Friday, June 24, 2011

Cat Creativity

We may not have human children, but we certainly have cat children and at times it seems like we have real children.  We get woken up in the middle of the night at times, mostly the wifey since she feeds them, we have to clean up after them, which quite often involves puke, poop and the necessary steaming of carpets as a result and with 4 of them, there's usually always something going on.  We sometimes have to get creative when it comes to trying to solve issues we run into.

Sage is our skittish kitty of the bunch.  Around us he's generally calm and happy, although he does not like loud noises, especially when you are watching sports on TV and yell YESSSSSSS when someone scores a goal/touchdown, etc.  It's kinda funny, when you do that he'll chirp at you for about 30 seconds to tell you to cut it out.  He does the same thing when you put away the silverware from the dishwasher into the drawer.  When you leave for work in the morning, if you say bye to him he will also chirp to say goodbye, it's super cute.  But he also has an intermittent issue where he will be spooked by something or someone and will leave poop nuggets around the house.  It's very hard to pinpoint at times why it happens, but sometimes it's obvious. 

If we come back from vacation and it happens, that is obvious.  Mainly I think he doesn't like all of the smells of other pets that the pet sitter brings in and isn't too excited there's a stranger in the house, so that's understandable.  There is another potential cause we're aware of and that's if he gets anything stuck on his fur, he freaks out....If he starts to go and something sticks to his fur, he flies out of the litter box and zooms around the house apparently trying to shake it loose and he keeps going.  I know it's gross, but probably not any more so than the stories I'm sure all of you out there could tell from your pets or children.  And the good thing is the nuggets are hard as a rock, so no messy cleanup other than a quick shot with the carpet cleaner.  Heh...anyheu...

But at times he'll relapse for a day out of no where like he did the other day.  Generally it's in the middle of the night and the only thing we can think of is that he sees other cats or bigger animals outside.  We would occasionally feed this one stray cat and her kittens if we saw them wandering around our house, but we didn't initially make the connection between that and his behavior.  We usually wouldn't notice when other animals were around outside, but he sure did as he'd run back and forth from the sliding glass door to other windows at night trying to see where they were going.  Once he started to do that we realized he was a bit spooked out.  Usually if he leaves us presents, it's in the middle of the night and we can hear him zooming around the house.  He usually sleeps against the sliding glass door, so we're thinking that he's seeing animals. 

We do get deer in our back yard that come and go from the golf course open areas and for sure there are cats around occasionally, armadillos, etc.  Since the sliding door is the only place for him to look out at night, since we have plantation shutters closed on the rest of the windows, the wifey came up with an idea for blocking the lower portion of the glass with Wallpaper for Windows.  If you've never seen or heard of it, check out their site, it's really a cool/inexpensive product that we've used many times.

We use it on the small glass area next to our front door and also the big open glass area above our front door.  This is a picture from their website, but it's real close to what ours looks like, except we just have glass on one side of the door. It provides a level of privacy and adds to the look as well.  It works great, you just spray water on glass, put the plastic type paper on the window and squeegie out the water with a credit card like thing.  It can come right off anytime you want to remove it, but otherwise it stays tight.  Below is a picture showing what it looks like on.  You cannot see through it, but it does not completely block out the light, so it should work great.  And it is just tall enough to block his view at night, without sacrificing our view during the day. 



I hadn't thought of that idea for the sliding door, but it was a great idea.  We just put it on tonight and hopefully that solves that problem for good, or at least until we go away somewhere again.  I think this just might do the trick!  Hopefully this might help out someone else that has a creative problem that needs a creative solution!

Do you have any pet or child behaviors that you've solved creatively or are looking for creative solutions for?  Let me know!

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