Cat vs. AC

Above: Zooey sits in the cool breeze as he contemplates how lame the interior our apartment is.

A pall has been cast over my household. The trouble really started yesterday morning, when my furry companion, Zooey, dislodged one of the window shade seals on the side of my new air conditioning. You can see it just behind his head in the picture above; the one he managed to get through is behind the gate (that refuses to budge from the window) on the left. These things are supposed to have screws in them, but because of the way my window is designed they wouldn’t fit and I had to tape them in place. This tape, and Frigidaire’s cheap plastic that can easily get pushed out of its frame, was no match for this cat.

After noticing he wasn’t in the bathroom for his usual tap drinking in the morning, I saw him on the roof outside my window (running from pigeons, I think) and yelled, “Zooey! Get in here!” He was so excited from his jaunt in the out-of-doors that he momentarily lost his little mind and ran right up and jumped onto the windowsill and was all like, “Mom! I've been outside all morning!!”
At which point I shut the window, patched up the hole, and left for work.

When I came home, the poor little guy was inconsolable (see despairing photo, below). He spent the entire night by the window, angrily meowing at the former site of his escape and bemoaning his cruel, cruel fate in general (well, he did take a brief nap—meowing takes a lot of energy). I guess he thought he had found the portal to a new, exciting world, where the wind weaved its way into his nostrils and he heat of the sun warmed his fur. The ironic thing is, I had just spent the evening complaining to my therapist about life not being exciting enough, and now here I am denying the most exhilarating thing ever for him.

And now that he’s realized he could get to this other world he thought impossible, nothing’s quite the same. He doesn’t enjoy the little things, like playing in the bath tub, getting his tummy scritched, licking his stripes, and especially gazing out the window from the vantage point of his amazon.com box.

Poor guy. I’ll just have to rely on his short-term memory to get us out of this one.