What an interesting smell

I have a crazy cat, and she lives in my office.

She didn't used to be crazy. In fact, she was once the most lovable ball of fluff in the world. Well, actually cute and crazy are not at all mutually exclusive as evidenced by Tom Cruise. But I digress.

I think the change happened when she was still a kitten. All 20,000 of my pubescent nieces and nephews came over to our new apartment to check out the digs and see the new cat. As soon as she smelled the hormones, she ran under the end table. In many ways, she's never come back out.

Imagine a plush rattlesnake. That's Stanzi.

Her full name is Constanza Quake, and that may have been part of the problem. She was named after a particularly violent quake that occurred in Napa in 2000, right after we got her. Why Constanza? Because I'm a super dork. Might answer that one day. Next question...

I have a picture to prove that she was at least reasonable for a short time:



She must have been drunk on eggnog.

The real troubles began when another one of our cats, Sonja, joined the fray. She was a little bat-eared kitten, with a face only a mother could love. That mother is my wife, so we had to keep her.

In the picture above, you get the impression that they got along. But this otherwise sweet, cuddly cat, has it in for Stanzi. I can imagine how Stanzi sees her.



Scary.

Well, they hate eachother. Halloween cat, growling, hissing hate.

I finally had to install a pet door so that they could get away from eachother. Or at least fight outside. As referenced in the last link, this lead to a Lazarus-type experience.

I mean, I buried the damn girl, and she still came back. It was like Pet Cemetery. And yes, she came back even crazier than before.

So now she appears every 2-3 weeks, and looks angry. She wants in, but she doesn't want to be lead in. She claws your face off, then purrs and rubs your leg. Maybe she's bi-polar.

Why she doesn't just come in through the pet door I'll never understand. Oh yeah. It's because Sonja patrols the house perimeter like a fucking Nazi guard. "Ver are your papers, Fraulein?"

So now she lives in my office. Away from the other crazy cats. We've moved in a litter box and a food dish. She hangs out, reads the periodicals, bats the random piece of paper around. I've tried to let her out again. Now she's afraid to leave, because the rest of the house smells like other cats.

I have a crazy cat, and she lives in my office. Sometimes I think that the crazy is catching.

And what is that smell?