Watching and caring for our four house-bound cats is one of those never-ending sources of amusement or stress (depending on our moods and the moods of the cats too).  Two large cats and two small cats make for a substantial amount of litter, hair, hairballs and droppings of the usual warm-and-slimy kind.  It also makes the house look like a giant enriched cat enclosure.  There are cat beds in various locations, a couple of kitty tents, dedicated cushions, and a cat tree with baskets, scratching posts, jumping platforms and hideaways.  There are window sills set aside for their near exclusive use, including some way above our height, that they reach by climbing through bookshelves.  There are two large litter boxes, one under my desk (don’t ask!) and one occupying the entryway closet.  There are also several open and strategically located cat carriers that they can use to sleep in or hide from each other (it is not always a peaceful “pride” environment among these four) and we even have a little cat-sized ottoman, arm rests and all.  There’s lots of space in the laundry closet and the shed for the humongous food and clumping litter bags, a water fountain with a gallon-sized reservoir and a filter, a number of special blankets for their exclusive use, and the usual cat-care paraphernalia, such as nail clippers, hair clippers, pill plungers, medicines of various kinds, even a bag or two of treats, several catnip-infused toys, a feather-catcher toy on a flexible wand and a couple of laser pointers.  I’m sure I’m missing a few things (just remembered the little cat-sized Santa’s hat used one year for the Christmas card), but you get the idea.  We love the cats and show it by showering their lives (and ours) with their support system and possessions.

So then, it is somewhat puzzling to see that they prefer, among all that feline furniture, the IKEA chairs we bought for ourselves, the IKEA couch and, if we would allow it, the IKEA bed in the guest room and the home-made bed in our own bedroom.  The chairs and couch sport a separate, cat-dedicated covering that we can remove when we want to sit, saving our clothing from the ever-present cat hair or the occasional hairball.  About once a week, we collect the assortment of furniture covers and wash them, in a attempt to keep the various bits of cathood at bay.  Vacuuming regularly takes care of the hair puffs that tend to accumulate in the corners and under the furniture, those that when you open the door on a windy day make you think of little kittens running across the living room floor.  But it is not only the IKEA furniture they like.  I attempted, with crushing failure, to teach these guys to stay off the tables and desks.  Who was I kidding?  With many hours by themselves (most of the night) and a similar number of hours with an extraordinarily tolerant human (Claud) there is no chance of any well-intentioned lesson to take hold.  The only exception is during dinner, when they get a consistent message: “Food on the table, kitties on the floor,” or at least a chair, as Boots likes to fantasize he’s one of us and sits at the head of the table, watching what goes on while we eat.

Desks with warm laptops and interesting surfaces, like keyboards, are of particular interest.  Austina has typed interesting messages on laptops carelessly left open, creating excitement trying to figure out how to find those missing files that mysteriously disappear or turn the keyboard back to English from the alternative and unintelligible gibberish that comes up on the screen as we type.  Remote controls offer their own unique walking or sitting surface, which generally results on one of us scrambling to find out how the language was permanently turned to Spanish or to get the DVD player to function again after their careless button-pressing.  The wireless computer mouse may not have round ears, four legs or a tail, but it still gets “chased” off the computer table and threatened with disembowelment.  Little dusty paw prints provide evidence their nighttime forays on the desks.  My desk sits in front of a window that faces west.  I like to see through it in the early morning, when I watch the dawn slowly paint the skies as I write and drink my coffee.  In the afternoon, when the sun becomes too warm and the light to strong, that’s when the cats head for this only westerly-facing window.  Getting to it is a minefield, though.  I’ve seen Austina navigate gingerly between two laptops, a rack with bills, squeeze between the phone (which invariably gets knocked off its charging stand) and the fan, tiptoe around the little sculptures that adorn the windowsill and finally reach the valued spot to catch the last rays of sun of the day.  Besides the phone getting discharged, I don’t fret much about this routine.  It is the particulates what gets a little old.  I’m talking about hair, dust, dander, bits of clay from the litter box, the sporadic regurgitation – a little too organic to handle with your bare hands.  Brrr!

I realize that the house is really theirs and that includes all three dimensional spaces, whether they are easily reachable or not.  The bedrooms remain off limits to their actual presence, although the space under the door provides access to the hair that accumulates under the bed and the occasional swinging paw trying to grab who-knows-what.  Regularly they push the doors (to see if we left them slightly ajar or nor fully closed) or scratch the surface as if by knocking we would let them in.  The guest room is off-limits, although occasionally it gets open to them by a guest.  And the guest bathroom, as much as we try, also remains catless.  The rest of the house…cat country.  So, I’m learning (it is a life-long process) to live with their signatures on everything we own, scratches on the wood furniture, hair on everything, and a stubborn stain here and there, learning along the way how to reach new levels of tolerance, resignation and peace of spirit.  Letting them go outdoors has always been out of the question (disease and fleas and other dangers to their and our health).  Surgically removing their claws has never been an option for us.  Discipline to stay off the chairs, tables and other human-use-only surfaces, is generally futile.  We just can’t be consistent enough to make that work.  So, we gently shove them off when we want to sit down, only to have them bounce on our laps immediately or sit patiently until we stand up to change the volume of the computer or get a cup of coffee so they can reclaim their rightful space on the preferred chairs.  We select our furnishings with 80 claws in mind, striking a compromise between industrial steely coldness and warm and woody IKEA design.  I think we’re slowly getting there.

Carlos