Fleas Navidad

Miles, always the professional.

Oddly enough, I got it together this year in time to actually order and send my cards before Christmas. Shocking!  Only taxidermied pets had to wear costumes. Everybody else just needed to behave for like 5-10 minutes each.

It was a lot to ask.

Birdie tried to be as focused as Miles, but her sassy nature (and Olivia) got in the way.

The Wigglebothum barely tried.

“Psssssttt, Ross, what are we looking at? That squirrel??”

Sookie, of course, went into hiding the instant she sensed the costume bag and camera. However as I was cleaning up, she was casually camped out on the Ripple Rug chuckling at outwitting me once again. Seeing an opportunity, I scooped her up and really wrapped up the photo shoot.

Disclaimer: I literally had to lock the two of us in the bathroombecause I needed both hands to pull the Santa hat on. There was no way Sookie was hanging around for that.

Olivia was less than helpful here.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Miles, Sookie, Birdie, Olivia Wigglebothum, W. Charles Marmota, Ross the Holiday Armadillo, Cheese Curds, Maury Bearassed, and The Weasel (name TBD)

Happy Halloween. We tried. Not too hard, but ya know…

I struggled a little bit with pumpkin design this year. I feel like the owl was okay, but rather uninspired. The pumpkin on the left totally got away from me. The vision was unclear and the execution was worse. Our Yelp review will be terrible!

Perhaps due to the poor designs, there was only a 50% participation rate among the cat super models. I’m not sure where everybody was. I definitely sat on the cold kitchen floor with the camera and a bag of treats for an extensive amount of time.

The Bird

I guess we’re lucky to have made it this far. Two days later the cat/dragon/geometric shapes whatever was leaking and both pumpkins went out to the garden. Hopefully they will be as popular as the spaghetti squash remnants.

As always, Miles brought his soulful A-game….mostly because Mommy had treats.

This one is my favorite. Look at those fangs! Happy Halloween!

Righteous Side eye

Two Targets and a website search later, I could not provide my children with the Cardboard Haunted Mansion for cats. The Target employee who helped me said they suddenly started selling out. I blame it on the number of articles I’ve seen about the house.

Sorry, kids.

However Target #2 did have a small in the lion mane I’ve been eyeing.

Sorry, kids.

It has a certain rock star quality. I feel like Miles is channeling 80’s Bon Jovi. Side eye and snarrrrrrl.

Look at that hair toss!

He hates it, but I think he hates Olivia’s photo bomb more. Indignant!

Not to be left out, The Wigglebothum brings her dance moves to the stage.

Sookie also wore the wig, but her photo was just too sad to share. It’s like I broke a part of her heart.

A Disturbance in the Force

There was a disturbance in the Force this week when Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew died at age 74.

A re-enactment of the Force being disturbed.

Chewbacca always seemed like the ideal guy. The ideal guy if you’re into wookies.

“Chewy, is that you?”

Chewbacca always seemed like the right height, had good hair, made really interesting noises, and wasn’t as cocky as Han Solo or as emo as Luke. I’d date him.

On this May the Fourth we mourn the passing of Mayhew, but celebrate his contribution to the galaxy.

As per usual, Sookie sensed me opening the costume bag and used a Jedi mind trick to evade me.

“This is not the cat you are looking for.”

#caturday

#maythefourthbewithyou

My Dead Cat is in a Calendar!!

So my dead cat is in calendar. That’s not weird, right?

Once upon a time I used to buy page-a-day calendars because they were adorable and the scrap paper came in handy at home and work before all my lists ended up in my phone. I gravitated towards ones like Cuteness Overload which was a variety of animals being…CUTE and featured the word “squeeee” in many of its captions. I would also grab cat based dailies like Cat Fancy, the very literal Cat-A-Day and,of course, The Bad Cat calendar. The Bad Cat calendar was strictly for home use as some of its captioning was a bit too bad for school, hilarious but bad.

All of those calendars came with a submission form so that your pet could potentially appear in the next calendar. In fact, one year early in our relationship Bella Luna appeared in both the Cat Fancy and Cat-A-Day daily calendars. She was such a super model.

Certainly I must have submitted other pictures to other calendars over the years which would explain my mail. Workman Publishing has no idea how weird they could make me feel. I had literally just come in from running errands, one of which was to buy 50% off calendars. I stood in Barnes & Noble debating over the last copy of Bad Cat an hour earlier. Now this!

That letter took a bit of contemplation before it made sense. Cosmo has been dead since 2009. So for at least 10 years whatever photo I submitted has been sifting around their offices, maybe physically, maybe digitally. I don’t know! I had no idea what my cat’s posthumous calendar appearance would look like!

Of course, I had to buy the damned calendar now!

Face palm. Eye roll. My poor Cosmo Cat! Immortalized as Yoda. Could be worse.

That was October 2008, a year before kitty cancer. I was hemming up parts of the costume for a friend’s pug and Cosmo wanted to be in the middle of it all. Modeling was the best way he could help. May the Force be with you.

Halloween Hangover

The best holiday is over and it’s time to clean up. Three perfectly good pumpkins to nibble on, and my squirrels extracted all the vanilla scented candles.

Although their positioning for this one was pretty hilarious.

We tried revisiting the pumpkin photo shoot, but per usual the felines are awful models.

Birdie was as obsessed with sniffing the pumpkin cat’s butthole as she is with sniffing everybody else’s.

I tried keeping my models a little hungry, but added in some catnip and strategically placed treats. That backfired.

Sookie refused to even remotely get involved. “Nope. Just nope.”

Olivia sort of participated, but her eyes ask, “What the cat shit are we doing? And when’s dinner?”

This was probably the best shot-Thanks, Miles-, and we are officially done with Halloween for the year. Now I just need to figure out the Christmas cards.

Happy Halloween: Pumpkin Carving Knife in hand

I knew I had waited too long to buy pumpkins when I found that someone appeared to practically be living in them. The cashier told me that they had live-trapped a raccoon in the garden center that week. My concern, of course, was the two cats that roam the store. Everybody’s okay though including the raccoon.

Halloween snuck up on me. I realized the weekend before that I hadn’t even thought about carving pumpkins which is something I really enjoy doing. Life skills: gourd art. Typically, I steer clear of anything that seems to originate in the evil realm of Pinterest, but I did see this idea online and …well…it’s my life.

Cat butt.

Successful pumpkin carving requires good Halloween based shows or movies although there was a point when I really wondered if I should be holding a knife and watching something with so many “jump scares.” I made it through the extended “Murder House” episode of American Horror Story’s latest season. Not bad in terms of jumpiness, but I am definitely being bullied by  “mean girls” in my class that are annoyed that I am always an episode or two behind them. They want to talk about it now! They are not going to be happy to hear that my DVR shit itself last Wednesday and didn’t even record the next episode.

Since Halloween seems to be the only horror movie that any channel will air, I headed to Netflix. I’ve seen all the variations of House on Haunted Hill and read the related Shirley Jackson book, so I was drawn to a new series The Haunting of Hill House. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Don’t watch this with a pumpkin carving knife in your hand. Do watch it alone on your couch in the dark. I only lasted two episodes that night because it was late, and because episode 2 had me sobbing to a point my stomach hurt. Warning: box of haunted dead kittens.

***Side note: This isn’t just a cat thing. I HATE it when the horror genre brings in animals, whether it’s the family’s pet or just a random stray who wanders on screen or that fucking horse in season 5 of The Walking Dead. It is always gruesome, upsetting, and completely unnecessary to the plot line. Stephen King, I’m lookin’ at you too.

Most of my usual work supervisors went to bed although I was able to pique Birdie and Olivia’s interest with some strategically placed treats. I may have to try again for our usual cats vs. pumpkins photo shoot.

My favorite photo is the tongue action in this shot. Happy Halloween!

…and it’s now National Cat Day. WTF?

I can’t stop crying. She just keeps quoting Samuel L. Jackson something about striking me down with furious anger.

Do you mean FUR-ious anger, Bird?

Unicorns vs. Sharks

The Target $1 bin never fails to amuse me. I know Birdie is grateful I shop there.

Tragic Unicorn is her look.

A herd of unicorns stampeding through my kitchen was just what the end to an exhausting day called for.

You can almost hear their tiny hooves.

However every story needs a little drama so I threw a shark into the herd.

Cue the music from Jaws as he scans the depths for treats!

duunnn dunnn… duuuunnnn duun…

duuunnnnnnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn dunnnn

No! Birdie, look out there’s a shark!!!!

Shark: “Nope. I’m not messing with her. Movin’ on!”

Satan is Just Santa Spelled Wrong

According to my cats, Satan is just Santa spelled wrong or vice versa. If it involves costumes, they certainly lean towards the Satanic interpretation. Costumes at this time of year means Christmas card photo shoot!

This year I was lucky enough to find a Santa beard. I looked last year, convinced that Maury desperately needed a white beard, but was only able to find him a moustache. Worth the $8 at Target.

Who wore it best?

Acquiring the beard, was definitely the signal to drag out costumes. I rarely put up a Christmas tree (Someone has to put that shit away later!), but it’s nothing to drag out the costume bag.

There was the typical forest of trees wandering around the kitchen in festive capes.

Sookie, as usual, declined to be involved and went into hiding. I basically dropped a costume on her then pulled it off before she panicked.

Olivia Wigglebothum explored the beard situation. She already has the meowstache.

Birdie was uncharacteristically annoyed by her costume options and I let her smack them around after pictures.

Miles, ever patient and accepting, gave me the winning shot. Because of his facial expression though, I used lyrics from “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” as text on the card. The Grinch’s dog Max was always one of my favorites with his giant reindeer antler attire.

You’re a rotter, Mr. Grinch!
You’re the king of sinful sots!