Pretty Kitty Roller Derby

So, no, I haven't thrown up during my pregnancy.  Awesome!  I'm very fortunate! 

But our newest kitty-cat has more than compensated for it.  In every possible way.

Apparently, Lady Freyja the Gray is not adjusting particularly well to being a housecat.  In the beginning, she was kept in her own room, with her own food and litter box.  She went in the box and ate all her food, trying to escape the room each time the door was opened.  We played with her each day, brought her toys (which she rejected) and pet her soft fur.   Sometimes the other two cats would pay her a quick visit, under our supervision.  We called her the "Princess in the Tower".   Once we got her to the vet, who put her age around Thor's (2 1/2 to 3 years) and seemed surprised that she was in good health for a stray, we began the process of giving her run of the house.

It has not gone well. 

Loki seems to resent being the "middle child" and has made that very clear to Freyja.  Although Freyja is a larger, older cat, she lets Loki boss her around.   Loki has determined that Freyja is "allowed" to live on top of the chest of drawers in our front entryway.  She's sometimes "allowed" to sleep on top of the kitchen counters (these are Loki's rules and they do not jive with mine.)  She's also "allowed" to sleep on the couch, provided that Ross or I am on the couch, too.  If she ventures too far away from the living room or the hallway, Loki tears after her like she's got wheels, fur flying.  Per Loki, Freyja is not "allowed" into the basement...which has created some pretty putrid potty problems upstairs.  After the fourth pile of fresh poo that was waiting for us after work, we called in the big guns.

I texted my baby sister Jules, who is in grad school to be a vet.

I shared my concern that Freyja was regressing due to anxiety and territorial problems, and both she and her "cat expert" colleague agreed.  They suggested temporarily putting a litter box near where she likes to poop.  In the kitchen.  UGH!  That worked for a week or so, until it wasn't cleaned to Freyja's liking.  That day, she punished Ross by taking a potty break right in front of the front door.

At our wits' end, we finally tried moving the covered box to right next to the front door, underneath the (unused) writing desk in the entryway.  She is definitely using it now, and, at least since it's winter, we're not noticing any particularly unpleasant aromas from it. 

But she's also been having other tummy troubles.

She horked in Ross's shoes last week. 

It wasn't entirely her fault.  Since, according to Loki's Law, she is not allowed on the floor, she had to vomit from on top of the drawers.  Ross's work shoes happened to be directly underneath.

She's thrown up a few times since then, and I don't think it's what she is eating so much as how fast she is eating.  Terrified that Loki will attack her, I've seen her gulp her Friskies faster than Garfield downs a tray of lasagna.  Of course, cat physiology isn't entirely different from that of humans, and if they eat too quickly, guess what happens?

I actually caught her puking the other day.  It was a pretty gruesome sight.  She seems fine otherwise, and she's been cleared of worms by the vet, so the only thing that seems to make sense is that she's been agitated.  And I know that it's not Thor doing the terrorizing.  Oh, Loki.  Sometimes you are so very like your namesake...

I guess all the cats are cooperating in order to prepare me for motherhood.

How sweet of them.

Attack of the Centipedes! (Part Three)

Be warned.

My flip-flops are smeared with the legs and guts of your slain brethren.  I keep a record of your dead allies.  I am an insect terrorist.  I will destroy you and all you know. 

Also, I am hiring an exterminator.

Your days are numbered, fools.

Attack of the Centipedes! (Part Two)

We were cuddled up in bed.  I was nearly asleep, the day's events slipping into memory, and my arms wrapped lovingly around my husband.  Then he spoke.

"Honey?  Can I tell you something you don't want to hear?"

Honestly, who wakes their wife up to say something like that?  I was suddenly fully awake, preparing to hear about an outlandishly expensive car he wanted to buy or a job that would require us moving to Idaho.  "What, baby?"

"...when I was downstairs today..."

Only two things happen in the basement: laundry gets done, and centipides roam freely like wild mustangs on the plains of the American midwest.  Vaguely, I hoped he was going to tell me a story about how he shrunk his new Gap khakis.

"I was cleaning the drain...and one of them came up out of it."

I shuddered.

"So I hurried upstairs to get a shoe to smash it with, and I figured it would have been gone by the time I came back."

I shuddered again.

"Um, but it was still there.  It just kept running around in a little circle.  It wasn't trying to hide or anything.  Just running around in a circle.  So I killed it."

I relaxed.

"And then, another one came up out of the drain."

I shuddered again.  This had the makings of a horror movie, but I didn't want it to be happening in my house.

"It was a teeny one, just a baby.  I guess he was looking for big brother.  So I killed it."

"...oh..."

"And then, Momma came up, looking for her kids.  So I killed her, too.  Three of them  I killed them all.  Do you want me to clean the drain again tomorrow and see if I can get any more?"

"No, it's ok."  Good God, Ross, it's not like they're ten-point bucks.  You don't get a point for every freaking leg you smash!

He paused for a second.  "It was strange.  That first one was weird.  I mean, they're supposed to like the dark.  They always run and hide when we turn on the lights, right?"

Was I really discussing insect duck-and-cover tecniques with my husband at midnight?  "I guess so.  The ones we've seen usually do."

"This one was messed up, I think.  He just kept running in that circle, like he was panicking."

"Maybe he was hatched with half his legs shorter than the other half.  Maybe that's how he always moved."

Oddly, the thought of a centipede with a birth defect struck us as so ridiculously hysterical that my anxiety disappeared, and I didn't have nightmares about giant bugs that evening.

Last night, around eleven, I went downstairs to get a glass of water from the kitchen.  I flicked on the light and there was one of those monsters, sitting just to the left of the table.  Despite my grogginess, I took exactly one-millionth of a second to identify it.  I don't know that I've ever screamed so loud in my life.  While I was screaming, I was actually consciously wondering why Ross had not flown to my side, shoe in hand, ready to strike down the offending beast.  During the breath I took between screams, I heard him call, "Honey, what's wrong?" but I kept screaming.  Then, as he came downstairs, I burst into tears and I blubbered, "I saw one, I saw one!"  I ran out of the kitchen and hid on the stairwell.  "Honey, take a deep breath," he soothed, "I'll get it."

After a few minutes, I didn't hear the tell-tale thwack of his sandal on the linoleum, so I put on my shoes and tiptoed into the kitchen.  "Where is it?" I whimpered, forcing myself to grab his flashlight and illuminate the dark, crumb-infested corners of the room.  "I can't find it," he said, at the moment my beam of light hit the motionless bug.  "It's another one," I gasped.  Surely that small, quivering thing wasn't the leviathan that had just startled me.  Was it?

"It's the same one," I admitted lamely.  "It's kind of little, I guess."

We yanked the kitchen table out of the way and crept towards it.  It remained perfectly still.  I was surprised.  Those things are super-attuned to vibrations, and, like most "feeler bugs", skitter out of the way when they sense an approach.  But this one was...playing dead?

Ross and I looked at each other and prepared to lunge when the thing make a break for it.  But it never moved.  Finally, frustrated, I shoved the chair it was hiding under.  It twitched lightly, and ambled over to a crumb that was lying near the radiator.  It ambled.  Have you ever seen anything with more than eight legs amble?  It did.  It was as casual as though it were mingling at a cocktail party.

"Is it...eating a Cheerio?" Ross asked.

"Yeah, you eat that.  It's good for your heart, you little freak," I narrated like a crook in a crummy crime novel.  Ross dealt the maiming blow with his shoe, and removed two sets of the centipede's legs.  I smashed the flailing half and I do not lie when I say that I could actually feel it under my flip flop.

There was a moment of silence.

"Did it try to eat the Cheerio?" Ross repeated.

"It's time for bed, honey."

During our study of centipedes in their "natural" habitat, we've learned the following things:

    1. They can survive an eight-foot fall with nothing more than mild disorientation.

    2. Like other wild animals, they are capable of being protective of their young, but their young are idiots.

    3. They can be demobilized by petrified female screams.

    4. Following the current health-food trend, they are making wiser choices involving low-sugar, high-fiber cereals.

I guess we'll arm ourselves with heavy boots and Cheerios from here on out.

Attack of the Centipedes!

It had been an otherwise pleasant day.  We'd accomplished a good deal of housework and run several errands, and we were both ready to turn in for the night.  I was tidying up the den when I heard him muttering about a "little bugger", then I heard him snarl, "stay still!"  Seeing as how we have no pets and Ross is not one to talk to himself in such unkind language, I immediately assumed the worst.  I called across the hallway and asked my husband what was wrong.

"Uh...nothing honey," came the less-than-confident reply.  "Just...stay in the other room."

My heart sank.  I had a feeling he'd discovered something in the bathroom that had more than two legs.  Despite his protests, I peered into the bathtub.  There it was, the first house centipede of the season, hurtling its little multi-legged way out of the drain in the bathtub.  

"Really?  Already?" I sobbed as he smashed the thing.  It was only a baby - if such a tender term can be used when referring to a juvenile creepy-crawly - but that meant that there were probably others.  Last year, they were everywhere, it seemed.  Several accosted me while I was doing laundry, and now I never go into the basement without shoes on. One was hiding in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner and the bold, stupid thing had the audacity to rush me while I was at the stove.  One even - quite literally - fell headlong from a damaged ceiling tile over the sink while Ross was washing the dishes.  We nicknamed it The Paratrooper and promptly dispatched it.  After I screamed bloody murder, of course.  Now, I rarely curse.  I very rarely use foul language.  But when I see one of these awful things, I find it really, really hard to bite my tongue.  I find myself cursing them, calling them names, shouting absurd epithets and threats at them.  I find myself subconsciously checking each room for their presence, as well as for the presence of anything that can possibly be used as a weapon: a broom, a can of hairspray, a skillet.

It's not that they're particularly dangerous.  In fact, house centipedes are probably among those "pests" that actually eat other, more annoying (but less scary) pests like ants or aphids or something like that.  But who cares how "helpful" the things are?  They're HORRIFYING to look at.  They're not particularly huge bugs, but their eight million long, slender legs make them look much bigger than they really are.  And, of course, having eight million legs, those suckers move FAST.  They move so quickly, and their legs make them look so large, that I've mistaken them for mice on occasion.  

I'd rather have a mouse living in the house.  I'd welcome a mouse.  Do mice eat centipedes?  That would be even better.

The only perk I can see in all of this is that I'm no longer afraid of spiders.  How can eight legs freak me out more than thirty?