Intelligence

Our cats are so darn smart.

They are bilingual. (We mostly speak to them in English, but occasionally I'll talk to them in the little bit of high school spanish I remember, thank you very much Senora Taylor. I'm trying to get Alex to teach them - and me - some German, but so far he's not cooperating.)

They can tell time.

Ah yes...they really can tell time.

They get their evening meal at 5:00. Around 4:45 or so, they begin their routine of hovering around, meowing occasionally, trying to lead the "feeder of the cats" to the box of Fancy Feast. Pepina especially, will walk in and around my legs, then walk in the direction of her food bowl. She'll stop, turn around to see if I'm following, then urge me forward.

It's truly entertaining to watch.

We have a pretty large clock above our fireplace. (It's 27" in diameter.) When I purchased the clock at the light place when I was selecting light fixtures for the house, the woman asked me if I had a large space to hang the clock. I told her I did. When our electrician brought everything here, he looked at the clock and shook his head. Apparently he also told Ted that I would probably be returning the clock because it was so big. Several weeks after moving in, we got the clock out and just leaned it on the fireplace mantel to see how it would look. Ted thought it was too big, so he took it down. (For the record, HE thought it was too big....I did not.) I purchased another clock somewhere else. It looked big enough at the store, but when I brought it home, it was way too small. Eventually I suggested he put the original clock back up. He did.

That's when he decided that it really wasn't too big after all. I told him that I could see it from the kitchen without my glasses on, so that was good. (I'm slightly near-sighted.)

It was a very involved procedure to get it hung in the exact right spot, but once it was up there, we were good to go.

Although I haven't seen the back of the clock because Ted was in charge of setting it, he told me it was unique. He said after you put the battery in, you punch in the time on the back, then the hands will turn rather quickly on their own until it gets to the desired time. If it takes 5 minutes to get to that time, the clock will add 5 minutes to the time you set it for. I thought that was pretty cool.

It also has another feature. It will automatically fall back an hour in the autumn, and go forward an hour in the spring. The internal workings of the clock are set to do this.

However, there's one little problem. Until last year the weekends of the time change were the last weekend in October and the first weekend in April. That's when our clock automatically changed. Last year, it became the first weekend in November and the second weekend in March. Why someone felt the need to change the dates, I don't know. But they sure didn't bother telling the inner workings of our Howard Miller clock, that's for sure.

Our clock changed last week. It's an absolute BEAR to take down, so we've spent a week looking at a clock with the wrong time. If we had changed it to the right time last Sunday, we would have had to change it again this weekend, and that just isn't feasible with this clock.

In other words, it's been a hour behind all week.

Getting back to our cats now... they have not bothered anyone about their dinner time all week. They look at the clock; they all do. They know when the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 5, it's time to eat. It's never gotten that far all week. According to the big clock, they've been eating at 4:00. Not ONE SINGLE TIME all week have they been chomping at the bit for dinner. In fact, they've looked downright surprised when they've been fed their evening meal.

Our cats are so darn smart.