Back when I was trying my best to care for my ailing mother, my anxiety was at the highest it had ever been. In an attempt to try and manage it without medication, I bought a weighted blanket. Which was advertised as a help to anxiety (among other things), but was completely useless when it came to me. So I packed it away in my closet and didn't give it another thought.

Until Jenny puked on the blanket I had on my bed. I didn't have any others unpacked from storage, so I grabbed the only on I could find: my weighted blanket.

"But Dave," you might be saying, "what does this have to do with Caturday?"

So here you go: It's freaking out my cats.

The weight it probably coming from some kind of tiny metal pellets. But Jake and Jenny think it's sand. So whenever the walk across it, they stop and try to "dig" into it.

Which is to say that I really, really hope that I don't come home to it being all busted to shit with a mess everywhere. Maybe I should be reconsidering getting a new kitten next year?

Yeah, if I ended up with a cat like that, it's likely more than the blanket that's getting shredded.

The cats are unhappy about the changing weather. No more lazy nights out in the catio because it's starting to get chilly out there at night.

So they spend more time indoors wanting to have my attention. Sometimes.

The nice thing about my cats taking naps next to each other while I'm trying to work in bed is that I don't have to be holding their feet or petting them the whole time. They are able to be happy laying next to each other without me...

Probably time to think about pulling out the warming pads and heated blankets!

I don't trim my cats' claws.

They have always been very good about not clawing furniture. I have a variety of different scratching posts around, and they are happy to restrict their scratching there. That takes care of their claws naturally, without my having to traumatize them by clipping, so I've just let them be.

As I was laying on the couch with my laptop working, Jake was sleeping beside me. All of a sudden I feel my leg getting poked. I move my computer out of the way, and this is what I'm seeing...

I mean, come on! Just look at this lethal murder mitten!

I said "Ow! Can you not claw my leg, Boo-Bear?" To which he responded by snarling at me...

As I lay there wondering what his reaction would be if I try to un-hook his claws, he got up and went to the end of the couch to give himself a manicure...

Would have been nice if he had done that before deciding to give me a flesh wound.

   
• Snek! I meant to post this on Caturday, but forgot. This is SO Jake with his stuffed lion toy, Mufasa. He took that thing everywhere for years. I would find Mufasa in his food dish, the water dish, and even the litter box...

Gotta make sure your best friend is getting enough to eat when they're looking a little thin.

   
• Oh Deer! I don't have a snek friend, I've got a deer friend now...

Such a pretty girl.

   
• U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! So proud...

In an age that science is attacked, education is ridiculed, and intelligence is mocked, this is where we are now. How sad.

   
• BUSINESS! Exaggerated. But still conceptually true...

Business is war, after all.

   
• Middlemen! It's insane. It's just insane...

The near-constant mantra from politicians continues to be that the USA has the best health care in the world. But every conceivable metric has shown that's not true. The truth is that it's the best if you can afford it! Studies show that Medicare for All would save ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND SAVE 114,000 LIVES ANNUALLY! But we continue to pay "health" insurance companies to provide worse care for more dollars. Disgusting.

   
• UnJournalistic! Getting facts completely wrong on your news story is one thing... but editing it so that the original wording is preserved so as to obscure the fact that you got it wrong? Shitty...

The edit should have eliminated the word "released" completely, as NOBODY TALKS THAT WAY. "Bail has been set at $1 million" is the only edit which takes responsibility for your misinformation. But because they went the dipshit route, now we've got a bunch of "READ IT AGAIN!" assholes in the comments chiding people who commented on the original headline. I am so sick of this shit I could vomit. If you don't have journalistic integrity, don't be a journalist.

   
And now back to preparing my home for Fall.

And so... Jenny's journey into becoming one of the most entitled, demanding little kitten princesses to ever exist. She has long been insistent on getting her pet-time when I go to bed. But then she started letting me know that she's impatient when I finally go upstairs to brush my teeth and get ready for bed. She sits outside the bathroom and meows her displeasure if I keep her waiting. It's cute. I walk outside and say "Okay, let's go then" and she goes running to my bedroom and hops on the bed waiting for me to show up.

Heaven help me if I forget something downstairs and have to run back down to get it. When I get back to my bedroom, she's on the bed meowing and meowing.

But now?

Jenny's taken it up a notch.

After the food dispenser drops her 9:00pm pre-bedtime snack, she'll chomp it down, then come to get me wherever I am (usually on the couch watching TV).

And if I don't get up and follow her upstairs, she will sit on the stairs and meow her little head off.

Assumably because the acoustics are great...

She does it because it works.

If I'm watching TV, I just finish watching it upstairs in bed while petting her.

Which is exactly what she wants.

I returned home yesterday to find that both cats were waiting for me. Not just Jake, but Jenny as well. That almost never happens. Jenny prefers to wait and see if Jake doesn't get murdered after he bounds down the stairs to greet whomever is opening the door.

As expected, the cats are all over me all the time... perhaps afraid I'm going to disappear again...

It's nice to be home. It's nicer to be missed.

Going on vacation is incredibly stressful when I'm having to leave my cats behind. Sure there are robots for food, water, and litter box... and my home is fully automated... and there's a dozen people I could call to run over if something went wrong... but it's still tough to leave knowing that they'll be looking for me as the week goes on.

This was my last view of them before I walked out the door...

Yeah, hard to not feel guilty about it all.

Nothing makes my cats want to go outside in the catio more than when I don't let them go outside in the catio because there's too much smoke in the air for little kitty lungs.

Seriously. Jake acts like he's being tortured. Jenny walks around the house meowing at full volume to let her frustration be known. And it doesn't end there. They are both constantly hanging around me. The minute I head to bed, they are there. And they stay there until morning.

Most times they just want to lay there...

Other times they demand belly rubs...

But sometimes they manage to entertain themselves without my involvement...

At least until something like this happens. At which time I will say "JAKE! COME BACK HERE AND FIX YOUR SISTER'S EAR!" Except he won't, so I have to get involved...

I really hope that the smoke dies down enough that I can open up the catio again.

I've mentioned a few times how my cats have become increasingly annoyed by my existing in their house, and far more demanding of my time.

This peaked last week when I was upstairs in bed and heard Jenny screaming downstairs. It was so unnerving that I leapt out of bed and went running down to find out if she was hurt. But nope. She was just sitting at the bottom of the stairs demanding that I come down to pet her or feed her (or more likely both).

I pet her for a minute, then told her to follow me upstairs, which she did.

But since I came running once, she did it again on Thursday night... then again last night! Both times I just yelled down to her to come up. Which she did. But she was not happy about it.

In other cat news, I saw this and was immediately struck about the accuracy of it all...
 

Yeah. Though I'd argue that every social media platform is a stunningly safe space for cats.

My cats are at home while I am across the mountains.

They have robots to feed them, robots to keep their litter box clean, and fountains to keep their drinking water clean and cool. There's cameras and alarms and sensors to keep them safe and let me know if there's any trouble.

But all that doesn't matter.

They are 2-1/2 hours away being mad because I'm not there to cater to them.

But don't worry. They'll let me know when I get home.