Leaving on a jet plane. Not Herself, but it will do for purposes of illustration.
Herself is out of town, and Miss Mia and I are out of sorts.
Ours is a fragile ecosystem, especially Miss Mia’s little corner of it. You give her output, she’ll give you input, and plenty of it, especially if she catches you napping on the job.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeowwwwwwww!”
“Hold my calls, stand by, and await further instructions.”
As Nick Nolte told Frank McRae in “48 Hrs,” “Yeah, I hear you, your voice carries.”
When we’re fully staffed, Herself takes the early shift. She gets up at stupid-thirty, feeds and waters and amuses Her Majesty, and then goes about her business while Miss Mia takes a nap.
I get the second shift, which starts a couple hours later. I feed and water and amuse Her Majesty, and then go about my business while Miss Mia takes a nap.
Then we tag team the rest of the day, which is mostly a breeze because hey, she’s a cat. Miss Mia requires about 20 hours of beauty sleep per diem.
But if one of us goes somewhere for a few days, it’s Katie bar the door. Double shifts, weird hours, and negative performance reviews. My first writeup came around 3 this morning.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeowwwwwwww!”
It’s gonna be a long shift in the barrel. “Yeah, I hear you, your voice carries.”
Her Majesty recovers from the stress of entertaining.
With one birthday down and one to go, things are back to what passes for business as usual around El Rancho Pendejo.
As you can see, Miss Mia Sopaipilla is greatly relieved. She is a creature of habit and not a fan of company, especially when said company evicts her from her bedroom.
And yes, of course Miss Mia Sopaipilla has her own bedroom. What are we, Nazis?
Meanwhile, our friendly local roof wizards have waved their wands overhead, just in time for what looks like a bit of spillover from the atmospheric river giving California such a brutal hosing.
Jiminy Chris’mus, South Lake Tahoe is starting to look like the ice planet Hoth, only with leaking roofs, exploding propane tanks, and rental cars stuffed into snowbanks, abandoned by fleeing tourists.
Here, the worst we can expect is a bit of drizzle, maybe a soupçon of snow. And of course, the usual seasonal allergies as everything from azaleas to zinnias checks the long-term forecast and decides to scatter pollen far and wide, and all at once, too.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla is doing her Queen Victoria impression again, so you know it’s not going to be sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ today in The Duck! City.
Happily, it was sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ the past couple of days, so I was able to get out and about on a two-wheeler, in this case the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff.
My man Chris Coursey, a beach bum and journo who rose from his humble origins to become Santa Rosa’s mayor and then a Sonoma County supervisor, probably longs for the days when he had to drive to the California coast to see a few gajillion tons of water in motion.
Friday and Saturday marked my first off-road rides of 2023, and they were a nice change from running, which I will probably return to today, if I can pull myself together in time to beat the rain to the punch.
Yes, the wizards are predicting rain, and even a small chance of snow, so I guess we’re getting a little spillover from the atmospheric rivers that have been drenching the West Coast.
I’ve never had to contend with weather like that, and I hope to keep that lucky streak unbroken. It makes the occasional four-foot Colorado snowstorm look like a day at the beach with a cold sixer and a hot girl.
I ain’t opening that door. I’ve seen “Poltergeist.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla was being a pill as I performed my coffee ritual this morning, so after a couple sips to get the motor running I figured I’d best tend to the litter boxes.
There’s one in the guest bathroom’s tub and another in the spare room where we contain Mia’s restless nature at night. This two-holer setup is a relic of the Before-Time, when we had two cats. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) insisted upon having his own personal latrine, and one feels obliged to give a 16-pound cat pretty much anything he deems mission-critical.
I dealt with the tub box first, and yep, it had seen action overnight. Then I headed for the spare room and noticed the door was closed.
Well, hell, I thought. No wonder Mia was pitching a bitch. She was locked out of her quarters. So I opened the door, gave that litter box a cursory inspection, and … it had been used too.
So I cleaned that one up, hauled what had become a sizable bag of feline exhaust outside to the trash, came back inside and asked Herself, “Why’d you close the door to Mia’s room?”
“I didn’t close the door,” she sez to me she sez.
“Well, I sure didn’t,” sez I.
A moment of silence.
“Mother?” she inquires, glancing around.
No reply.
I doubt it was Herself the Elder. She was never much of an eater, and while she had a great head of hair she wasn’t a furry, barring the occasional chin whisker. Plus, I don’t think her shade could squeeze into that litter box, which has a lid on it. It would have been undignified, even in extremis.
When Turks attack.
No, I’m inclined to suspect the Turk. My old comrade had an interesting sense of humor that encompassed leaping at you from hidey-holes, flashing the bathroom lights at us the night he died, and triggering a hallway smoke detector that requires a stepladder to reach as I was rehabbing a broken ankle.
Now there was a cat who found a loo with a lid to be an awful tight fit. He had to poke his blue-eyed brain-box out of the one we kept downstairs in Bibleburg. We called his bathroom breaks “driving the Turkentank.”
When you gotta go, you gotta go, they say. But if you’ve gone, do you gotta come back? If you do, leave the door open, or at least crack a window. Maybe light a match. I’m trying to enjoy my coffee here.
The Commander inspects his (purely defensive) chemical-weapons stockpile.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla couldn’t care less that some elongated muskrat has made off with Twatter, or Twitcher, or whatever that other thing she couldn’t care less about is called.
Miss Mia is an intelligent Animal, a Higher Order (h/t James McBride, “Mr. P & the Wind”). She don’t need no phone, tablet, or laptop to get your attention. If she wants it she will throw a meow your way or do something cute like frolic in a crinkly pile of wrapping paper, or turn your crumpled comforter into a cat cave.
And it goes without saying that she would never ever come over to your house uninvited and hammer a loved one into the hospital.
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