping it and pushing it around. It wasn't moving. I sighed, went and got my glasses from the bathroom, grabbed a plastic tub from the kitchen - with lid - and went back into the hallway. The mouse still wasn't moving. Poor wee beastie.

In my experience, rodents will play dead so that the thing attacking them will get bored and stop attacking them. This was not the case last night. I put the tub over the mouse, I slid the lid under the tub. It had huge shiny open black eyes. No playing.

What do you do with a dead mouse? I wasn't entirely sure. The last time this happenend (in a different apartment) I flushed the mouse and I've felt guilty ever since. It seems a shame to flush something that might keep something else alive. And mice are much less creepy now that I'm used to bats. So I took my dead mouse and dumped it into the garden. It will either keep a feral neighbourhood cat going for a few hours, or make my lilies more beautiful. Or both.

I know I'm an addicted blogger because it actually occurred to me, at 2 in the morning, that I should hunt out my camera and take a picture of the dead and slightly bloody mouse in my hallway to spice up the post that I would of course be writing. Lucky for you, that insanity didn't last long. And I was too tired.

This is a white-footed mouse, a possible example of the mouse killed by my cat.*
This one is much cuter than the one I saw. Fewer claw holes, at any rate, which is the same as cuter in my books.

*It may also have been a deer mouse. I don't know how to tell the two species apart, and who the hell is going to look that closely at a dead mouse in the wee smas anway?

Uses for Plastic Tubs: Catch and Release

When I first started reading the lovely David Scrimshaw's very amusing blog, he was writing about the things you can do with binder clips, besides, you know, clipping pieces of paper together to bind them into one unit.

I will pause a moment while you go look at his binder clip series. And here is a link to my contribution, which David could not support.




Another good series, I suggested not so long ago, would be to figure out what to do with the damn plastic tubs that seem to multiply in my cupboard at a ferocious rate.

He came up with one solution, that ended up being two solutions. Once more, I will pause a moment while you go look.




In a conversation quite a few weeks ago now, Eric and I covered irrationally strong dislikes/phobias. Mine are ice and spiders.

I don't touch ice and I don't touch cold metal. If someone puts ice in my water, I'll wait until it melts a bit to start drinking. Mostly I drink whatever I'm drinking neat. If I'm at Grace and Greg's and getting us all water, I will use a spoon to put ice in Greg's water. He likes two cubes. Grace doesn't seem to care, though I may be misremembering.

What makes spiders worse than ice is the surprise factor. Ice rarely shows up in your house where ice didn't used to be. If you figure out a way to move it without touching it, it stays still and lets you manage it. Spiders, now. I went into the bathroom to get something out of the medicine cabinet. And there, beside the cabinet, was a spider, jammed into the corner where two walls meet, with its hairy looking grey legs stuck together in two clumps, one set extended up and one set down. I gasped and ran out into the kitchen, damn near smack into Eric.

"Okay. Spider. Spider. Needs to be removed. Can you put it outside or kill it?"

I may not have asked, come to think of it. I may have actually said "You need to put it outside or kill it."

There are a lot of advantages to being my close friend/lover. At least I like to think so. Being put on automatic spider disposal is probably not one of those advantages. I can tell you that taking care of someone else's phobia get boring. My friends have all gotten used to me by now though. I gasp my phobia gasp, they say where is it?, I point and they move into action, killing or removing as their personality dictates. By and large, I know removers rather than killers.

This was the first time Eric had seen me in close proximity to an arachnid. I assured him that I was actually being very calm and I am much better than I used to be.

"I'll take it outside."
"But it'll die outside, so why not just kill it now?"
"But maybe it will just hibernate."
"I don't think spiders hibernate. Maybe you should just kill it."
"I am going to put it outside. What do you want me to use?"
"Anything. As long as it's gone."

I think I stood at the table, shuffling papers around, looking down and keeping busy.

"Hey! I know! A plastic tub!" Eric reads David's blog too.

One plastic tub used, one spider removed.

He went into the bathroom. I heard the two things I do not like hearing when spiders are involved. "Wow. It's a big one." and "Oops. It fell." Of course, I knew it was going to fall. Spiders in corners always fall because you can't get the right angle on them.

But success at last. Eric came out of the bathroom, plastic tub aloft. "Hey, I wonder if it's really dead or if they just curl up to fool people into thinking they're dead. It's pretty cool. Wanna see?"

Ah, the early days of a relationship. My eyes widened. "No. No."

"You don't want a picture to blog it?"

"Oh, I'll blog it. Of course I'll blog it. But I am not taking a picture of a spider."

"Huh," he said, "I don't think I realized how serious you were about not liking them."

"I am very serious about not liking them."

And so because he is gallant and he likes me, he took it outside.

He came back in and I hugged him, which I'm prone to do, spiders or no. "I left the tub in the recycling,"* he said to the top of my head. "I didn't think you would want
to use it again."





"You know, if it were my last plastic tub, I would probably suck it up, wash it out and use it again. But it is not my last plastic tub."**



*Swear to god, I went outside and this is how he had left it in the recycling.
**Swear to god, this is what my plastic tubs look like. They're organized by shape. Frequent visitors will corroborate this.