Monday, November 23, 2009

Nightmares are made of these

If you're prone to nightmares, you can have a look at this assortment of deep-sea and marine critters to see if anything looks familiar. Some of them aren't too bad -- others are the kinds of things that you'd only want to see IN a nightmare that you could wake up from...

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Absentee Parenting

My Primary cat, Elf, learned quickly and easily that she wasn't allowed to go certain places -- kitchen counters, bathroom sink, dining table, my electronics workbench, and so on. Whether it's because she's more stubborn, or dumber, I'm not sure; but my emergency backup cat, Radar, isn't learning as well.

Rather than have to try and catch her in flagrante delicto to punish her (so she associates the punishment with the place/action), I'm trying something different: booby-trapping the places I need/want her to stay off of.

The booby-traps consist of multiple squares of highly adhesive tape (I'm using package strapping tape, since that's what I had handy; duct tape or similar would have done as well) along the jump-able edges of things -- sticky side up, so that they'll adhere to her foot(s) when she lands or steps on one or more of them. That way, the unhappy thing (getting something stuck to her hoof) will happen regardless of whether I'm home and/or paying attention.

This may turn into an "interesting" experiment...

UPDATE:
(11:32) Would anybody like to guess who just came wandering through the living room with tape stuck to her two back foots? Fairly radiating innocence and outraged indignation while trying to shed the tape by shaking the taped extremeties at every step?
As much as she apparently doesn't like it, I figure I'll leave her to get it off on her own -- driving the point home with a sledgehammer, as it were.