The Cats Won!

I wasn't going to post about this. Believe it or not, I'm not really a cat person. I love dogs, but I hate mice and rats so cats have always been welcome in my home as "Green Pest Control". I only have two cats. Beautiful long-haired mongrel cats that were born a year apart to a kitty that was dumped in the area and found her way into our home. I had lots of kids hanging around back then and keeping the kitties fed and the litter box cleaned wasn't a big deal. It was good training for future pet owners (and they ALL have pets these days).

The kids left. The cats didn't.

My cats are now around 15 and 14 years old. They are pretty worthless when it comes to mouse control but since my son moved in with his two cats, mice are pretty scarce. One of his cats is also either 14 or 15 and the other is younger, maybe 9 years old. So we have four cats total. Two fat ones and two skinny or small cats, two female and two male, two long-haired and two short-haired. The one thing they all have in common is loving the outdoors. My kitties go out. My son's do not. He's never allowed them out since he lived in the city and is afraid they will run off or get hurt or something if he lets them out now. They sneak out now and then but we haul them back in pretty quick-like if we know it. I respect his wishes to keep them in.

So.....I have 2 windows in my computer/craft room. When I'm in there during the day, I open the blinds and during the beautiful weekend, I opened the windows a bit. My son's cats are sooooooo wanting to see what's out there that they jump up in the windowsill of the one window. I have storage towers under the other window full of thread and other embellishments. I had "stuff" on top, of course. It just naturally lands there. One of my son's cats recently developed a habit of jumping up there and knocking things off in the process. I was highly irritated one day to find a BUNCH of stuff on the floor, including a container of beads and tatted motifs scattered hither and yon. Even so, I didn't clean off the towers. I did make it easier for them to get to the one window but I wasn't going to give them TWO windows.

One of my son's cats is oddly impervious to warnings. He was the one jumping on my towers and kicking things off. Every time he jumped up, I put him down. He gets right in your face and literally dares you to do something about it. He was really putting a crimp in my computer browsing. So I thought, okay, it's a beautiful day, I'll just put all this stuff in a box for now and they can each have a window to gaze out of. I plan to clean and paint this room in the summer anyway.



As you can see, it didn't take long for at least one of them to claim squatter's rights.

This one is mine and she seems to be taking it all in and wishing she could be up there too. But then I let her out and she probably blew raspberries at them from the yard!