Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

When one has a digital camera, and certain felines are more than happy to pose in adorable and personality-infused poses, this is what happens.

I first give you Phoebe, who can usually be found wherever Loki is.

“urrrr…?”

“THAT CAMERA IS SHINY WERE YOU AWARE OF THIS.”

She’s trying really hard to eat a lot so that she can balloon out like Loki (who didn’t wake up during the entire photo session).

And she strikes a pose for the camera. How does that not hurt her legs?

Later… Isis watches. She’s not interested in playing your reindeer games.

Later still… Isis turned around and “lazr kitteh” Loki tries to fit his dog-sized butt onto one stair.

Phoebe decides to practice for the Feline Olympics. She starts up the stairs, hugging the wall before jumping over her first hurdle.

She clears it, but then comes the hard part: Isis is not a hurdle, but she is a dangerous foe and may jump out at Phoebe if she gets too close, much like a chain chomp.

Phoebe clears the course and strikes another pose at the top of the stairs. She would like more cowbell in the next photo shoot.

I’m going to start posting some of the emails I receive, along with my reply, here on this blog. This is in addition to the place I’ve set aside for crazy emails. I’ll start with an interesting question I received that goes back to the days before the Geek Test was Internet Famous.

Hello Yvette,

Thanks for your great website! Many years ago on the front page there used to a picture of a cat’s head. This kitty was making a comedy face and was named Fairuza in the filename. Who is this cat and what is this picture? When and where was it taken? I’d love to get more information on this great picture! I attached the picture. Please reply soon, thanks! have fun, Mike

Hi Mike,

The first thing visitors saw on my first version of innergeek.us was the cropped head of a kitten that Ben and I named Fairuza (after Fairuza Balk for a reason that I can’t quite remember). You were one of the first people in the world to take the Geek Test if you remember Fairuza on the front page!

This photo was not photoshopped other than to crudely remove the background. I took it in the fall of 2000, a few weeks after our newly adopted cat, Isis, had kittens. (We didn’t know she was pregnant when we took her in, but watching five kittens grow from soggy mouse-sized creatures into curious kitten-shaped mammals was a fun and rewarding experience.) We took a lot of photos (especially considering that we were still using film-based cameras back then) and I must have caught Fairuza mid-yawn for this one.

Here’s a recent photo of Isis mid-yawn. Sucky lighting, blurry photo, but can you see the resemblance? She’s making a crazy face for the camera… all pirate-eyed and practically screaming “Yarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”

Fairuza went to a good home with a woman who renamed her Tiny.

We found homes for the other four kittens. I would have liked to keep one of them, especially since Isis was a great parent, but we lived in an apartment and already had Loki. So we remained a two-cat family until last summer, when Phoebe showed up outside my employer’s office.

So though I no longer have an awesome Fairuza face on the front page of my website, there are still plenty of places where I gratuitously place my cats’ funny faces. I guess it’s fitting that that’s how everything started out.

I felt a little like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” watching my cat crawl into our stock pot to lick out bits of rice and chicken curry flavor. Except I had no intention of really cookiing her – she’s still far too skinny…

Don’t worry, I’ve since sterilized the pot so that I can use it to boil fresh corn from the local stands! And for Cincinnati Chili when the weather cools down. Isis was very pleased after eating a little human food.

Phoebe has now officially been with us for over a year, and still amuses and annoys us daily. She loves to play with fake mice and to tear off their tails, and bites their faces until the inside (probably toxic) filler is exposed and we have to throw them away. She hides them all over the place and will carry on with a pathetic, in-distress meowing until we toss one for her to chase. Also, in a previous life, she was a meerkat.

She’s also just tall enough to put her soft, adorable little declawed paws on the dining room table while standing on the floor. She did that for the first time when we had a confiscated mouse (with its neck cracked open) sitting on a napkin in the middle of the table. She was trying so hard to get it wihout actually getting on the table, since she knows that she’ll be swiftly swept off or sprayed with a water bottle, that we threw it away before taking a photo of the nearly deapitated orange mouse. Maybe we should start saving them in a jar (hidden in a cabinet, of course) to use for fun around Halloween…

In case you were wondering, this is my view about 75% of the time when I am sitting in front of my computer at home:

Sometimes she sits directly in the middle and just stares at me. 

Phoebe is approximately one year old now. Her head finally grew into her body, and she spends her free time meowing pathetically next to a toy mouse until someone throws it for her. She loves to chase the mouse up the stairs (going downstairs is just okay) and will play fetch for as long as her humans are willing, or until she is nearly hyperventilating (at which point she flops down on top of the mouse to indicate that she is done, but you cannot have her toy).

She’s about 40 times the size of Isis now, and not too scared of her anymore (though still very respectful when Isis hisses and beats on her). And she’s still BFF with Loki (who is still approximately 4,000 times the size of Isis).

Today, before I came home from work, Ben said that Loki was lying on the bed and Phoebe jumped up and nose-dived into his big belly. This prompted Loki to start licking her head. Phoebe responded by biting his elbow, and he in turn bit her ears. It turned into a (typical) scrimmage, which Loki always wins by pinning Phoebe down and squashing her poor little kitty ribs while biting her.

The weird/cool thing is that we’ve never seen a scratch on Phoebe after one of their rough scrimmages. If they weren’t both neutered, I’d think that they were lovers.

Unlike children, cats won’t repeat what they hear. Normally I just grunt my grumpiness in the morning, but I actually went to bed before midnight last night so the swearing started early.

"Get the HELL away from me." (to Loki after my first alarm went off)

"Mother fucker!" (to Loki, still before my second alarm went off, while trying to shove his purring, drooling, 21-pound dead weight off the bed)

"Get your head out of the fridge, stupid." (to Isis, our recently picky eater who tries to get her head and/or tail and/or body slammed by the fridge as many times a day as possible)

"Stop chewing on my shiznit." (to Phoebe, who likes to sleep on my desk but has a slight obsession with chewing paper) 

Phoebe eats about everything she finds that will fit in her mouth. If it is on the floor and should be swept up, chances are good that our little feline Roomba will eat it before it can be thrown away.

This is particularly disconcerting while Ben is in the middle of home improvement projects like drywall repair, paint removal, and fiberglass anything.

On Friday, Ben cut a hole in a wall upstairs so he could crawl through it to put a hole in the floorboard to prepare for ductwork related to installing a new bathroom fan. He also removed some ductwork that was rendered useless after we had a new furnace installed that separated the upstairs into two HVAC zones.

He made sure that the door was closed to the room where the hole was cut so that none of the cats would wander in. Well, Phoebe found a way to endanger herself regardless.

The old ductwork led to a vent in the upstairs bedroom, where the the door was not closed because it was in the process of being replaced. Phoebe managed to pull the vent cover away from the hole and crawled into the fiberglass-laden area with a dangerously big gaping hole in floor, plus a myriad of other dangers to a pet who tastes and/or eats everything not bolted down.

We’re not sure how long she was up there, but Ben noticed the vent pulled off and heard a mew… it didn’t take too long to coerce her out safely, but still. This is an area in which Ben wore a ventilating mask without me asking him to… fiberglass in the lungs being something that we agree is plain awful, and not a symbol of manhood like fiberglass in the hands.

I wiped her down with a wet washcloth after Ben pulled her out, and she was apparently fine after that. With the exception of her crying for the entirety of Sunday morning and into the afternoon that worried me greatly. We’ve already determined that she has anxiety problems (and they even make kitty Zoloft for that, but we haven’t gone to a kitty psychologist yet) so the crying could be from a number of things: general anxiety from a closed bedroom door that had been open, a toy mouse left upstairs that she wanted, fiberglass in the lungs, fiberglass in the digestive system, or who knows. The last two obviously being of the most concern. 

She finally stopped crying after we opened the (now replaced) bedroom door. We watched as she ran directly to the (now replaced and blocked with a paint can) vent cover that she had pulled off before. She tried everything in her kitty power to pull it off again, and it was interesting to watch. Luckily she didn’t suspect that it was one of us who put that paint can there. She finally gave up and, having mildly satisfied her curiosty/anxieties (OMG did I close that vent cover after going in I can’t remember maybe I need to go back up there and double check and OMG did I pace back and forth and taste every bit of loose fiberglass I could find, etc.) and was quiet after that.

WEAK STOMACHS DO NOT READ. Later on, she exploded some of her insides politely within the litter box. The smell was anything but polite, so she must have gotten into something up there. Early Monday morning, around 4am, she started hacking up a hairball/fiberglassball, which if you’ve ever been jolted awake to that sound you know how pleasant it is. But nothing actually came out. It just sounded like we were going to have to watch her die slowly and painfully as her insides expanded like a pigeon that ate dry rice and whatever was inside blocked her esophogus and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.

Luckily it didn’t come to that and she’s been her perky, anxious, Roomba self after that. She’ll still cry like she’s stuck in a bear trap once in a while, which we’re good at ignoring nowadays. But LOOK at that face. When we pick her up while she’s crying, she starts purring like a rattly, well-loved old car and everything is forgiven. And isn’t that what love is all about? 

The video that actually started yesterday’s political post was sent to me from my darling husband (please don’t make me write DH b/c I do not approve LOL ROTFL BBQ). It helped me start out my morning on the right foot.

My favorite quotes from this clip:

"…this country is based on the fantasy that the government is the voice of the people."

"From now on, We at Diebold will see to it that we properly safeguard the illusion of democracy for all Americans."

"Well, let’s hope so"

The second video for today, in my first-time ever crossover of politics and cat themes on this blog, is from the same guy, Simon Tofield, who animated the other short and delightful cat film I posted on this blog where truth in comedy is explored in intimate detail for anyone who’s ever had a cat. All three of my cats are indoor-only for various reasons, and somehow they still manage to do things like this.

This is one of my favorite recent photos of Isis. She spends a lot of her time looking at us with disdain, and occasionally with disdain while upside down. Here she is exhibiting her extraordinary power over the sun, the floating air particles above her, and Phoebe (who is peering out cautiously from underneath the couch).

Captain’s Log for today: spent all afternoon making long-overdue returns to stores and subsequently spent more than had been refunded. It’s all good. I bought new bath towels and honey roasted mixed nuts. 

When she’s not meowing like crazy for no reason, she’s cuddled up with someone (or Loki) and purring like crazy. If you look closely, you can sort of see where her eyelines are in this photo…

This is how my night and early morning went, only imagine a cat that weighs 20 pounds and drools excessively and crawls up to the top of the bed for more IN YOUR FACE action:

Actually, my biggest problem of late is that my feet get hot and I try to roll over in my sleep and I can’t. The culprit? A 20-pound bulk of Loki asleep at my feet, constricting the covers and creating near thermonuclear levels of heat. This is compounded by Phoebe, who is a normal-size cat and will generally move when I start pushing her away with my feet.

Loki maintains his dead weight, and I’ve tried everything I can with my early morning foot/leg strength to let him know that he is no longer welcome. I can push my foot underneath him (I’m under the covers, he’s on top of them) and shove shove shove with no results. If my eyes were open at that time and it was not dark in the room, I’m sure he’d look at me with an O Hai and chirp a little morning purr for me.

Painfully adorable at many hours, but not at 3am. Or 4am or 5am… or any hour at which I am still blissfully unaware of reality.

So I shove harder, and I’m sure at some point I’ve actually pushed him to the point where all four paws are in standing position–and yet somehow he maintains his dead weight. One time, and I still feel really bad about this, I only nudged Loki and he rolled off the side of the bed and he thumped onto the floor. It’s not my waking-hours wish to hurt him, but 3am Yvette-who-you-disturbed-from-slumber can occasionally (okay, often) be angry and wrathful.

So at this point, Phoebe has already jumped off the bed. Loki is refusing to move. At this point, I sometimes give up and move myself into a cooler, less comfortable position and try to fall back asleep. Or, if I’m determined to go back to sleep in the position I desire because I’m the human in charge, dammit, this is usually how it goes:

1. Sit up and attempt to pick up Loki.
2. Fail.
3. Move closer and pick him up from a better angle where I can use the strength in my back and/or knees.
4. Release him onto the floor.
5. Growl at him.
6. Flop back onto the bed.
7. Feel my blood boil as he jumps back on the bed.
8. Repeat steps 3-6, with more teeth grinding.
9. Realize that I’m not in charge when Phoebe jumps back on the bed and flops down between me and Ben.
10. Fall asleep hoping that when Loki jumps back on the bed, he’ll stay on Ben’s side.

I need to remember to put the spray bottle full of water next to my bed again. That usually helps. But it often disappears from my nightstand for various home improvement projects.

Speaking of Ben, he’s usually unaware of my nighttime cat ritual. Sometimes he’s the victim of my squirming (do you really need more details?) but he still doesn’t totally understand because his feet extend to the end of our queen size mattress and the cats don’t have room to be a thermonuclear heating pad on his side. 

Yet somehow, through all the trials of living with Loki for over 7 years, I still love the big fatass.