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System | Oct 23 2005

I neglected to mention that the cat is on a diet. It’s on a diet because it’s fat and at high risk of diabetes. This explains why it begs for food all the time: because it’s hungry.

The last time we weighed the cat, it had lost half a pound, a considerable sum for a cat. It has another pound and a half to go.

We weigh the cat at the beginning of each month. I’m the one who does it. First I weigh myself, then I stand on the scale holding the cat. K has taught me how to hold the cat, but I’m not so good at it and the cat squirms a lot. (K would do the holding except she doesn’t want to know how much she weighs.)

So far as I know, the cat has only been overfed twice since I’ve taken on the job of principal feeder. The first time was when my sister visited. My sister is, among other things, an animal communicator. I mention this because my sister fed the cat right after I did, presumably because the cat told her she was hungry.

The other incident of overfeeding was K’s mistake. We’re supposed to signal each other whenever we’ve fed the cat by turning around the cat’s dry food bag. (On the front the bag is says, “Last fed in the morning,” and on the back it says, “Last fed at night.”) One night K forgot to do this and I fed the cat a second time. I got upset about this because, as I explained it to K, I’m trying so hard.

Actually K has forgotten about the bag several times, so I’ve stopped believing what it says on the bag if there’s any chance K fed the cat. Instead I ask. This would seem to defeat the purpose of the bag-turning system (a system I created, by the way), but I still do it because the system works the other way around, letting K know when I’ve fed the cat—assuming that K remembers to look at the bag, which I don’t know that she does.

Funny thing. Though K has been away the last five days, I’ve still been turning the bag around.