That’s what I told my husband this morning as he left for work. But he didn’t buy it. Toast remains in the house with me today. But you really can’t blame me for trying to escape the ginger critter for a while. After all, he is both the bane of my existence and the apple of my eye. I wrote a bit on how we got our female cat, Jam, here. I figured it was only fair to tell a bit about our male, Toast, as well.
Bane of my existence? “Really?,” you ask. “Isn’t that a little extreme?” Well, let me fill you in and you can decide later.
When we brought Toast home as a mere tiny ball of orange fur and ears a few years ago, the first thing he did was find his way into the platform under our waterbed. The platform, in a bird’s eye view without the water mattress on top, would look like this:
So, there the little fuzzball stayed and cried so pitifully that I couldn’t take it and I decided he had to be rescued because he might never find his way out. He would be scared and hungry, I pleaded with TGH. We didn’t have a kit for the waterbed as we had obtained it used, from a friend. So we had to unplug the water mattress and repeatedly fill a bucket with the water, dumping it out our second floor window for a couple of hours until it was empty so we could get at the kitten and free him. Eventually, we got to him, a little wetter for the wear (WE were wet, not the kitten). And we took apart the waterbed, never to put that possible kitten death trap together again.
Fast forward to a young adult Toast - the awkward little teenager who irritated our Jam by his mere existence. She wanted nothing to do with him and all he wanted to do was follow her around. When he wasn’t doing figure eights around my legs or stalking Jam, he would be scratching the wallpaper off the walls, or sitting on TGH’s computer, or hanging on the window screen to be let in or out (we used to let them outside, but not anymore). He had a habit of running to his “safe” place - a wicker travel basket I had bought him to take him to the vet’s with - whenever he was being scolded by us or retaliated against by Jam. He also chewed off most of the wicker around the door to the basket so that we couldn’t use it to bring him to the vet’s anymore and it just became another lounging place for Toast.
One summer night, Toast was outside and he hadn’t come in for dinner time. When TGH and I finally went to bed around midnight, I started to hear my boy, crying from a bit of a distance through the open window screen. I couldn’t sleep knowing he was out there crying and possibly stuck or in peril somewhere. So I went out in my pajamas to see what was up.
I finally found him at the end of our road on top of an old storage building that he couldn’t find his way down from. Apparently, it was easy to jump from the narrow tree branch to the rooftop, but not so easy to go from the rooftop to the narrow branch to get down. So I had to run back inside and pull TGH out to get a ladder. We did and the ladder was too short. Plus, Toast would come no way near the edge of the roof to be rescued.
We then tried to devise a ramp with all the pieces of leftover wood from home improvement projects in our basement, screwing and nailing them together until it was long enough to lean up against the side of the building for Toast to come down. Remember, this was all in the middle of the night. Finally, we had to ask our neighbors (lucky for us, they were still awake) to borrow another ladder, one that was taller than ours. They happened to have one so we were in luck! TGH put it against the building and climbed up. But Toast would not go any way near the edge or close enough to TGH so he could be rescued.
After watching this a few minutes, a lightbulb finally went off in my head and I ran back into the house. I grabbed Toast’s little refuge wicker basket and ran back out to pass it up to TGH. Well, TGH had his doubts, but he brought it back up the ladder as far as he could and when Toast saw his wicker basket, he jumped right in. Rescue mission accomplished!
Our cats love to be involved in whatever we are doing around the house. One day, Toast followed TGH down the basement so TGH could work out. Well, I guess Toast was really interested in the pulley system of the weight machine and tried to play with it by swatting at it with his paws. And got his paw stuck. I heard a blood-curdling cat scream that wouldn’t stop and I heard TGH calling for me from the basement. When I got down there ( I swear my feet never touched a step on the way down), I saw TGH on his back on the weight bench, holding the weights above his chest and Toast trying to back away from the equipment but apparently not able to because his paw was somehow trapped. I was horrified and my heart was broken to see the young cat in pain and scared.
TGH excitedly asked me to look down and see which way he should move the weights he was balancing over his chest so that Toast could be freed without further damage. I’m still amazed that TGH even figured out what happened from his vantage point. Great - even though TGH was holding all that weight, the pressure was all on me. If I chose the wrong way, Toast’s little paw would get hurt again, but we couldn’t dally too long as Toast was panicking and liable to hurt himself more. “Up, but slo-o-o-wly,” I chose. Then, “No, down, DOWN,” when I could finally see which way the gears were working. Finally Toast became free and ran up to his hidey hole.
I was relieved he was able to run, but he wouldn’t let us close enough to him to see the damage for a couple of hours. When I did get close enough, I could see his paw was swollen up like something you’d see in a cartoon. His little paw was the size of a big ole hamburger, or so it appeared to me. At the vet’s, we found that Toast really had only received a blood blister between his cat “fingers,” and had pulled muscles in his “arm” when trying to pull away from the machine. Otherwise, there was no damage. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was thinking they’d have to amputate or something. And in a few days, his paw was back to normal and you would never have known the trauma that had so recently visited us.
Now here’s a mystery that has yet to be solved. One day, I was walking by Toast as he sat in the top drawer of a built-in dresser, so he was at my eye-level. Well, rude thing that he is, he yawned right in my face. And, to my horror and disbelief, I saw that he had a forked tongue! Really, WTF? I knew he was a little devil by now, but this was too much, even for Toast! I had to look in his mouth again to see it. I was able to wrestle his mouth open and there it was - a forked tongue! It wasn’t perfectly evenly divided like a snake’s tongue, and it hadn’t looked like that the last time I had seen it. I racked my brain trying to figure out how or when something like this could have happened to him.
I still have no answers. My theory (and the vet’s who sewed his tongue back together) is that he possibly jumped from too high a spot or fell from a spot in surprise and accidentally bit through his own tongue.
The vet also said that tongues heal quickly so we have no idea how long it was like that before I noticed. But my thinking was that it couldn’t have been too long as I would have noticed him having trouble eating and drinking - after all, cats use their tongues to lap up their water, and I like to think that I take notice of my pets and any odd behavior. Toast is not a big complainer though so I have to watch him like a hawk. And you’ll be happy to know that his tongue healed up so well with dissolving sutures that you can’t even tell it had been injured. And he has no trouble eating or drinking as can be attested to by his 14 pound girth.
Toast loves to bound onto our half sleeping chests in our beds from the floor without warning and purr into your face. You can pet him when HE feels like it. If you play with him too long, he gets irritated and will attack you. He likes to drink out of your water glass if you leave it abandoned, so we are reduced to using only narrow mouthed glasses. He likes to scratch our furniture and our wallpaper to shreds. And he comes running to hide behind my legs if Jam goes after him, even though she is half his size. He’s the furry son I never had.
So, yes, he is the bane of my existence and he is quite the little booger. But he’s MY little booger and I love him. 
- Tish has a lot going on at her blog too. There are lots of humorous stories of her bad dating experiences (sorry Tish, I’m not so sure they are humorous to YOU), as well as stories about her possessed television and some really cute old pictures. 
