we need to have a talk « the knitty professor

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

we need to have a talk

Coming soon: an Addi Turbo Haiku Challenge Update.

I think I've mentioned Perry before. He seems like a very sweet kitty in this picture, no? Well, there are a few things I need to tell you about this cat.

1. He likes hands. I mean, he LIKES HANDS. When he wants loving, he doesn't look you in the eye. He looks at your hand. In fact, sometimes he grabs the hand with both paws, and tries to pull it towards his furry body - clearly indicating "You should pet me now, human slave." Of course, I comply. (Did I mention he has me trained?)

2.   He is a voyeur. He likes watching humans take showers. In my current apartment, my shower has two curtains, one patterned and opaque, the other clear. He climbs underneath the patterned one and watches me shower from behind the safety of the clear curtain. In fact, he has been known to chase my hand (see #1 above) while I am trying to shower. (I of course find this all so adorable that I try to call him into the bathroom when I shower, and I am upset when he gets bored and walks off. I guess that makes me a cat flasher... This is a pretty damaging post, don't you think?)

3.   He eats plastic. No, really. He doesn't just play with plastic (although he loves doing that). He consumes it. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), it seems to go right through him. But it means that if I want to get even two hours of sleep back to back, I need to completely plastic-proof the house, lest I am awoken to the rustle of a plastic bag.

4.   When I said he eats plastic, I wasn't joking. Look at the following evidence, and you may get a sense of why I thought it necessary for us to have this talk about Perry.

Look very carefully at the upper right hand corner of the bag containing the oh-so-precious Addi Turbos (of Haiku Challenge fame). That's right - Perry has viciously attacked the Addi Turbos (well, at least the bag) in search of plastic to consume. Now the most important thing to note is that this bag of Addi Turbos was hidden at the bottom of my knitting bag. And that this bag was right next to my bed when I was trying to sleep and Perry decided to go fishing for plastic. Lucky for me and my beauty sleep, he found some. I was furious. I chased him out the bedroom, and shut the door. This only transferred the noise - now, instead of chewing plastic, he kept me awake by trying (unsuccessfully as yet) to claw a passage through the door.

5. The next night, I thought to hide the Addi Turbos deep in the bag, and then put the bag in another room, far from where I was trying to sleep. This worked rather well - or so I thought. I managed to get some sleep. But then I woke up to this:

This is supposed to be the beginning of a to-be-felted diaper bag for the parents of the VIB. Notice how the yarn on the needles is completely disconnected from the yarn in the ball. Now, this may have happened spontaneously. Maybe the yarn just broke in the middle of the night with no external force being applied. Maybe the yarn on the needle couldn't take the yarn in the ball any more and decided to break away. Or - and this is the best theory, given the tell-tale slobber on the yarn - maybe Perry has transferred his passion for plastic to yarn.

Whatever your interpretation, I have been diligent ever since about shutting all of the yarn, needles, and plastic I can find into my office and shutting the door whenever I go to sleep, leave the house, or just plain think Perry looks like he is about to commit a criminal act (which is pretty much all the time). I know that I am drastically reducing his quality of life by doing so - but can you blame me?

So now you know what you need to know about Mr. Perry. Let's hope my defensive maneuvers are sufficient to protect my knitting...

Posted at 05:59 pm by mishaele