Average Jane Needs A Squirt Gun

We still haven’t named the kitten. My sister suggested another name the other day and I told her she should think of something that means "keeps pooping in your shower."

She wrote back that in Swedish, it’s "Skiten Dusch," in Portuguese it’s "Merda do chuveiro" and the German is "DuschescheiBe." Ha ha.

The kitten runs around doing all sorts of things I’d rather not have done in my house, including molesting the wood blinds, threatening to bat my glass candle holder off the table, and stepping on the buttons of the answering machine so that a robot voice randomly declares, "You have no new messages."

Yesterday my husband and I agreed that it’s time we purchased a squirt gun. Because the little cat doesn’t have a name and doesn’t respond to anything we yell at her, it would be extremely handy to be able to squirt her when she’s chewing the cables leading to our A/V gear, lurking in the back of the fireplace or doing any of the other hundred-and-one things we would like to make her stop doing.

In the past, we’ve discovered that a little bit of squirt gun goes a long way. By the time a cheap squirt gun begins leaking and needs to be thrown away, the cat will have learned to react to any similar sound. Then you can make a squirting sound between your teeth and get the cat to stop its bad acts…at least until it figures out that it isn’t getting wet anymore.

The kitten really is sweet and adorable – it’s just that neither I nor my husband has had a kitten around in nearly two decades. Sometimes their abundant energy is just tiring. Imagine if we had a child!

Sadly, our male cat, Kato, is rapidly declining in health. Ever since his pal, Friday, died he’s been very subdued. This week, neither of us has seen him eat anything for at least a couple of days. He appears extremely frail and he barely responds when spoken to or petted. I sincerely hope that we haven’t hastened his decline by bringing in the kitten, but I think it was inevitable either way.

So that’s the emotional tug-of-war going on at our house right now. On one hand we have the joy of the lively kitten and on the other, the sad last days of our oldest cat.  Cue Elton John singing "The Circle of Life." Sigh.