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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (6688)	1/29/1998 6:38:00 PM
From: Gauguin	Respond to of 71178

You wouldn't think cats could sulk for days. Sometimes the new collars make them a little queasy because of the higher concentration of poison; thinking this you would probly just be deluding yourself, but it's easier than thinking you're fooling them. Just gotta tough it out. Lupita taught Stumpy to open the door. She's very athletic. It's an amazing thing to me, that I don't think most people would believe, but she even taught him to help her. We don't have to lock our door here, and didn't for years. (Stop me if I told this already.) It's one from the twenties, with a brass lockset that has a looping vertical handle and a thumb-lever above it that you push down instead of turning. It latches firmly, so we were mystified when we came home one winter evening and the door was wide open with the lights out and the heater trying to heat Oregon. All of the kitties were inside asleep in various favorite places, of course. Then we saw her do it. She jumps up with her feet on the bottom stile, loops her left paw thru the handle loop, and uses a full roundhouse right to slam down on the thumbpiece. She has to hit it hard, but if she does, the door swings in open with her riding it over to the wall. It makes quite a brass-bangy racket so you can tell when she's at it. And it turned out that when I had restored the door, the lockset had been left for later; deprioritized. With no lock, she could open it any time. We now had a door problem, but not burglars, that forced me to install a lockset. Still it's not that simple and you have to go rent the installation kit yada. In the meantime, I would put a box of tools against it to keep her out at night. Boy, that was a mistake. Made her angry. She knew she was hitting that damn thing hard enough and that that box was the problem and she didn't appreciate me one bit. I avoided eye contact. About a week later the box was pushed in about four inches and the door was open. This really got us going, because there is no way she can hold down the latch while hanging from the door and still reach the porch to push in with her feet. And the box wasn't light. This happened until I put a BIG box o' tools behind the door. One Saturday, we come down the stairs to let them in for breakfast, and Lupita is up hanging from the door handle (we can see her because most of the door is glass) and her big brother Stumpy is down in the center of the door, up on his hind legs, pushing in the center of the glass. Mystery solved, and it was darn cute and scary. I got the lock installed. It took Stumpy a couple months to learn how to do it himself when it's not locked, but he does it in two whacks now, so unless the thing is locked all day, he's coming in. About five time a day. Doesn't even bother to meow to come in anymore. (It's a cat door.)

To: Rambi who wrote (6688)	1/30/1998 2:54:00 PM
From: Gauguin	Respond to of 71178

>>>SO, dammit, Paul! Did you ever float in the not-so-great Salt Lake or not?<<< Penni, I'm with JFQ (alledgedly); will take any type of female attention. But c'mon, you're a parent ~ You think I let my parents steam anywhere near Utah without waking the lake? Actually, I was tyring to think of how to describe the place. Uhmmmm... I liked your description of the stars in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Been up there many times, out far from any lights. The stars were so dense, so edge to edge, that you couldn't really pick out the constellations. The Milky Way was only more dense than the rest of the dome. Like sand. With brighter dust in the middle. But they were really mosquitos.