Hello, it's me again, Monty the fearless cat, fluent in Human-speak. Yawn! You’ll have to excuse me if I fall asleep while I’m meowing this to you. Life has been a little bit traumatic recently for me and Maddie. We keep wondering what our humans are going to do next. They can’t seem to leave things alone, they keep changing things around in our house. First they did what they called ‘decorating the house for Christmas’. Then they did ‘taking down the decorations’. And now, believe it or not, they’re doing ‘re-decorating the living room.’ I don’t know why they can’t make up their minds – do they want it decorated or not?
I mentioned last time that they’d brought a tree home and were going to bring it indoors. It wasn’t for us to climb up, unfortunately. It was for the humans to hang pretty toys on, which we weren’t even allowed to play with. I wouldn’t mind, but they didn’t play with them either, they just sat and looked at them. Sometimes I do wonder about humans: they do so many pointless things. I did have a little pat at one of the shiny balls on the tree one day when I thought they weren’t looking. They laughed, told each other I looked cute, and then told me to leave it alone. As I say, they never seem to know what they want!
The other problem with this thing they called ‘Christmas’ was the number of extra humans in our house. First there were an extra three, who stayed in our house for quite a few days and nights, turning our favourite sofa into a bed, and allowing us into the bedroom that’s normally kept closed. It was great fun being allowed into their bedrooms, and they were very nice to us. I liked all the extra cuddles, but they spoke a different version of Human so I couldn’t always interpret their meows. Mum said it was an ‘Australian accent’ – I have no idea what she meant. But we got used to them being around, and I told Maddie I thought Mum and Dad must have adopted them into the family, like they did with us.
Then the days of ‘Christmas Day’ and ‘Boxing Day’ happened (maybe that was why they’d had so many boxes delivered to the house?), and there was so much fuss, with them all opening presents, and a lot of wrapping paper for us to play with. We got presents too – some packets of treats, and a toy mouse that the humans pretend is real because they can make it run on its own for a little way. If they like to pretend things like this, I’m happy to humour them, but honestly, it doesn’t taste anything like a real mouse! And all the rest of the family came – Mum and Dad’s grown-up human females, their male mates and their human kittens. And Dad’s own litter-mates too, who are almost as old as him. You could hardly move here for humans. We were so outnumbered, Maddie was completely freaked out, as you can probably imagine. They seemed to be eating, drinking and laughing far more than is normal, even for humans, and we both spent a lot of time outside, staying out of their way.
Well, eventually the extra three humans turned out not to be adopted – or if they were, Mum and Dad must have sent them back to the Adoption Home – because after all the Christmas fuss died down they went away again. We missed them, but at least Mum and Dad were still here to feed us: that's the main thing, obviously. We’d got used to the tree and the decorations by now, but no, Mum decided to take them all down again and Dad took the tree back outside.
‘Oh well,’ I purred to Maddie. ‘I suppose things can get back to normal now.’
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Dad doesn’t seem to like things being ‘normal’. Next thing we knew, he was moving furniture around again and moving all the rugs and curtains from the living room. It looks horrible and the floor’s cold and uncomfortable. And – I know this is going to sound weird – he’s started painting on the walls. He always likes doing painting, but he normally does it on sheets of paper, making nice pictures. I wish he’d stick to that. Maybe he’s run out of paper.
Thank goodness, we still have our comfy beds and blankets available so that we can close our eyes to all these changes, and try to get our essential sixteen hours of sleep every day.
Goodnight, humans, from me and from Maddie.
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