More Home Renovations and Good Parenting

I have a cat with one eye - Albert Nigel. He had two when I got him which is partially why I haven’t had kids. It’s frowned on when your children lose an eye although the SPCA probably doesn’t condone it in cats either. To be fair, it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t remove it, I just paid thousands to have it detached and sewn up. It was not really recoverable, last I saw of it, the iris was bulging out. But, it was on my watch so I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since.

Every time I move house, it’s all about the cat. Except this time. This time I just had to move and take what I could find. So, I told him he would be an indoor cat. He went outside to think it over. I told him to wink if he agreed. The move goes more or less as planned, I put in the litter box in my bathroom – 2 days later, I've decided he's going back to an indoor/outdoor cat. That litter shit (the litter, not the shit) is everywhere and I can’t get him to wipe his feet when he steps out. Also, it’s a little uncomfortable when we both have to go at the same time. Both of us look away and pretend it’s not happening. We just hum. Well, I hum. I don't know what he's doing. He's lucky, he can just put his eyeless side to me and genuinely not have to pretend to avoid eye contact.

With this new place, I have to find a new way for him to come and go and the only possible window is the kitchen one – it has a sash type window and I bought a cat window panel that fits across and has a flap that he can go in and out of. He has to jump up on the bar stool inside the kitchen and then go out the flap – unfortunately, it’s too high for him to jump up from the ground outside, unless he perfects the standing jump followed by dive roll and let’s face it, he only has one eye and couldn’t guarantee hitting the target every time. Would sound like a bird hitting the window over and over until he got it right and popped through the slot.

So, I called Wolfgang. Wolfgang is the neighborhood handy man – I gave him the bits of wood I had cut at Home Depot, the brackets and the screws so he could make a series of steps for Albert. Wolfgang had other ideas and made a ramp. Great! So now, Albert jumps up on the bar stool, goes out the window flap, ignores the ramp and jumps down to the bone-crunching concrete below. Walks it off and makes his way to the front of the apartment to hide in the bushes before making a wild dash to the next set of bushes in front of the next apartment block. Then he comes to the front door, crying to be let in. At first I thought he was just stupid and hadn’t figured out the ramp, especially when my neighbor said he saw him hanging from the screen outside one of my other windows and mewing to come in. Literally hanging - like he was velcroed on. More guilt heaped upon me – reinforcing the no children thing. You can’t push children out a small slot in the window, leave them out there to face traffic, dogs and raccoons, then demand that they scale a near vertical ramp to get back in. I mean I haven’t seen a handbook or anything but that just sounds wrong.

So when he comes to the front door, I take him round to the ramp and show him how to go up it and that’s when I realize that the poor bugger is sliding back down it and it’s too steep. Kind of why I wanted steps in the first place. And now in order not to hurt Wolfgang’s feelings, I have to take down the ramp in the dead of night and install the steps myself and honestly after the blind debacle, we all know it’s not going to go well. Will get bandaids. Do I need a special drill bit for concrete? Is my house even made of concrete? Will drill random trial hole on neighbors side and see what happens. Will get safety goggles. Also, what is a drill bit?

And then Wolfgang comes up with a better plan - steps on the ramp. And carpet. I'm skeptical but too lazy to do anything myself so I let him take a crack at it. And voila, custom cat ramp, complete with camo carpeting. Albert actually uses it, the neighbors have yet to hit it with their cars and I'm changing my decor to match the color palette.



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