Friday, March 04, 2005

Of mice and cats

My contribution to the tradition of Friday catblogging:

Local news: Two weeks ago, our neighbor Carol presented us with a package of a dozen cat toys: tiny stuffed mice made of rabbit fur and amazingly realistic. I gave one to each of our cats, who were outside assisting me in the garden, and one to Smokey, the cat we share with another neighbor, Steve. A half hour later there was a blood-curdling scream from across the street. Another neighor, Theresa, was pointing at her driveway where Smokey had deposited a little gray mouse. "It's just a stuffed toy," I shouted. She peered at it and waited until I ran over, got the mouse, and returned it to Smokey (who had taken refuge under her car when the screaming started). In a few days, all the mice had vanished, and I distributed a new batch, giving Smokey is nice white mouse that he promptly began tossing around on the lawn.

Today I got a phone call from Steve, Smokey's elderly co-owner. He reported that his daughter and her husband had arrived for a visit and discovered that Smokey had left a dead mouse on his front porch. They had taken it away with a shovel and flung it into the trash.

"Was this mouse white?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "How did you know?"

I explained it was a stuffed mouse. He said his daughter will certainly be surprised.

It was, apparently, a week to be surprised by your cat. Check it out.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:11 PM

    Hmm. Never knew about "Friday CatBlogging." Of course, I never read the NYTimes either. (I can look down my nose at them just as well as they look down their noses at me.)

    But I sent in this pic of one of mine:

    http://www.quibble.com/geoff/percolating/1128My kids have the rabbit-fur mice too. Fortunately, I mostly had the foresight to get them in green, purple, and other non-natural rodent colors.

    Mostly.

    gd

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  2. Anonymous5:13 PM

    Oh. Just look how Blogger munged my perfectly-nicely formatted and twice-previewed post. Piffle.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The post looks OK to me...hmmmm. (Viewing in Firefox).

    You win the Friday Catblogging Cool Cat prize.

    K

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  4. Anonymous1:16 PM

    The URL was on a line by itself when I wrote/previewed the comment. Mysteriously, when posted it got glommed onto the start of the next graf.

    I'm desperately trying to get a picture of Abhi being taunted by a squirrel just on the other side of a window. ;-)

    ReplyDelete