The other morning I was awakened by a bit of a scuffle in my room. Gallagher, the smart one, had shut my bedroom door trapping Mommie & Littlehead in my room with her. Gallagher is the only cat who can figure out how to open and shut a door… the other two are useless.

I think Mommie and Littlehead would be trapped in a room indefinitely even if the door were ajar. I saw The Captain figure it out once, but Mommie never has… at least old Sherlock will paw at the door, even it if is ineffectually. Mommie jumps up beside the door and paces back and forth as if there’s something behind it that she may find. It also makes her wicked nervous… Gallagher was in heaven.

Eventually Gallagher got bored with watching her panic and opened the door, but she let it go on for a good 10 minutes and jumped down from her perch on the cable box to swat to her when she was her most vulnerable before the party was over.

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Three out of four pets spit-up yesterday! Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket. It started off with Ernie, I heard him clicking around at night. This is rare, he usually sleeps all night and will stay in bed with The Lady until she gets up. After a few minutes of clicking I heard the gagging, poor thing.

Within less than a half an hour The Captain flopped right next to my head and he had extremely loud gurgly stomach. Soon enough he was heaving and I had to hold him over the side of my bed like a drunken sailor out a cab window.

Fast forward to the morning. As I’m getting ready to shower Gallagher starts heaving while she’s sitting on the counter waiting for breakfast (very charming). The morning wouldn’t be complete without one more pre-breakfast round from The Captain. Everything seems to be back under control.

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The Beholder, hard at work

Mommie is the master of what we call beholding. For example, she’ll get really close to Gallagher when she’s eating and watch her, or if Gallagher is playing or even just minding her business, Mommie will watch her the way a bully watches its next victim in the school yard. This is one of the reasons we call Mommie The Executive, she knows how to psych-out her competition.

Another one of Mommie’s favorite techniques, is to pick a spot that Gallagher has claimed and make it her own. In the loft Gallagher used to have club house in the top of a closet in The Lady’s office and the beauty of it was that she was the only cat who get up there. There aren’t too many places like that for Gallagher in the current apartment so she’s always looking to find a new spot.

Last winter I had a vest that I laid down in my work area (mistake) and it took Gallagher all of 5 minutes to turn it into “The Cat Nest”. I never wore the vest again, but was happy to see Gallagher have a spot of her own. We knew what was coming, the first thing The Lady said when she noticed Gallagher was “How long do you think it’s gonna take?”.

Without fail, a week or so later I noticed that The Cat Nest was in use. Looking down I expected to see Gallagher, but it was an innocent looking Mommie. Like any good bad girl, she quickly flashed me the flirty eyes… she knew what she did. She never does it right away, she always lets Gallagher get comfortable and then she sneaks right in there.

We recently bought a soft carrying case for Ernie (that hasn’t quite worked out yet) and since we couldn’t decide where to store it, it’s been sitting open near Ernie’s “bed” (pile of towels) in hopes that he might go in and make it a den. No such luck with Ernie, however Gallagher moved right in. Gallagher has been in there for about 2 weeks and in keeping with her regular timing, Mommie made her move this morning and is now sitting comfortably in the fleece lined case, looking completely innocent and batting the lovey eyes.

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Back when we lived in the loft, Gallagher always used to rush the door and run about half way up the stairs and then turn around and look back at us. She’s always been a drama queen, wanting to be chased, needing her alone time and hiding places… the usual. This ritual usually meant I would follow her, she would go up one more flight and then she would “let me catch her”. This happened almost nightly (and was actually occasionally fun if I was stoned).

One night she had apparently gotten out in to hallway unnoticed. It was kind of late, maybe around midnight, and the phone rings. Phone ringing in general makes The Lady nervous, but late night phone ringing is outer limits.

We’re screeners so I let the machine get it. It’s our nice upstairs neighbor muttering something about one of our cats getting out. Always good in a crisis, The Lady reacts: “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god… which one, which one, which one?”. I pick up the phone and find out she’s just in the hallway. The Lady then trims her mantra to just “Which one?” so I ask the nice neighbor (like he knows the names of our, at the time, 8 cats). “Uuuuhhhhh, the pretty one?”

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