Author: Joe

New Toy

Talore has been given a few new toys, but the one that gets the most attention is a plastic mouse with about inch-long fur everywhere except the nose. It rattles, and it’s attached to the end of about four feet of elastic cord.

If you notice, Talore has chewed through the cord twice so far trying to keep it from being pulled out of her grasp. She’s also severely dented the plastic body, but she hasn’t managed to chew the head off (or leave a mark on the head besides holes in the ears) despite working on that a good bit.

I’m pretty sure the elastic is what makes it so entertaining. When I walk around my apartment with the other end of the elastic in my pocket Talore catches it and lets go, causing it to fly at me, then she’ll try to catch it again nearly while it’s still in the air. She also responds very well to me sitting still bouncing it back and forth. I’ll try to get a video this weekend when I can get natural lighting to film by.

I’ve also been very surprised at how well Talore is able to grasp it with a single paw. I haven’t trimmed her claws recently and they’re probably the sharpest I’ve let them get since I got her. With that advantage she can snag the toy with one paw, and once she’s caught it and adjusted she can hold it (not pin it to the ground) with one paw while I stretch the elastic a good bit. She did get stuck where she couldn’t let go of it while I was pulling on it once, but generally it looks like she’s trying to hold it.

I haven’t managed to find somewhere that I can hang it where Talore will attack it on her own yet. She’s rolled around on the floor a bit with it when I wasn’t pulling the string, but if it’s hanging she doesn’t even notice it. The closest I’ve come is when I shut the bathroom door with the cord going under the door, then pulled the cord tight. Talore spent a while pulling at it, but eventually she pushed it under the door out of reach. Watching her flail around under the door with claws out was entertaining, but after a few tries at that she left.

Weekend Excitement

This post is a bit late, but I’ve been working late all this week to take time off on Friday and just never got around to finishing it.

The plan last Sunday was to go to laser tag with several people from work at a family fun center. We all got there and almost everyone had bought a two hour pass, then we noticed the sign saying that the laser tag was reserved for private parties for most of the next hour and a few more times after that. The two hour cards wouldn’t activate till the first use, but that left us with a good bit of time to burn. After a round of DDR we wandered through the entire place for those of us who hadn’t been there before.

Besides an extensive arcade and laser tag they had bowling (which wasn’t covered in the 2 hour pass), go carts (electric since everything was indoors), mini golf, a room full of battletech pods, and a new section that had moved in since anyone in our group had been there before. That new section was a large room set up for Xtreme Challenge.

Xtreme Challenge is basically a large set of physics based games and challenges designed to be done in a group. They normally only take group reservations, but we had a large enough group and the guy running it wasn’t busy so he invited us to sign a waiver and go demo the stuff. It was great advertising for them since we had a blast and all the people who walked by and saw it got to see something happening instead of just a room full of interesting stuff.

I generally make no effort to keep in shape since I don’t really do anything that requires it. Considering our group was made up of programmers I’m probably not the only one, but several of the people we had are fairly active. Either way, we were all pretty tired out by the end of 45 minutes to an hour.

Regardless of how tired we were, Calvin hurt his ankle on the second to last thing we did, which was jousting (as labeled by the tv show Gladiators). Basically both people stand on a platform with sticks that are padded on the end and try to knock the other person off their stand. I knocked Calvin off first, then we went for a while and he knocked me off. Apparently while I was falling off Calvin jumped off, but since he wasn’t wearing his glasses he couldn’t tell how far away the ground was, and he tore something in his ankle.

We didn’t end up playing laser tag at all, but most of us still have the 2 hour cards so we may go back for that at some point. There is also talk of going back to Xtreme Challenge once Calvin is recovered if we can get a large enough group.

Cat/Roomba battle?

When I got home today the roomba had failed to make it back to it’s charging dock. When I went to look for it I found a couple things conspicuously not where I left them: a pot holder was on the floor (Talore normally doesn’t jump on the counters in my kitchen) and the laundry basket was on it’s side and mostly emptied. The roomba was stopped near the laundry basket, but didn’t have anything jamming it and had no obvious reason for it to be stopped. I’m guessing that Talore was trying to walk on the side of the laundry basket to evade the roomba, tipped the basket over, and pushed the button that stops the roomba, but I have no way of knowing if that’s actually what happened. The roomba also had collected very little in general, but there was far more cat hair on one of the sweeper brushes than I’ve seen there before and I cleaned that last night.

Over the weekend I attempted to keep Talore from sleeping all day like she seems to do while I’m at work in the hopes that it would cause her to sleep later and not wake me up. I was reading Cryptonomicon most of Saturday and every time it looked like Talore had fallen asleep on my desk I would get up and either pet her till she was awake or sit back down with her in my lap where I could pet her. She got a little sleep in her window seat, but for whatever reason she didn’t sleep there for long.

She still woke me up Sunday morning, but it was by walking across me to get back to the bookshelf that she sleeps on instead of meowing at me. I tried to continue keeping her awake Sunday afternoon, but she woke me up this morning in a mood to attack stuff. I think that was because she was hungry (her food bowl was empty), so I may start filling it at night instead of in the morning.

I’ve been planning to get a water pistol to shoot at Talore when she claws at the cushions on my furniture since just telling her “No” and glaring at her doesn’t stop her for long, but I couldn’t find one at wal mart today. Over the weekend I got a cup of water to flick at her when she starts clawing things. The first thing she did was drink a noticeable amount out of the cup, then go to sleep next to it. Apparently it’s convenient for Talore to have a cup of water on my desk since over a fourth of the cup has been emptied by her. The first time I managed to hit her with water she leaped three or four feet from the couch. The next time I tried she watched me flailing trying to fling water that far from the chair I was reading in for several seconds before I managed to hit her, but she did leave the sofa.

Talore has been playing with the feathery toy by herself (tossing it in the air and dragging it around), but she didn’t at all appreciate it when she somehow managed to tie the thread the toy is attached to around her tail. She got up to leave it and it followed her, which prompted another attack on it, but the next time she tried to run from it. She also tied her back legs together with the thread some time later and didn’t appreciate me rolling her on her back so I could untie her.

I discovered I had one of those large plastic bubbles of air that they use for packing flat things in boxes, so I thought I’d see if I could get Talore to pop it. She poked a few holes in it, but it’s probably a good thing that she didn’t actually burst it because when I did so she ran and hid under my bed for a while.