This is my cat, Pizza Maria. I just interrupted her 34th nap of the day to take this picture. She was especially pleased with the blinding flash…as you can see.
This is a piece of my cat’s tail. Notice how it’s no longer attached to my cat. This is the fault of both me and my youngest child. Wait! Don’t call PETA or the SPCA yet. Let me explain.
When we first moved into this house, the cat was extremely freaked out by her new surroundings. She spent the first night cowering in the space created by leaning a table against the bar in the basement. The next day, when we moved the table up to the kitchen, she sought solace underneath the built-in benches in the rec room. These benches are totally retro seventies. They’re made of brick, they’re hollow and they have removable wooden seats covered with cushioning and finished off with the finest pleather money could buy in the age of disco. On that second day in our new house, while trying to coax our frightened kitty out of her hiding place (to use the litter box already….because oh my god cat, how long can you hold it?!), Adam lifted one of the heavy wooden, pleather lids and it fell in on itself landing right on the end of Pizza’s tail. A number of events happened from this point:
So, flash to three and a half months later and the tail was healed as well as it was going to. It was definately broken and crooked at the end, but according to Google there was nothing a vet could do short of amputation, so we didn’t take her in to get checked (we are bigtime believers in saving money via the internet. I performed Richard’s appendectomy thanks to a wiki, we save on cable by just watching YouTube and our cheque from Bill Gates should be here any day now, as we forwarded the 236 emails just as they instructed). She wasn’t fussy about it unless you purposely touched the end of her tail to check it, but sometimes she would rub against one of us and flick her tail at the same time, then yowl and give us a dirty look like it was our fault.
Friday night, I have the food ready, the house is clean and I’m looking out the window waiting for our guests to arrive. I take a step forward and my foot goes under the coffee table where, unbeknownst to me, the cat is sleeping. My foot lands squarely on the end of her tail, she YOWLS at the top of her feline lungs, scratches the motherfark out of my foot and bolts for the bedroom, stopping only once to look back and shoot me a dirty look and some parting words. That’s when I looked down and found that a piece – a rather large, 2 inch piece – of my cat was still in the living room. There’s a piece of bone in there! It’s rather brittle, proving that the end of her tail has been dead for quiet a while. It’s kind of cool though and looks sort of like a rabbits foot (would it be wrong to hang it on a keychain and use it as a goodluck charm when I play Texas Holdem? Wait, we’re still not calling the SPCA right?)
I wanted to take a picture of it next to a ruler to show how big of a piece it really is, but all I could find was a protractor.
Portrait of a tail at 180 degrees
Then I just started taking pictures of it with random stuff:
Like my stapler…
and our bananas and Jack Daniels…
Then I actually found a ruler. See? Two and half inches! My cat is two and a half inches shorter now.
We call her Stumpy McStumperson.
Posted by landismom on May 20, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Oh, poor cat! It’s a good thing she has the ability to take 34 naps a day to work through her anger at you.
Posted by Teena in Toronto on May 20, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Your poor kitty!
Posted by Jenn @ breedemandweep on May 21, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I admit it. I laughed like the scared kid at her grandma’s funeral. Oh. My. Goodness. The pic of “Tail and Jack Daniels,” well, that did me in.
Posted by Jessica on May 23, 2008 at 8:53 am
Poor cat. But I must say that was an interesting blog to read.
Posted by crunchy carpets on May 23, 2008 at 11:41 am
As a cat owner I will freely admit to laughing and ewwing at the tail stump.
The more humane bleeding heart in me is in agony over the the poooooooor kitty…
but it is drowned out by the snorfling.
Sigh…
Posted by Melinda on May 23, 2008 at 12:18 pm
OMG, funniest post ever! Although I am laughing, I still feel for that little kitty. Poor little guy…
BTW, did you ever read “A Penguin’s Tale”? One of my all-time favorites and relates pretty good with this.
Posted by eva on May 29, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Love it! Who even has a protractor just lying around? Hilarious post!