Muted

Obi here.

The Girl is still sick and Oliver is giving her purr therapy. Let me tell you what I think is wrong with her.

Aunt Staci turned off OutTV. She slept on the couch and didn’t want it distracting her or something. I thought it would be turned back on but then it got really cold outside.

Really cold.

So cold that it is cold inside, too. The people turned off ALL the OutTV in the house to protect us.

That can’t be healthy.

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Reveille at Camp Couch

I caught a cold last week and have been staying at Camp Couch since Saturday. I have mostly been alone; Oliver has decided that sleeping in the empty spot in my bed is much more comfortable. He’s come down to check on me, of course. And I think Obi has been sleeping on the loveseat.

So it isn’t like I’ve been alone or unsupervised.

Especially in the morning. On Monday, I needed to get up at 4 a.m. for drugs. Me playing with a foil package in the kitchen inspired the pitter patter of eight little feet. If I was up and getting a treat for myself, I might as well give them a little something something, right?

At 6 a.m., when The Boy got up, I heard them earnestly telling him that they needed breakfast. I lacked the will to move the ten feet to the kitchen to contradict them. I lacked the will to raise my head and see if I had a voice to say otherwise.

Kitten Thunder got a second breakfast.

The Boy kind of knew that and confirmed with me when he brought my coffee. But, by then, Oliver was laying with me – dutifully applying purr therapy – and no one felt like scolding him. Purr therapy is hungry work.

This morning, I woke to the familiar feel of a kitten paw poking me in the nose. I opened my eyes to see a grey kitten sitting on the floor by the couch, nose to nose with me. I lifted the blanket to see if he wanted to snuggle. His ears when flat. No.

I lowered the blanket and closed my eyes. Poke. PokePoke. Mew. PokePokePokeMewPoke. I opened my eyes. Mew.

“It isn’t time yet,” I said.

But, just as a well-aimed poke went UP my nose, the breakfast bell went off. A satisfied grey kitten turned and walked expectantly out of the living room.

I guess it was time to muster in the kitchen after all.

***

I’m feeling much better after two days of barely leaving Camp Couch. I’m packing up and moving back upstairs tonight.

Purr Therapy Sunday

I have the plague. Or a cold. I had to work all day yesterday, followed by The Boy’s work Christmas party, so I had already declared that I’d be sleeping until noon.

That didn’t quite work out since Kitten Thunder saw the dread black cat in the driveway at 10 a.m. I got up to help The Boy talk them down.

Then I moved the condo into the dining room.

Oliver has spent much of the day administering purr therapy.

 

After dinner, which The Boy went a got when he went to the grocery store for me – above and beyond the call of duty, I say – Obi decided to administer some preventative therapy on The Boy.

 

 

There’s Nothing on TV

Right this moment in Cheyenne it is eight degrees below zero. Even by Wyoming standards, that’s a wee bit chilly. In fact, a bunch of people have looked it up and we’re colder than many places in Alaska this week.

Aside from the five hours I had to walk around the downtown area in a blizzard (on Tuesday) and in below zero temperatures (Wednesday), I’ve been blissfully enjoying a career that involves my house, the couch, a blanket and a cat. And a computer, of course.

This morning, though, I realized that the furnace had been running for a while. Like, since I got up. And before that. And, more importantly, I was still shivering under my blanket.

Looking around at my bright, sunny house I realized that drastic measures had to be taken in light of the frigid temperatures. Everyone was going to have to make some sacrifices for the good of the house. Unfortunately…

We were going to have to turn off OutTV.

I went from room to room, dropping our blinds all the way to the bottom sill of each window. At first Obi was interested in what i was doing. Then he realized my intentions and was horrified.

He raced me from one window to the next. “I’m watching this channel!” But I turned it off. To the next window. “This is my favorite program!” Off.

All the programming isn’t off. I didn’t have the heart to turn the OutTV all the way off by the kitty condo. I pulled the drapes nearly closed and dropped the blinds down except for about four inches at the bottom. On, but turned way down. Also, the blinds are broken in the front window so I couldn’t turn OutTV off.

Though without dogs walking, runners running, squirrels scampering or birds hopping…there’s nothing good on OutTV anyway.

We value your patronage…

…but I have a cold and I had to be on the road at 6:30 this morning to get to a conference in Denver at 8:30.  I am tired. Please enjoy these videos from Simon’s Cat.

Our First Month: A Report from Oliver

Note: This report has been dictated to The Girl by Chief Executive Kitten, Oliver. She will not be adding in her two cents.

"The trials and tribulations of the cat, they are many."

This past month has been a hard transition for the Thunder staff. With The Girl staying home, our roles in the household have been more challenging than ever. First, my primary duty is to ensure maximum quality couch time for the people. You’d think this would be easier with The Girl doubling the amount of time she spends in the house. However, she is stubbornly refusing to go to the couch for long stretches of time.

I though we were making progress. For several days The Girl spent maximum time on the couch. My quality assurance, in fact, had her convinced to spend the night on the couch as well. Even though she insisted on coughing and sneezing – which I think is kind of disturbing – we were working steadily toward our couch time quota. Then, inexplicably, The Girl went back to insisting on long stretches of sitting in front of the box of light. She is there from breakfast time to lunch time and again from lunch time to dinner time.

I’ve adjusted my work schedule to allow for Girl supervision from the condo and snuggling in front of the box of light. Obi has also taken on additional Girl supervision duties. Plus, he has to come up with extra cute things to do because she is here so much. Luckily, The Girl doesn’t seem to get tired of the old standards: belly rubbing, playing with shadows, becoming a bed monster, etc.

In addition to our household duties, Obi and I have put some thought into The Girl’s business. We’ve tried to convey our ideas to The Girl but she seems to want to do this on her own. This afternoon while I was listing business leads she pretended not to understand me. “What?” she said. “What do you want? Does your tummy hurt?” Please. Just take the advice, or not, and move on.

All in all, it has been a successful month. I fully expect to receive our bonus, at least a can of tuna, any day now.

Reporting from in front of the box of light,
Oliver Pi
CEK

Battle of the Super Cruds

That’s right, cruds. I’ve been fighting off a cold for a week and last night my body gave up the fight. So I blog from the couch with two kittens administering purr therapy.

In kitten crud news, it turns out that it isn’t okay for Oliver to have the sniffles while on antibiotics. We have upgraded him to bigger, badder antibiotics and a month of steroids.

We are a pathetic pair.

The upside? Quality time on the evil couch all day long. Well, until I had the audacity to sneeze at 2:45 this afternoon. At that point I lost both kittens to the upstairs for their afternoon nap.

***

It’s Thunder Thursday! Since I am blogging from the couch with a grey kitten on my arm and a brown kitten on my feet, I bring you Chip. Chip is the baby neon tree dragon that I did NOT buy last week.

Have a great weekend!

Purr Therapy and Dereliction of Duty

In case you got to work on Monday and said, “hey, where was my Kitten Thunder fix this weekend?” I can honestly tell you I was sick. So sick. My nephew, with assorted family, was in town for a hockey tournament and every moment not spent with them was spent on the couch gathering energy to watch the next game. Uck. I didn’t even step into the same room as my computer for five days. So no blog. But! Plenty of blog fodder.

So the coughing began on Thursday night. It came on so fast and furious I thought I was having an allergic reaction to something I ate. When the initial fit was over, Oliver and I settled on the couch for a bit of Purr Therapy. Oliver is most excellent at deciding where a person hurts and pressing his rumbly little purring body against it. It’s good for the soul, if not the body.

Friday the cough progressed from scratchy throat up to full blown cough. I offered to sleep on the couch. Before you feel bad about me sleeping on said couch you must know two things: 1) I always slept on the couch when I was sick as a kid. Looking back, I don’t know why. But setting up Camp Blanket on the couch is a natural and comforting thing for me to do. And 2) we refer to this particular piece of furniture as “the evil couch” because it is sooooooo comfortable. Even if you aren’t remotely tired, this couch will suck the will to move – and your consciousness – right out of you.

We mused, before bedtime, about what Kitten Thunder would do. Of course, Oliver would stay with me on the couch because he’d want to do Purr Therapy. And he always, obnoxiously, sleeps in my arms with his head on my pillow. Obi, we figured, would continue to try to sleep through the night at the foot of the bed.

Folks, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Evidently, The Girl is too annoying to sleep with when she has a persistent cough. I was totally abandoned. Oliver slept upstairs. The Boy slept upstairs (okay, don’t really blame him for that). Obi slept upstairs. The Girl? Downstairs. With only the dragon to keep her company; and don’t think for a minute that Zensai wouldn’t have abandoned me as well if he could get out of his tank.

No Purr Therapy. Does it not work on coughs? I suspect it has more to do with the inability to get a proper 18 hours of sleep on a coughing Girl. Or perhaps I was too gross for my fastidious grey kitten.

PLUS, in my absence, Obi decided he now sleeps at the top of the bed. Sideways. Pushing The Boy into the middle. You’re thinking that, perhaps, Obi should not get final say on where he sleeps. But he weighs 10 pounds when he awake and 800 pounds when he is asleep. And he’s VERY tolerant. No amount of foolishness will annoy him into moving.

I’ll let you decide how much you want to think about how inconvenient this was once my cough subsided. Oliver, I can tell you, is annoyed. We’re contemplating moving The Boy to the foot of the bed.

Anywho, on Monday my cough was all but gone, but all the hurricane force winds pushing out of my head made my neck sore and my skull throb. The Boy doesn’t think a person can get a concussion by coughing. After yesterday I’m not so sure. For one thing, my eyelids weren’t thick enough to block out the blinding lightness of the dim room I was laying in. I stood only up long enough to get a new round of beverage and, if at last three hours and fifty-nine minutes had passed, more pain pills.

On the bright side. I got some serious Purr Therapy.

Feel free to find my pain amusing…I will, some day when the trauma is dulled by time and more Comtrex. In the meantime, a picture of an early Thunder. This is in the old house when the condo was in a corner window and Obi was trying to fight/play his way in from the headboard a foot or so away. This is before they learned to share the condo.

"Welcome to the condo cafe. Can I offer you a knuckle sandwich?"