Qatteri Cat Loves His Dad
We start our day together as a family – Adventure Man, me, Qatteri Cat – and all of Qatteri Cat’s babies, who end up on the bed by morning . . .He brought two babies in last night while I was still reading, and the other two appeared sometime as we were sleeping.
As we gathered in the living room to watch the sun over the Gulf, to see if we could spot any dolphins, Adventure Man sat with Qatteri Cat and began to play with him. Adventure Man almost lost a finger!
We got the Qatteri Cat when he was still a very young cat. He was found, sick and with an eye infection, on the Corniche in Doha, too young to be away from his mother, but with no mother in sight. A family adopted him, but the females in the family didn’t like him, and he spent much of his time alone, on a too hot or too cold balcony.
When we adopted him, he LOVED Adventure Man at first sight, but he was very wary of me. His back would arch if my hand raised. He watched my feet like a hawk. If my voice raised, his ears went back. And he was terrified of plastic bags, totally freaked out.
After a month or so, he would sit next to me, but not for long. He usually ended up biting me or scratching me in a panic to get away. It took months to calm him down, to calm his terrors, to gain his trust.
He is a very odd cat. He doesn’t eat meat, won’t touch it. He loves shrimp and sardines, and we special order salmon flavored cat food for him. He never begs for food. If I forget to feed him, he will nip at my feet – that’s his only signal, and he has to be very hungry to even do that. He never begs for food. He drinks very little water, so little that we have to encourage him to drink often.
Most of all, he wants to go out. He wants to roam free, he wants to be the CAT that God created him to be. But now, we have trained him too well – he is too trusting, and has no understanding about cars at all. He wouldn’t last long on the mean streets of Kuwait.
We also have to be careful, because underneath this contented cat, not too far from the surface, is that street-born cat. Most mornings I have a tough time typing, because he is snuggled up between my left arm and the computer. Occasionally, all of a sudden, in his imagination, my left hand becomes something else as it types along, and he attacks. His attacks, with teeth and claws, come as a surprise. It is a great trick NOT to try to remove my hand immediately, which only makes him bite and claw harder, but to stay totally still and say his name in reproving tones. It reminds him who he is and who I am, and he will let go. It happens less and less often, but we never forget there is still a wild cat not far below the thin veneer of civilization.
Most of all, he loves Adventure Man. He cries when he leaves, and he starts getting restless when it is time for him to come home. He waits by the door. When Adventure Man travels, he gets depressed, and Adventure Man talks to him on the phone when he calls. Sometimes I will ask “can you say hello to Qatteri Cat?” and he’ll say “not now, there are people around!” and he will leave the office and call back to talk with Qatteri Cat where no-one can hear him. Adventure Man gets most of his exercise these days chasing Qatteri Cat from room to room, throwing his ball, playing hide and seek.
OK, Skunk, this one was for you. 🙂
Qatteri Cat Wants to Play
Look at those eyes. Mom is busy. Won’t you come play with Qatteri Cat?
You can chase him, and then let him chase you. Or you can hide his babies. Or you can put him in his Sakura sack and let him try to snag your finger. (Ouch!)
Oops. too late. He’s decided to take a cat nap.
Google Street View Peeping?
I found this article on AOL, but it is from the New York Times originally.
Google Zooms In Too Close for Some
By MIGUEL HELFT, The New York Times
The New York Times
OAKLAND, Calif. (June 2) – For Mary Kalin-Casey, it was never about her cat.
Google said it takes privacy seriously and considered the implications of its service before it was introduced. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” it said.
Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.
“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”
Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”
Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”
Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”
You can read the rest of the article on AOL MOney News by clicking here.
My comment: I am a huge fan of transparency, so you might think this new ability wouldn’t bother me. But the transparency I favor is transparency of business and government transactions, not people taking in my behavior in my own house! I am also a huge fan of personal privacy, and while a street view that just shows my cat in the window wouldn’t be alarming, it tells me that photos shot at night, which would show the interior of my residence, are also possible, and that thought troubles me very much.
Our homes are our castles! If my husband wants to walk around in his underwear (or less 😉 ) and I want to wear my nightgown all day when I am working on a special project, honestly, it is not YOUR business, nor anyone else on the internet! Do you want photos published, taken of you unaware in your own house? This capability is terrifying!
Rude Awakening
In the wee small hours of the morning, my husband and I had a rude awakening. While we were sound asleep, the Qatteri Cat figured out how to open the front door and walk out. Awakening and seeing light, my husband jumped out of bed, and yelled “Qatteri Cat is gone!” but as he wasn’t wearing much, he couldn’t go look for QC. Sheer panic. We know the QC would not last long on the mean streets of Kuwait.
I’m paranoid about sleeping in nothing much, like what if there is a fire or something? So I am wearing a little more, not much more, but enough that I can go look for QC, but as soon as he hears us exclaiming, he comes back in, like “hey! glad to see you up! Did you notice my food dish is empty?”
And it was empty. I have noticed if I can remember to feed him before we go to bed, we have fewer howlings in the middle of the night, fewer jumping at the door handle. Hunger makes him wakeful and energetic. And we normally lock the front door, but when we came in last night we were both carrying packages and I must have gotten distracted, I am usually the obsessive-compulsive one about making sure the door is locked.
And the Qatteri Cat? After all the commotion, he is sleeping in this morning, while I am walking around bleary and tired. But he is so sweet when he is sleeping.
Helpful Hint for Hairballs
When you have a long haired cat, you have to brush them often, to keep them from swallowing too much hair. Even with frequent brushing and combing, from time to time they need a little help digesting some of that indigestible stuff, and for that, veterinarians have devised a hairball gel that you (quoting loosely) put a large pearl sized drop on your finger and the cat will lick it off, because he loves the taste.
Yeh, right.
In the rare occurrence, it goes on to say, that a cat doesn’t like the taste, smear it on his paw and he will lick it off.
Something in my posture seems to give me away. The cat who normally sits and waits for me to come give him a pet or two runs as soon as he sees me coming with the hairball goo.
So today, oh so smart lady that I am, I saw him snoozing deeply, and I knew THIS was the time. And it was.
Helpful hint: when you put hairball goo on your cat’s paw, make sure you do it on the side or top of the paw, not on the bottom of the paw.
Once the cat starts running, there is hairball goo – EVERYWHERE.
Don’t do what I did. (scrubbing and scrubbing and seeing spots I’ve misssed.)
Best Mother’s Day Story
In honor of the upcoming American Mother’s Day (I don’t know why we have it on a different day from the rest of the world) a friend sent this hysterical story, which I am sharing with you.
So, we had this great 10 year old cat named Jack who just recently
died. Jack was a great cat and the kids would carry him around and sit on
him and nothing ever bothered him. He used to hang out and nap all day long
on this mat in our bathroom.
Well we have 3 kids and at the time of this story they were 4 years
old, 3 years old and 1 year old. The middle one is Eli. Eli really loves
chapstick. LOVES it. He kept asking to use my chapstick and then losing
it. So finally one day I showed him where in the bathroom I keep my
chapstick and how he could use it whenever he wanted to but he needed to put
it right back in the drawer when he was done.
Last year on Mother’s Day, we were having the typical rush around
and try to get ready for Church with everyone crying and carrying on. My
two boys are fighting over the toy in the cereal box. I am trying to nurse
my little one at the same time I am putting on my make-up. Everything is a
mess and everyone has long forgotten that this is a wonderful day to honor
me and the amazing job that is motherhood.
We finally have the older one and and the baby loaded in the car and
I am looking for Eli. I have searched everywhere and I finally round the
corner to go into the bathroom. And there was Eli. He was applying my
chapstick very carefully to Jack’s . . . rear end. Eli looked right into my
eyes and said “chapped.” Now if you have a cat, you know that he is
right–their little butts do look pretty chapped. And, frankly, Jack didn’t
seem to mind.
And the only question to really ask at that point was whether it
was the FIRST time Eli had done that to the cat’s behind or the hundredth.
And THAT is my favorite Mother’s Day moment ever because it reminds
us that no matter how hard we try to civilize these glorious little
creatures, there will always be that day when you realize they’ve been using
your chapstick on the cat’s butt.
Qatteri Cat’s Paw
The Qatteri Cat has some desert cat in him, or so the vet says. She says this on the basis of his very very hairy ears, the better to keep sand out, and his very hairy paws. His paws crack me up – desert cats have hairy paws so that they can walk on hot sand without burning their feet.
There is another meaning to cat’s paw than the literal meaning. When a person is referred to as a cat’s paw, it means that person is acting, knowingly or unknowingly, to do the will of another person. Here is what answers.com says about the term cat’s paw:
cat’s-paw also cats·paw (kăts’pô’)
n., pl. cat’s-paws also cats·paws.
A person used by another as a dupe or tool.
A light breeze that ruffles small areas of a water surface.
Nautical. A knot made by twisting a section of rope to form two adjacent eyes through which a hook is passed, used in hoisting.
cat’s paw
A dupe or tool for another, a sucker, as in You always try to make a cat’s paw of me, but I refuse to do any more of your work. This term alludes to a very old tale about a monkey that persuades a cat to pull chestnuts out of the fire so as to avoid burning its own paws. The story dates from the 16th century and versions of it (some with a dog) exist in many languages.
I know that some of you out there in etherworld share my love of words and phrases, and of knowing their origin. This is for you! 🙂
Qatteri Cat Gets Bored
The Qatteri Cat remembers what it was like to live on the streets. He doesn’t remember the hunger, the thirst or the danger. What he remembers are the smells, and the great adventure.
When he first came to live with us, he often escaped. He could run out the back, up a tree and once over the wall, he was GONE. He always came back . . . unless, of course, he was stuck in someone’s back yard, or up a tree so tall he couldn’t figure out how to get down. We always knew when that happened – we could hear him yowling all the way home.
But now, he can’t get out. There are days when he yearns for the street, for the smells and strangeness of the great outdoors. We try to amuse him, and he humors us.
We hid one of his “babies” under the sack. It’s driving him crazy:
He pushes the sack, trying to get his baby:
Finally, he wins!
Qatteri Cat’s Amusement
This week, my window washers were back, but this time they did not catch me by surprise! I had read the notice posted by the elevator, and closed my sheers so that they couldn’t look in and see me blogging.
The Qatteri Cat, however, thought this was great stuff. He yearns to be an outdoor cat. He remembers the early street life, and then the green garden he called his own, and the occasional escape over the wall and down to visit the neighbors. In his innermost cat nature, he wants to be free to roam, free to follow his cat nature.
So this morning, the window washers provided great excitement in his hum-drum contained life. The window washers stopped briefly to “Miao” at him and tap the window to tease him a little – great fun, if you are a cat. I could hear his loud purring from ten feet away!
Qatteri Cat vs. Easter Egg Tree
The Qatteri Cat’s favorite toy is a Sakura Express Bag:
But sometimes, when he needs exercise, we tease him. We put his white bear “baby” at the top of his scratching post:
And the Qatteri Cat HATES that! He can’t bear it! He says “That’s just not right!” and within 30 seconds, he attacks the bear and brings – or knocks – him back down (that white blur at the bottom of the photo is the bear):
Now, he thinks our Easter Egg Tree is his new toy. (Remember the debacle with the Christmas tree?) I am working with him on this, not to bat at the eggs. So far, not so good:
*Easter Egg trees have nothing to do with religion. Easter Eggs go a long way back and are related to Spring, to fertility, and probably to early pagan rituals. Same with bunny rabbits. In Germany, people used to put literally thousands of hand decorated eggs out on their trees as Easter approached, and we would walk around admiring everyone’s trees. It is more a cultural thing, not a religious thing.
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