Here’s where I come clean and tell you all that I’ve basically got a roommate. With the exception of a few nights here and there, Rick has been at my place pretty consistently since…well, now that I think of it, December. There was a bit of a learning curve for a while as we figured out what it was like to be around each other all the time, and Freddie had an especially tough time of things. Freddie is a cuddler, and while I don’t have a problem with him sitting on my lap, Rick does. He makes a lot of noise about “Lumpy” and “Fat lumps that lay on me” and there you have it. He’s settled down a lot lately, and I figured it was because he’s getting older and the kitten is finally growing up.

And then Rick went up to Pittsfield on Monday and Freddie was doing things he wasn’t supposed to every two seconds all night long until I was ready to kill him. I told Rick the cat had been acting up since he’d been gone, and he informed me that’s because I let the cat walk all over me, and that I need to get up and discipline him. I told him I was. He said “No, you have to discipline him in a way he understands. You start with snapping your fingers in his face. If he still acts up, you flick his ear. If he does it again, you give him a cat noogie. That’s the most severe thing he gets, and he doesn’t like it.”

I was laughing by this point. “I didn’t realize you had a punishment system complete with tiers of wrongdoing!” I said. Rick just said cryptically, “We’re developing a language.”

Apparently I need to learn a new language.

« »