Friday Cat Blogging

by Bryan

14 comments

1 hipparchia { 11.12.13 at 5:46 pm }

wait until tonight…

2 Bryan { 11.12.13 at 11:25 pm }

I’m getting ready to bury myself under a mound of blankets.

I took the heating pad I bought for Sox and put it under the house for the outdoor cats. It is designed for outdoor use and I had a convenient plug. The ‘Insiders’ don’t like it, so I put it use.

3 hipparchia { 11.13.13 at 7:10 pm }

none of the destructocats can be trusted around anything that plugs into the wall. i did distribute lots of blankets and cardboard boxes though. there’s only one cat allowed in the bedroom at the moment, and yes i woke up this morning with that one sleeping on top of me and all my blankets.

4 Bryan { 11.13.13 at 10:19 pm }

I had two on top of me, and they haven’t left the blankets all day.

The cord is armored and the plug is inside a cover, so it can’t be pulled out.

5 Badtux { 11.14.13 at 12:36 am }

I have an electric blanket. It’s much cheaper than heating the whole house, this house is pretty much uninsulated and it’s a low efficiency gas furnace. I use the furnace only in the morning to heat up the house while I do my whole shower routine, then turn it off again before going to work. Anyhow, the electric blanket is protected from feline mischief by a regular blanket on top of it. But I haven’t had to use it much. Mencken has taken to sleeping under the covers with me. He just crawls right under the sheet and blankets and curls up against me. Definitely keeps me warm! I have learned how to turn in place so he stays snuggled against me. Meanwhile I know it’s a cool night if it’s a two-cat night with TMF snuggled up against my *other* side or on top of me, except he’s on the outside of the blanket. That’s not a heart attack causing the pressure on my chest, that’s just an 18 pound kitteh ;).

6 hipparchia { 11.14.13 at 5:56 pm }

That’s not a heart attack causing the pressure on my chest, that’s just an 18 pound kitteh .

that’s not a big cat, that’s a small boulder.

i have an electric blanket too… but it’s an even chance that somecat destroyed the controller or bit through an important wire, or else an electrical surge zapped it. so now i have just a blanket with wires in it. 🙂

The cord is armored and the plug is inside a cover, so it can’t be pulled out.

ordinarily i’d love to have one or two of those, but… i have one cat who scaled a wall, ripped the vent cover off the a/c vent (1.5 stories up, just under the vaulted ceiling), and crawled through the ductwork to the other end of the house. i have a second cat who later managed to reproduce that feat up to the “ripping the vent cover off” point. the second one either wasn’t agile enough to actually climb inside the ductwork, or was agile enough to both get inside and back out the same way.

i not only have destructocats, but apparently they share their knowledge with each other. the other, equally scary, possibilities are that they learn from each other by surreptitiously watching the others, or they’re all independently figuring these little engineering feats out on their own.

7 hipparchia { 11.14.13 at 6:01 pm }

I have an electric blanket. It’s much cheaper than heating the whole house, this house is pretty much uninsulated and it’s a low efficiency gas furnace.

that pretty accurately describes my house too. i’d love to be able to have an electric blanket.

8 Bryan { 11.14.13 at 11:55 pm }

I have an electric blanket, but don’t know what would happen if a cat got annoyed at me and decided to use the bed as a cat box, so it is no longer connected.

Excise walks on my chest immediately after I get into bed, but then flops down on the side. Ms P prefers to sleep against a leg. Neither will go under the covers, although they have seen their Mom and Dot do it.

I get by with warm clothes and wool blankets.

Ms Underhouse has discovered the pad, and now owns it, so the others won’t be messing around. It is sitting on what seems to have been the slate from a pool table, so there will be areal heating that can be used. The pad doesn’t really get very warm until there is weight on it, so the slate will heat up too.

9 Badtux { 11.16.13 at 1:00 pm }

Bryan, I used to ride motorcycles. In all weather. Back in the day, we deconstructed electric blankets and used the wires inside to make heated motorcycle gear. This being before there was such a thing as off-the-shelf electrically heated motorcycle vests and jackets. It’s all low voltage low current stuff, and the wires are actually insulated. We ran’em on 12 volts with rheostats to control the heat. Yes, they got wet sometimes. As long as the rheostat didn’t get wet (easily managed with a plastic sandwich bag and rubber band), you were fine. If the rheostat got wet it might short out and then you’d pop the fuse you put inline to handle that eventuality, but you’d *still* be fine.

Modern electric blankets with the electronic controls use PWM (pulse-width modulation) to adjust the heat rather than a rheostat, but are similarly low voltage and made of insulated wires. The only thing that happens if a cat pees on it while you’re sleeping under it is that you get wet :).

Hipparchia, a biker friend who came over to my place to work on his bike once said of TMF, “that’s not a cat, that’s a small panther!” But he is 100% pure alley cat. Hybrid vigor, indeed :). As seems the case with your brood and mischief, it seems. (TMF is lazy and his mischief extends only to shredding the toilet paper roll in the bathroom when he’s annoyed with me).

10 Bryan { 11.16.13 at 4:05 pm }

That information is comforting, Badtux, and I may use it if it gets really cold again, but I have always preferred to sleep on electric blankets instead of under them. That just seems to work better for me.

11 Badtux { 11.16.13 at 11:42 pm }

They actually make heated mattress pads designed to be underneath your fitted sheet. It has the advantage that the electric elements are underneath a thicker amount of padding so it doesn’t feel like you’re sleeping on a bunch of wires. My foam mattress already sleeps warm and I’ve never had to turn up my electric blanket past 5 (it goes to 9) so I never bought the mattress pad.

12 hipparchia { 11.17.13 at 7:14 pm }

(TMF is lazy and his mischief extends only to shredding the toilet paper roll in the bathroom when he’s annoyed with me).

I took the toilet paper off the roller and leave it sitting on the counter (or anywhere else), the cats only enjoy shredding it when it’s held captive, apparently because now they leave it alone.

the problem here with electric blankets (or mattress pads) isn’t the possibility of cats peeing on the wires especially, it’s that any wire plugged into the wall is a chew toy, much like the toilet paper on the roller, I guess.

13 Badtux { 11.17.13 at 8:09 pm }

My toilet paper hasn’t been on a roller for years, Hipparchia. But if TMF gets annoyed enough with me, he’ll dig it out of where I’ve stashed it (between a box of kleenex and the wall) and shred it anyhow.

If any of my cats were electric wire chewers I would be in dire trouble, because I have sufficient electric wires connecting my computer gear together to be worthy of electric utility status…

14 Bryan { 11.17.13 at 9:56 pm }

I’m fortunate that none of my crew have ever chewed on wires, not even Ringo who has declared war on all of the strings attached to toys – she has not interest in what ever is on the end of the string, just the string itself.

The thing about the electric blanket vs the mattress pad is that I own an electric blanket and would have to buy a heated mattress pad.