Owwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!

A guest post by Hallie

Tonight Negrin and Waite came home from wherever they were and as soon as I saw them coming to the front door I ran to the part of the entrance where I normally sit so I could get a good vantage point and then BOOM! I bolted for the opening because I really like it outside and I never get to go and they always say I can't go outside but then Negrin didn't see me for some reason and he STEPPED ON MY FACE and I SCREAMED so loud that it scared Negrin and Waite and even me and I ran up the stairs it hurt so bad and then Negrin and Waite were laughing at me and I felt even more scared and then I decided to curl up and take a nap.

I Don't Like This Show Let's Watch Something Else

This damn cat Hallie, no matter how many blockades we put up in our house, she'll find a way to crawl behind the television and knock over the mini baseball helmets and bobbleheads or whatever that I've put up there. Sometimes Hallie will watch TV with us, but by that I mean she'll make sarcastic comments while we're watching the hit NBC sitcom "Whitney."

"This show is hilarious," Hallie purred Thursday evening, dryly.

No one cares what you think about "Whitney," Hallie. I can't believe we even were watching that show anyway. Twenty-one minutes of darkness and silence like that one episode of "Rocko's Modern Life" would be funnier than "Whitney." Eating a bagel is funnier than "Whitney." Getting scratched by Hallie is actually funnier than "Whitney."

Actually the boyfriend in "Whitney" reminds me of my old roommate Andreas, a guy who would cheat at every board game and whom we pranked so hard our senior year in college by making him write a four-page paper about the European Enlightenment that we sort of invented by pretending to be his professor through a fake Gmail address.

That was way funnier than "Whitney."

An Untenable Antenna Antagonist

This damn cat Hallie, she doesn't really understand what television is, so it would be stupid to think she understands what an antenna is. Actually probably most people these days don't know what an antenna is what with all the wireless technologies. But old people do.

Anyway, we're pretty frugal over at Catlin Lane and decided to stop paying our cable bill (well, I decided to stop paying the cable bill) (and other bills) and we bought a weird antenna that has the wingspan of a small pterodactyl and hooked it up to the tele so we can get some channels. We get NBC, CBS, ABC and Al Jazeera English.

By get some channels I mean that we can watch them when the damn cat Hallie isn't prancing around interfering with the signal. Which she does. A lot.

Stop it, cat. I want to watch my Al Jazeera.

I Should Have Used This Picture for the Cat-in-the-Box Post

This damn cat Hallie. Those Mini Wheats are not for you!

I Will Not Play With You in a Box; I Will Not Play With You With a Fox

Ahh! This damn cat Hallie, she has so many diseases that there aren't enough names in the Oxford English dictionary to describe her. Whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is, she has it. If you ever come over to our house, do not bring an empty box.

Here's why: Hallie will get into that box. It doesn't matter what kind of box. It doesn't matter the size of said box. The box is no longer yours. It belongs to the cat. If you stand it up so that the open end is two feet off the ground, Hallie will tip it over with her stupid face and then scurry inside like a raccoon by a dumpster behind Chili's on one-dollar sliders night. Do they have sliders at Chili's? I've never been.

Also, bags. Hallie loves bags. She loves climbing in them and ruining them so much that the joke "the cat's out of the bag" isn't funny anymore. Because it's not true. The cat isn't out of the bag.

It's in the bag!!

No, Don't Get Up, You're Fine

This damn cat Hallie, sometimes she'll go hours without moving. And not while sleeping -- fully awake, just sitting in the same damn spot on the floor, or the table (?), or the couch. Here's what she does while sitting in the same spot: stare at something for a while, turn her head and stare at something else for a while, turn her head back to the first thing and stare at that for a while, lick herself, stare at the second thing. And repeat.

The only things that will get Hallie up are the sound of food pouring into a bowl and a toy fish dangling in front of her face. She's so lazy that instead of jumping up to play with the toy as she sometimes does, she'll just lift her paw two inches toward it as if she's pretending to be entertained, mocking the world as it turns all around her.

I like to play a different game with Hallie. I call it "Stationary Objects." I'll pick a stationary object in the room -- like the leg lamp that's part of our Christmas decorations -- and see if it will move before Hallie does. Usually the game never ends.

Merry Christmas, You Filthy Animal

This damn cat Hallie, sometimes I wonder whether she knows she's a cat. Cats are supposed to stay inside, where they can bother their owners. But Hallie, she's always trying to run outside. Probably because she knows we'll have to chase after her, and anything that could be annoying to us is catnip for her.

Countless times upon returning home, I've opened our front door to find Hallie waiting right by the entrance so she can scurry on out. What are you going to do outside, Hallie? Where are you going to find food? Where are you going to find water? Where are you going to find other people to scratch? Well that probably wouldn't be too hard. But not all of them will be as tolerant as we are.

One time Haldini snuck out like a ninja and we didn't know she was outside for four hours, in the rain! Then when Nick found her she came in all dirty and wet. Four hours! What a dumb cat.

I Just Want to Eat My Dinner Alone

This damn cat Hallie thinks she owns the place, but she doesn't even pay rent, much less chip in for groceries. She's even a fugitive in our community, because technically she was supposed to pay a $400 fee for living in our house, but she skirted it. Cheap cat.

So it's no surprise that the cat tries to mooch off of us whenever she can. Mostly when I'm eating dinner. Oh, Hallie thinks she gets to eat my spaghetti. Oh, Hallie thinks she gets to nip at my chips. Oh, Hallie thinks she can lick my cheddar cheese cubes and rub her nasty nose all over my glass of store-brand cola. Did you pay the 79 cents for that store-brand cola, Hallie? No. You didn't.

Hallie knows no bounds physically, so no matter where I put my food, she can get to it. She jumps on the coffee table from the floor. Then she uses my leg as a stepping stone to the corner table, where I've moved my food from the coffee table. Then she flies down to the floor and runs around again and starts the whole process over, making my dinner part meal and part calisthenics for both of us.

Next time, I'm having Hallie for dinner.

Oh You Get to Eat Whatever You Want I Guess

This damn cat Hallie isn't trained at all, even by the standards you would expect of a homeless, feral kitten sputtering helplessly in a garbage can. Like most pets, Hallie is given one thing to eat: pet food. But unlike most pets, Hallie has decided to take matters into her own paws when it comes to meal times.

Hallie's master Nick, who is unwilling or unable (or both) to teach her the proper ways becoming of a feline, left the home for two days over Thanksgiving. That means that I had to feed Hallie, because she needs food every day. So I did. I gave her a heaping bowl full of pellets or whatever the first day Nick was gone -- more than enough food to feed her, let alone a normal, trained cat. Hallie apparently wasn't happy with that and, once I left, figured out where her heavily medicated treats were -- in the cabinet below the sink -- and went for it.

I don't think Hallie has seen "The Italian Job" or "Blue Crush" (or maybe it's not "Blue Crush" but whatever that Martin Lawrence movie is where he hides the diamond in the police station -- "Blue Streak" maybe), or any other movies about heists. But she could have fooled me! I came home the next day to find the cabinet door being propped open by the bag of treats, which by the way had a goddamn rip through the middle of it that strongly resembled the mark of an untrained claw, and oh yeah there were catnip treats everywhere all over the floor. Did I mention that Hallie had vomited, again, all over the floor downstairs? Probably because of the treats, you damn cat!