Is There a Lamps Anonymous?

I'm sure everyone is desperate to know what's new with Maud these days. (And you wouldn't believe the number of hits I get a week for "cat q-tip orgasm.")

We did get her spayed, and it was traumatic. For me. She was fine. But when I went to pick her up, the vet handed me a sheet saying that she shoud have no water for the first day, no food for the next, and should not be allowed to jump or walk around or go up or down any stairs for at least two weeks.

Okay, she lives for those things. They are the whole reason for her existence. Food, water, and jumping up on things. And knocking shit over. The vet didn't say anything about that, but since all our stuff is kept up on things (tables, shelves, etc.) she's out of luck. And the only way we could keep her from jumping up on things (since there are things in every single room. We don't have space to have a room that just has, you know, air in it) was to lock her in a little kitty cage. For two weeks.

We decided to see if she coud be trusted to not jump up on stuff. She jumped on the table. She ran down the stairs. We tried locking her in the bathroom, and she jumped on the radiator and the tiny little shelf that used to hold glass bottles and shells and things until she knocked them all down.

We gave up. Our concern for her wellbeing and the state of her stitches was less powerful than our wish to avoid hearing her howling for two weeks because she was stuck in a tiny cage.

Anyway, she's fine. She pulled the stitches a little, but they did eventually heal up, and though her belly is taking forever to grow all its hair back, she's as active and lovingly bitey as ever. Now we're just waiting for her to settle ino the post-spay phase and become a lazy little lump.

It hasn't happened yet. Guy is most distressed by her habit of knocking over anything that has liquid in it, and is on a mission to make sure that we all gulp down our beverages as fast as we can because Maud might get them--a strategy that works really well with coffee and makes me hyper for the rest of the day.

I, on the other hand, would be fine if she would just FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE THE LAMPS ALONE.

Maud has an addiction. She loves lamps. Specifically, she loves clawing them and knocking them over. The problem is, I too love lamps, almost as much as I love glassware, and there are a lot of lamps in our house. And while Guy can shrug and say "hey, there's a weight on the bottom there, she can't hurt it, stop yelling at her because I'm missing Xander being funny," I can't, because I love almost all of these lamps (there's one she's welcome to) and they are not allowed to break.

We have to refill the special Maud-punishment-spray-bottle a lot these days.

So if anyone knows of a twelve steps program for cats, I would be most grateful.