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.