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Goliath is a sleeping beauty, stretched out along my arm and contoured against my body. He keeps me warm with his soft fur. If I listen closely, I can hear him purr, a small purr for a cat his size. I’m more likely to hear his breathing than to hear him purr.

Sometimes we’ll stay like this all night, with me waking periodically to the warmth of him against me. Other nights, he can’t seem to get comfortable. So he’ll toss and turn and eventually leave, perhaps to come back a time or two to repeat the process.

There will be night when we don’t quite fit right, and his tail or paws will cover my face, and I’ll struggle to breathe. Sometimes our slumber will be broken by his brother, who unknowingly — or perhaps knowingly — walks over Goliath as he tucked under the covers.

Goliath is a sweetheart, who lets me pet him when he just wants to sleep. He tilts his head just right so I can scratch his chin or touch his ears.

He is, in almost every way, my sweet baby boy, momma’s cuddle bug.

Not the good kind like “I found $20 in my winter coat pocket” but the “Oh, shit! The condom broke type.”

Despite the fact that we were told. Despite the fact that we should not have taken him home otherwise. Despite the fact that the adoption center was billed for it..

Phantom is not fixed.

In hindsight, this explains everything (the aggression and yowling).  It also means there will be an end to the sleepless nights. However,  I now get to deal with the spraying because he’s gone into heat so the damage is already done. Luckily, it seems the adoption center will take care of it Tuesday/Wednesday but this is totally crappy in the meantime. I hate locking him in the bathroom at night but what else can I do?

I look forward to having my sweet, quiet, non-abuse kitty baby back.

In my case it’s technology and, sometimes, my kitty Phantom.

Not too long ago I asked for ideas for keeping him out of places and one response was to use double sided tape. Apparently cats don’t like the feeling of it on their paws and if you put it over the entrance to a place you want to keep them out of, it should help. Well, I went to the extreme when I used some double sided tape; I put a grid of the tape over our entire fireplace.

It didn’t work.

That’s right. When faced with this barrier, Phantom simply chewed through it and made a hole big enough for himself. Since then, we have resorted to zip tying the chain link metal “curtain” over the fireplace. This seems to have worked. But, it renders the fireplace completely useless. Pah!

I also needed suggestions for how to get the kitty to stop going places we don’t want him, like near the computer, behind the TV and on counters, tables and dressers. Ashe suggested I get a can of compressed air and this has actually worked really well. I’ve only had the air a few days and Phantom already knows not to fuck with me. If I even grab the can, he scrambles.

Still, if the cat can’t be kind of naughty, he tries to be really naughty. He is now spending time on top of the fridge. He originally went up there because he could smell a ziploc bag of treats I had. He proceeded to chew open the bag. Now, I tihnk he just likes being up that high and he reaches down to play with the magnets and papers on the freezer door. This is especially problematic because I can’t spray him very well up there and we moved everything to the freezer door because he was jumping to get everything on the bottom door from the floor. I guess no magnet is safe.

When it comes to technology, I really like my computer and my MP3 player and the internet but when it goes wrong, it’s so costly. I caught a trojan (W32.Renos) the other day which was redirecting my search results and slowed down my internet as well as blocking potentially helpful sites and webpages. It took over 2 days to finally find a trojan scanner which fixed it. I am very grateful to Dez for finding, downloading and sending me the program since I couldn’t fully utilize my internet.

A lot of people had the same trouble with Renos and similar trojans which fall into the family of Smitfraud. I downloaded/used at least a dozen programs and only 1 of them detected it. I even used tools specifically for these type of infections like SmitFraudFix which did not help. The program which finally did the trick is Simply Super Software’s Trojan Remover and I highly recommend it to anyone with Renos or a similar invasion.

I hope that anyone with this problem stumbles across my site and finds a solution that works for them.

There you have it, the things I love to hate.