Laptop vs. Kittenhead: Round Two Begins Tonight

Published 19 Jan 2006

Gypsy is pretty sure that my lap belongs to her. She can accept being occasionally ousted by the dog, who is much bigger, and way too goofy for her to handle, but she will not accept my new laptop into our home.

We have had several battles of will as she insists on plopping down on top of the keyboard, whines incessantly for lap access, or tricks me into putting the computer away and making room for her, only to then sit on my lap and swipe at me whenever I try to pet her. This is a flagrant breach of our deal, which is that if she is on my lap I must get full tactile benefit of her fuzziness, and she must purr. No purring, no lap.

After a couple of months, I finally had the cat trained to at least wait until I ran out of battery to jump on my lap. That is, until tonight, when a visit to the vet revealed that among the other things that are supposed to show up in a cat’s urine, she also had magnesium crystals, red blood cells, and kidney cells. And the whole shebang has a basic pH instead of the acidic one it’s supposed to have, which floored me because if anything smells acidic, it’s this cat’s pee.

So now Gypsy is on a special kidney friendly diet, taking strangely banana-smelling antibiotics, and has first dibs on my lap.

How this will affect me remains to be seen. I just finished a big freelance project, so now the laptop isn’t as essential as it has been for a while. However, I have a backlog of articles I want to write and now have the time to write them. So we’ll see how the battle wages on. Hopefully when she feels better she’ll rather play than sit on my lap anyway…

Filed under Animalia