Paperwork and Catnip

May 28, 2013 by kolandasimone 2 Comments

I still have that migraine, they last, on average, about 3 days so I can expect another day or 2 out of it yet, joyous abandon.

My cat is being very attentive, by that I mean he is meowing for attention, tearing up my paperwork faster than I can file it. Walking about on my desk and randomly biting me, batting my pens off the desk, knocking over my water bottle perilously close to my keyboard, stretching using my leg as an anchoring point for his claws. In general he is being a nuisance.
I’d like to think it is because he senses my pain and wants to help, really I know he is just bored. He used to be an outside cat but I have had to confine him inside (he has an outside run but it isn’t the same as being free and roaming the neighbourhood). He was injured not so long ago, in a cat fight, and had to have extensive surgery to save his life. That and the fact that the laws are changing here to confine cats to their owner’s properties have prompted my decision to keep him at home. I feel it is the responsible thing to do. He feels that I am torturing him unnecessarily.

I have planted him a garden of catnip, catmint, lemon grass and cat grass and bought him a fountain. He ignores it studiously.

I have just been outside with him and picked him a bunch of catnip (he will eat it only if I pick it for him) in hopes that it will distract him from my desk long enough to finish the bookwork I need to do this morning.

I have never laughed as much as when I first gave him fresh catnip. He had never evidenced any interest in the dried or spray on variety but the fresh stuff set him off in a big way. My normally elegant (yet destructive) cat started to pant and drool and wriggle around on the ground in his own dribble, by the time he had totally crushed, chewed and mangled the small leaf of catnip he was wet and bedraggled and totally in ecstasy. Then he went nuts. Screamed around the house at mac 9 bouncing off furniture and people like the ball in a pinball table. His eyes were huge and his brain was obviously completely shut down. Then he went to sleep. Just like that. Lights out.

Since then the effect of catnip is somewhat diminished, he actually just eats it, climbs his cat tower, I give him a snack and then he goes to sleep up there.

Today he saw a bird outside after his catnip which made him cry a little so I coaxed him up onto his tower with his snack and he is laying there now, relaxed but staring at me. Sending me guilt messages, making me feel bad about locking him away from all that should rightly be his.

It’s for his own good.
I will not feel bad.
I will not be guilted by my cat.
I have paperwork to do.

Sigh…