Thursday Thirteen #14

Thirteen Things My Cats Gremlin and Merlin Do To Amuse or Annoy Me: 1. Gremlin jumps on my back whenever I bend over for any reason and then climbs up it to perch on my shoulder as I stand back up. This was amusing when she was a kitten. Now? Not so much. 2. Merlin chases balls vigorously enough to bonk into objects in his way. 3. Gremlin sits on my right knee as I type on the laptop positioned on a shoe box between my legs on the bed. This tends to put my leg to sleep, strain my knee and hip and leave numerous punctures where she grips to ride out any shifting of position. This completely negates the use of the shoe box to keep the weight of the laptop off my legs and leave them free to move. 4. Merlin shoots rubber bands by holding one end with a claw and the other with his teeth. When he miss-coordinates the release and gets smacked in the nose, he hisses. When they shoot across the floor he stalks them like a bizarre insect. 5. Gremlin hooks a claw on the rim of the food or water dishes to pull them closer when her leash is snagged. Often she tips them over. 6. Merlin is sometimes the one who 'snags' her leash by sitting on it. He will also tug on it to rile her up. 7. Gremlin is very vocal which is amusing when I am in the mood to converse with her but annoying when I'm trying to read, write or sleep. 8. Merlin does a fair imitation of a feline Houdini when he strips out of his harness in under twenty seconds by pulling the leash taut around the door jamb, tucking his chin against his chest, clawing at the section of harness at his throat until he loosens it, squirming one elbow out of the section that fastens under his belly then sliding out backwards as the whole thing turns wrong-side-out. 9 Gremlin, back in the days when we were in our own home and she could roam it freely, would climb into any open cupboard or drawer. I once found her asleep in a salad bowl on the second shelf up in the cabinet above the counter. Not so amusing once it sunk in that every dish on every shelf of that cabinet now needed to be re-washed. (hence the necessity of the leash here in my in-laws home) 10. Merlin knocks his balls under the door into the hallway and waits with his nose at the crack in expectation that someone will knock it back because occasionally someone will. He especially loves it when that someone keeps the back-and-forth going and will show his appreciation by reaching under to grab their foot. 11. Gremlin, at our homes in Longview and Sunnyvale, would climb up a door to perch on its top and then push against the closest wall to make the door move back and forth. Anyone walking through the door was fair game. 12. Merlin, disappeared from a closed up room during his 7 day quarantine after we brought him home from the pound in Sunnyvale. It was several hours before I discovered his exit had been the trailer house's heating vent in the floor under the bed. The metal grate had been laid atop the carpet and not screwed down. We feared he got stuck somewhere under the floor but he showed up on the front porch the next morning. 13. Gremlin clawed holes in every window screen at both the Longview and Sunnyvale houses. She would enlarge the holes until she could squeeze through them. One window was over the tub in the Sunnyvale trailer house. We could not figure out how she managed as it seemed impossible to either climb the slick tile wall or leap the eight feet up. Until the day I witnessed it that is. She jumped from floor to toilet tank to towel rack to shower curtain rod to window ledge in a quick series of moves without pauses. Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. Raggedy 2. Sweet Kitty 3. Tink 4. Write From Karen 5. Caylynn 6. Chickadee 7. Janie Hickok Siess, Esq. 8. Jamie 9. my 2 cents 10. scribbit 11. Jennifer 12. Nichole (leave your link in comments, I'll add you here!)

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