I will never have another cat

I currently have a single cat. A 5-year old female. And, yes, I’ll never have another cat. There are times when I’m wondering why on earth I have this one. Why? First off, cat’s aren’t trainable, at least not by me. I’ve failed in just about everything I’ve attempted to train her not to do. Stay off the kitchen table and counters? Failed. Stop chewing up cords? Failed. I’m sure there are other examples, but at the moment, I’m not coming up with anything else I’ve attempted to train her on. And it’s not that she doesn’t learn. She knows she’s not supposed to do it, but she does it anyway, just to get attention. She will look at me to make sure I’m watching before she attempts to chew on the computer’s power cord.

For some reason, lately, she’s really into the mini-blinds. She dives between them and reaches up through them, though I have no clue why. Well, when she does this I’ve been shooting her with water from a spray bottle that I keep on the end table next to the couch. It used to be half water and half vinegar, but she always came over to the spray bottle trying to get a drink. After a couple weeks of not getting anywhere with this, I ended up raising the one set of mini-blinds up higher than the chair-back she normally sleeps on. All the other mini-blinds had long since been raised well up above this point. I still occasionally have to spray her to get her down from standing up on the chair and rooting around under them, but it’s a lot less painful for both of us. I sometimes wonder which one of us got trained in this situation.

However, just the other day she started doing this same thing on one of the bedroom windows. And since we’re only in the bedroom to sleep, she’s usually doing this when I’m trying to get some sleep. And of course, since it’s the bedroom, I refuse to open the mini-blinds. Well last week, she decided to keep me up all night doing this. I spent the first 15 minutes try to give her some attention so she’d settle down. I spent the next 10 minutes trying to swat her on the head or butt to convince her she wasn’t supposed to be up near the window. I spent the next 5 minutes spraying her with water and throwing her out of the room. I then gave up and locked her in the bathroom for 15 min because that usually calms her down. But I felt bad leaving her in there too long, so I let her back out. She immediately began digging through the mini-blinds again. After about 10 minutes of chasing her around again, I locked her back up in the bathroom and tried to go to sleep. A couple hours later, I woke up feeling extremely guilty and let her out of the bathroom. Less than 5 minutes later, she was at it again. Mr. B got up for work shortly thereafter, but she still kept at it. I think the only sleep I got that night was the couple hours when she was locked in the bathroom.

Luckily, she’s been pretty well behaved since then. That’s not to say she’s not still doing it, but she’s stopped when I’ve told her to. Let’s hope she keeps it up. I don’t want another night like that.