IT'S ALIVE!!!!

Behind Dark Eyes

Mommy and Daddy finished their Frankencat! Here she is:

They call her Morgan and say she’s a sister for Kaline and me. Yeah, right. Like I’m going to have a science experiment as a sister. I can prove she was made out of our fur from the brush too. Look!

This is Morgan in front of the tall screen TV. See? You can see Kaline’s Fur and my fur. I think they even saved some of Baggle’s fur to get the white parts. And they probably could have started their project sooner because they obviously had too much fur!

Mommy said I could be Morgan’s purrsonoal trainer and play with her like I do with Kaline to help her get back her “svelte kitty figure.” I say they should have used less of the fur the saved to make her. Why do I want to play with a Frankencat?

Besides, Morgan the Frankencat is stealing my Daddy! The other night, she was all curled up on the couch with him, with me sitting right there staring at her! And he was all petting her and stuff, also right in front of me. He’s being unfaithful and flaunting it!

Kaline said maybe she is a real cat. She smells like a different cat than us. Well, why does she look like she is made out of our fur? And I don’t care. I just want her to stay away from my Daddy! I’m his #1 cat.

Excuse me; I have some more growling and hissing to do to keep that Frankencat in line.

The Cats Days of Summer

Summer is nice for cats! Let me tell you why. There’s sun in the summer and it shines in all the windows and makes everything warm where it’s good to relax. Poor Mommy doesn’t fit on the cat stand or the window sill and whenever she rests on the floor she tries to get up off the floor right away so she never gets to be comfortable. She just needs to learn to relax!

Okay more great things about summer. Holidays! We got a Friday the 13th last month. The best months are the ones with a Friday the 13th! I had great time celebrating with Carla and a bag of Black Catnip!

Now this month is the biggest and best day there is! MY BIRTHDAY! I’ll be seven years old on August 12. I’m a stripey Leo, so I’m half tiger and half lion. Hear that, Carla? You really don’t want to mess with me! We really don’t fight a lot. We share pretty good. Mommy says “for cats” whatever that means.

Carla and I will be sharing birthday cake on my birthday. I get crab for my birthday cake a lot because Mommy and Daddy know that’s my favorite. Next is Carla’s birthday in September. I read that makes her a Virgo. I know what Virgo means and Carla is not a Virgo! But she can pretend to be a Virgo for her birthday. I still think Leo is the best birthday to be. I wouldn’t want to be Pisces. That’s fish. I would have ate my own tail when I was a kitten!

Carla’s birthday will be right after school starts. You’re supposed to be four when you start obedience school, but since Carla will be four just a few days after school starts she’s starting when she’s three. She’s excited and I’m excited too. You just learn so much in obedience school! Daddy and Mommy listen so much better now that I graduated. I can’t wait until we’re both obedience school graduates! It’ll be all cat treats, all the time!

What’s REALLY Going On

Sometimes I worry that Carla actually thinks the things she blogs in her sleep are real. After that picture she blogged about happened, I swatted at her and she left. Nobody messes with my sunny spot. Mommy made a scrapbook page about it. She makes good scrapbooks. Of course that’s because she has great things to scrap about. Sometimes she does pictures of Daddy and our cousins too, but that’s to make it so people look forward to more cat pages.

Here is what Mommy saw:

Okay, so there’s the truth. But I don’t hold it against Carla. She sleep-blogs if she gets a chance and sometimes Mommy leaves my computer on.

Where we’ve been is another story, not the one Carla tried to tell at all. Mommy has been doing organizing. That's moving things from one stack to another and then she makes Daddy put the stacks in different places. I think she just does it to entertain us and that’s okay. If she does stuff on the computer she doesn’t want to pet me and even tells me not to stand on the keyboard! I’m just trying to help. She makes so many typos!

Then she took a break to go see our cousins graduate from people school and she took my computer with her! Carla and I couldn’t blog when she took my computer! I think she needs to get a computer of her own. Now her excuse for not letting me blog is that she had “writer’s block.” What does that have to do with ME writing??


The picture on top is me in my bedroom. Mommy and Daddy sleep there too on the daybed, where Carla and I sleep in the afternoon. I like to spend a little time on Mommy’s hip at night before I go to my quilt with all my bears. Then I go sleep on the daybed with Carla by their feet. Tickling their feet is how we let them know it’s daytime and time for us to get the daybed after breakfast. Sometimes I let Carla sleep in my bed with my bears too but usually during the day when I have the daybed. Once in a while, when she has a bad dream, I’ll let her curl up with me and the bears.

A few nights ago she had a dream that all the world’s salmon was gone! I shivered when she told me about it! I think she’s just getting nervous about starting school in the fall. That’s where the bad dreams come from. Obedience school starts when you’re four and she won’t be four until a week after school starts. I guess being almost a kitten compared to your classmates might make you nervous. I think she’ll do fine. She’s been doing okay making Daddy open the window for us, but he doesn’t always do it. The days where she seems to do the worst with Daddy are they days when it’s really sunny and really warm; the BEST days for open windows. Maybe Obedience school will make her better at telling him.

Holiday? Hmmmm...

Every few months, we're all black cats on Friday!

This morning, I woke Mommy up way before her alarm to pet me. You know what she did? That’s right, she pet me! I don’t even know if she really woke up. I just said pet me and she did. I think I have my final project aced for school! Getting done early has given me time to ponder something else that is pretty huge!

I like holidays, I really do. But the holidays I like are the ones we share with EVERYBODY. Thanksgiving and December. There’s something for everyone in December. Opening Day, which is totally an everyone holiday. Baggle says to ask Mommy because he is sure there is baseball in the Jungle Book, just like in Dances With Wolves. It got edited, but it was there! Memorial Day and Labor Day are good because we usually get to see our Grandma, unless the weather is bad and Mommy and Daddy stay home. I like the Fourth of July, but more in the daytime than at night. There are a lot of loud noises at night. There are personal holidays that you get, but they’re better to share too. That’s the important thing about holidays. SHARING.

Carla says she gets a holiday Friday. “It’s a black cat thing,” she says. What? She is gonna have a special holiday that she doesn’t share? That’s so street cat! I decided to do some internet research.

It seems that HUMANS are the ones that made black cats all that on Friday The 13th. Not all cats scare people, just the black ones. That’s just silly! Maybe that’s why they declaw cats, afraid of them. Well, why they’d declaw the black ones anyway. It’s all so dumb. If a human can tie us down and knock us out to declaw us, how scared can they be? Boy some humans are just out there. We are kind and benevolent rulers!

So here’s what I think humans should do on Friday. Wake up on time, have a good breakfast with some milk and share it with your cat. Go out for lunch and bring some salmon home for your cat. Then when you come home, watch a baseball game with your cats and give them extra treats. (Daddy, are you reading this?) And if a black cat crosses your path, give it a scritch behind the ears and send it home to its people. Unless it doesn’t have a home, then you should consider adoption. Feeding cats and giving them good homes to rule is the best way to keep the bad luck away.

So we'll all celebrate on Friday. It’s the day when, just like the people are all Irish in March, we’re all black cats on Friday the 13th.

Have a lucky day!

Busy Summer!

Me and my birthday cake

I just celebrated my 5^th birthday on August 12! Mommy served chicken birthday cake to all three of us and she and Daddy sang to me. That’s always very cool! Carla will be two this week and she’ll get to have her birthday cake in the family bowl of honor. I bet she'll like that! The bowl of honor was Aunt Azzie’s bowl. We kept it for birthdays to remember her.

We’ve had a lot going on around here this summer. Things have been okay, cut there have been some really bad things too.

In July, a bunch of worker men took over our bathroom! Mommy and Daddy had to bring our litter boxes upstairs for a few days and a bunch of noisy men invaded our house in the basement! They made so much noise my ears were throbbing! We all stayed upstairs while they were making all that noise in the bathroom. Mommy and Daddy said it was for waterproofing. What a great idea! It’s gotten wet in the basement before and I don’t like it when my paws get wet one bit! I’m so glad we have such a great staff!

Then a bug-guy was in the house. I don’t think I like him! It’s good that he kills the spiders that scare Mommy so much. Not that we can’t do that! In fact, spiders are pretty tasty. But Mommy gets all grossed out when she sees us eat them. Steenkey treats still taste better, so it’s okay for the bug-guy to kill the spiders. But what he does that is so NOT cool is that he makes it so mice can’t get in! Baggle and I like to play with mice and we’ve been telling Carla about the mice we’ve found in our basement. Well, okay, I’ve found one mouse down there since 2006, but there’s always a chance to find more. I look for them all the time. Now, the bug-guy came and used some stuff to chase them away. Like they weren’t having a hard enough time getting in before.

Baggle and I have decided that we wanted to share Behind Orange Eyes with Carla too. Her parts will be called Behind Dark Eyes. Her eyes aren’t dark they’re yellow, like mine, but she’s dark like I am orange, so that works okay! She has put a lot of work in on studying how to type in human and she’s not too bad.

The other big noisy thing that’s been going on is the Reds! Boy they are doing good this year and that makes Mommy happy, really happy! I like it when Mommy is happy and if baseball makes her as happy as she has been, I always want the Reds to win!

I’ll let Carla tell you about the Reds!

Behind Dark Eyes

Cat Treats For Everyone!

I think you all know that we are a huge baseball family. How could we be anything else? Kaline and Me are both named after famous baseball players! Baggle wasn’t named after a baseball player, but Kaline says he’s shaped like an old-school umpire. I don’t know what that means, but Kaline says I should Google “fat umpires.”

Anyway, we love red baseball things a lot. We like blue things and orange things too, but we really love red things. The Reds, in Cincinnati and the Red Sox in Boston. Carl Yastrzemski used to play in Boston. That’s where Daddy got my name. He liked Carl Yastrzemski when he was little.

This year the Reds are doing really good! When the Reds win, Mommy yells, “Reds win! Cat treats for everyone!” and gives us all treats. Then when the Cardinals lose, she does it again! “Cardinals lose, cat treats for everyone!” and more treats! Baseball is SO cool!

GO RED BASEBALLS!

-Carla

Afghans at The Rainbow Bridge

A lot of sad things have been going on lately. Mommy and Daddy were sad. Grammy went to Heaven. I bet she’s at the Rainbow Bridge making afghans for all the animals there. She was so good at that. In the picture today, I’m sitting on the one she made Aunt Azzie. That one is Baggle’s now. She made me a pretty one when I was a kitten too. Aunt Azzie always sat next to her when she made afghans and I did sometimes too. She called my Snicklefritz and told me not to chew on the string. Then she’d pet me. Grammy never got to meet Carla, but Mommy brought home some string that she said was Grammy’s string. Maybe Mommy can make an afghan for Carla.

My Grandma that I never met, Daddy’s Mommy, went to Heaven too. Daddy said she loved cats and that’s why Daddy loves cats so much. She taught him how to be smart!! If my Grandma loved cats, I know we would have gotten along great! I wonder if she’ll make afghans at the Rainbow Bridge with Grammy? Maybe Chester and Aunt Azzie will show them around Heaven.

Well, I get along better with Carla now. She’s clumsy and pushy, but she can be fun too. She plays a lot rougher than I do, but it’s fun to rabble rouse a little. I just get tired of it and want to sit with Mommy before she calms down. Mommy said I was a hyper kitween too; Carla is only a year and a half old, three years younger than me. Maybe she’ll grow up to be a calmer cat. But for now, I still have to hiss every now and then and even growl sometimes when she gets out of line. Kids!

Sometimes Baggle kitten-sits her during the day and they sleep on the bed together so I can get an uninterrupted nap, but sometimes, she’s quiet and we can sleep together. I really don’t mind when she cuddles Mommy during the day because I know she’ll stop when Daddy gets home to cuddle him. Carla is smart enough to know that Mommy is still mine first! Carla sleeps next to Daddy at night and I sleep on Mommy, so we don’t get in each other’s way. It’s okay. Baggle comes in in the morning and we all sleep withy them until they wake up. Then Daddy gets our breakfast. I'm happy to say, we're all adjusitng well!

Happy New Year!

Christmas morning after we all opened presents
I got Iowa Party Mix treats!

Welcome to 2010! Mommy says it’s my first new decade and Carla’s too, but not for Baggle. Baggle was born when it was a 19! Can you imagine being so old?

It was a nice Christmas. Mommy and Daddy got a new Christmas playscape for me, but it’s the wrong size! What a disappointment after the one I had as a kitten shrunk! I tried to climb it once, because I still want to get that angel, but nothin’ doin’! I have to settle for the fact that I knocked the angel off the top of it when I climbed up a little. That’s all I was going to do once I got to the top anyway, knock the angel off, so I think I won the game! Daddy put the angel back up, but after you win the game, what’s the point of playing more? I just spent some nice time sitting under it in the glow of the arcade lights.

Things are getting kinda okay with Carla. They have to! On Christmas, when we all opened our stockings, there was 4 bags of treats for us! The Steenkey treats had “everyone share” written on them, then on the other bags, one said “Baggle to share” and one said “Kaline to share” and the last one said, “Carla to share!” That settles it. If Santa Paws is bringing Carla presents and bringing them here, she is first off, not bad, second, he figures she lives here and third, if I’m not nice to her when she’s nice to me, I’ll end up on the naughty list and get no treats from Santa! I’m NOT letting her cost me treats!

She’s getting better. She still plays mean. I mean she plays chase, but doesn’t respect the neutral zone! Once I beat her to the desk downstairs, she’s supposed to just accept that I’m faster and she lost. But she stays there like she’ll chase me again when I get out from under the desk. Chase is a fun game, but I don’t want to play all the time. That’s why I don’t play with her a lot or try to cuddle with her. She’s crazy and she plays rough.

I know sometimes she goes on the table when Mommy is studying and Mommy will pet her. I’m okay with that. She’s not Mommy’s kitty sunshine and Mommy only sings to me. I only get bothered if I’m with Mommy already and she tries to butt in.

We’re all doing okay though. Mommy and Daddy are doing a good job as staff for all of us. It takes more food and litter box duties from them, plus we need their thumbs for treats more, but they are doing well! I can’t help but love them even more for taking that crazy rough cat off the streets. What great felinitarians.

Now Baggle and I just have to teach her how to be a better housecat and calm down. I think I need Baggle to sit on her. I gotta go talk to my brother now.

Carla Needs to Learn Sense

Carla ^..................... .^Baggle
If you're looking at my butt, we could be twins!

Hi everyone! This is Baggle and it’s my first official post as a writer for Behind Orange Eyes. Behind Green Eyes is my column because I have green eyes.

For today's column I want to talk about sisters. The orange kind who let you write on their blogs are cool. The ones who look like a skinny you from behind are maybe cool.

I don’t know what I think about Mom or Dad saying “It looks like Baggle, but it’s too skinny. Must be Carla.” I think they need to see my cousin, Tori about some sensitivity training. She understands how awesome fat cats are!

But the insults disguised as cute things about Carla aside, I’m just wondering what will become of this. I don’t want to be a hater. I’m just a lovable kind of guy as long as you aren’t stealing my food or treats. Heck, I’d even let you have a fight with Kaline I’m so easy going. She can take care of herself. She has great claws. See? I’m not one of those cats who treats girls like they’re wimps! But this Carla, well…

Carla is young, so she's like a cow in a shop in China. Cows are big and Chinese places are little, so cows tear things up because they don’t have the sense to know they shouldn’t try to shop in China. It’s the same thing with Carla. She didn’t have the sense to know not to look at me and Kaline until we gave her permission. But other than being too young to have sense, she doesn’t seem all that bad. I know Kaline disagrees with me on that and she and I have had a few hisses about it too. Carla is just wrecking our home.

I think she’ll grow up and learn how to have sense, though. But the first thing she needs to learn is that Kaline is boss. I’m retired, so making nice to me is okay and I can put a good word in for her, but I don’t make the call. I’m just the senior advisor. But she really hasn’t made THAT nice to me, either.

For now, I’m meowing the company line and agreeing with Kaline. I just don’t know!

Help Carla Out - Where's The Door?

I still haven’t decided if this is okay.

I told Mommy I wanted to assist her, NOT a sister! Now, Baggle and I are living with a nasty black cat interloper. She’s the spawn of Basement Cat!

Well, okay, maybe she’s not THAT bad.

No, maybe she is!

I’m locked out of the bedroom at night, where I have ALWAYS slept with my Mommy because SHE’S there. Really, I go in and get on the bed and there she is! I can’t stay because she’s there, all snuggled up with MY Daddy and in between him and MY Mommy! It just disgusts me to see her sucking up to them. I have to leave my own bed.

She lived here less than a week and she was in Mommy’s lap. MY Mommy’s lap! Like a black cat could ever be Mommy’s Kitty Sunshine, likes she sings to ME and ME alone! She walks on my table and around my laptop. Mommy is the only one I let type on my laptop!

Then there’s dinnertime. Mommy and Daddy put a third bowl down for her – and she eats out of the matching bowls that belong to Baggle and me! She drinks our water too and BREAKS the milk rings!! There is some kind of venom in her mouth that causes them to break when she bites them! Personally, I don’t bite the milk rings, but I don’t have spit that makes them break!

She had a room of her own when she first came to live here. I’m not so upset about that because I know that room is actually the people litter room. Can you imagine being locked in a room that smells like people-waste? She had a bowl of food and water and a private box. Private box? As if! This is the realm of Queen Kaline, NOT Queen Carla! There is no Queen Carla, just Queen Kaline! So, I fixed that. When the door is open, I go in and use her box and dig a lot so she knows she isn’t so special. Talk about purrtenshis pooping!

She’s sick too. I don’t mean good-sick or bad-sick, I mean sick-sick. She has a cold and sneezes all the time. There’s another good reason to keep my distance. She’s a little black germ-factory. Baggle and I like to watch the show when Mommy and Daddy give her pills, though. She doesn’t like it, who would? I have to admit I really do admire her ability to spit the pills out a bunch of times before they manage to make her keep it in her mouth and swallow.

Okay, and I kinda feel bad for her too. I had to take nasty medicine when I was a kitten.

All right! All right!

It’s true that Mommy doesn’t sing My Kitty Sunshine to her and they give us more food so we can share and Carla even brought food with her when she came home. I think we get even more attention too, but I’m not sure there. I don’t always come when Mommy and Daddy call. I’m mad at them for bringing her here. Baggle says they call us all for more treats, but Baggle always thinks there will be more treats when they call any of us. Mommy and Daddy also tell me that they brought me home when I was just over a month old and I don’t know what it’s like to live on the streets all of my kitten life and get pubity with no doctor to fix me. I guess she had a rough life before she came here. Mommy and Daddy seem to think we have enough staff to take on another cat in our house. I just don’t know.

I just don’t know. I need to go munch some kibble from one of MY bowls and think about it.