Tag Archives: Sparky

Life with Sparky: Little Things

Little things have become more difficult since Sparky came to live in our home with us.
Things like walking down a hall without being tripped,
searching for something that fell on the floor,
or putting clean sheets on the bed.

Each week as I tug the sheets off the bed to wash them, Sparky is right there with me,
examining each sheet,
wondering why it is moving,
and racing to catch the drooping ends as I carry them to the washing machine.

He’s curious.
He’s spunky.
He’s feisty.

I get that.

But when I return later, with clean sheets to stretch across the mattress, it is a different story.

Sparky loves dark places.

When I toss the sheet up so I can pull the corners around the corners of the mattress, there is a lump in the middle, chasing after the loose ends.

Sparky crawls under each sheet as I try to spread it flat across the bed.

Then comes the quilts. He lies on the top sheet and lets me spread the warm quilt and the bedspread quilt over him, leaving a nice lump on my otherwise smooth bed.

He’ll slide out from under the quilts in time to chase the edges of the pillow cases while I stuff pillows into them.

At last, the bed is made. It looks smooth and ready for me.
It must look good to Sparky, too. He’s laying in the middle of it.

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Life with Sparky: Screens

Sparky lies calmly on my lap, sleeping.
Until the phone rings.

It’s my daughter and grandson, calling on FaceTime.

Sparky hears the sound of people he doesn’t know and investigates. He looks in the front, he looks at the back. He doesn’t understand where the sound comes from and who are those people she is talking with?

When he first arrived, he would sit behind my computer. He liked the warmth of it.
But he’d hear my fingers bouncing on the keyboard and peek around.
His paws crept around.
And then, he’d pounce on me!

Later, he decided my keyboard is the place to sleep. He likes to lay on the keyboard close to the screen where he can change the pictures. Before I got a new computer, he managed to turn on the music almost every time.

I never did.
I’m not sure I knew where to do that.

Worst, he thinks his path into the room should include jumping onto my chair, walking across my keyboard, then on over toward Jack. Sometimes, he stops to sleep on Jack’s feet. Other times, he bounces off to play with his toys.

The problem is he always changes the document I’m working on. And when it’s taxes or a book, it can really cause problems. I’m learning to pick up my computer when he jumps up.

It was a big problem when he bumped the power cord out of my computer, and everything went off.
And I lost everything I was working on.
Because the computer battery died.
Good thing my new computer came!

Sometimes Sparky focuses on our television. It sits on a stand. He likes to jump up in front of the television and look at the picture.

He walks around it.
He knocks off the modem …
And the router.

Suddenly we don’t have internet service again!

Sparky!

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We Have a Problem

Early on, we knew we had a problem.

I walked into my closet to see a quilt I had stored on the top shelf now lying on the floor. The quilt, made by my mother, waits for a granddaughter to grow old enough to graduate or get married. I had to take a chair into the closet to get the quilt on the highest shelf.

Now it lay on the floor.

Sparky!

But how?

I watched him when we were there for the next day or so. It didn’t take long to learn how he did it.

He leapt up from the floor, or from my husband’s oxygen machine, crawled up the sleeves of Jack’s shirts, and on up to the shelf above the clothing.

Later, we found Sparky sleeping on the shelf.

We banned Sparky from our bathroom.

I walked into the guest bath not long after and found claw holes in the toilet paper he had unrolled, completely.

Enough!

He’d jump up on me and onto the counter by the sink. Once, I had to move him from the sink so I could wash my hands!

He’s banned from both bathrooms.

In the living room, Sparky climbed on top of the empty birdcage and starred at the moving ceiling fan.

That wasn’t going to happen.

I moved the birdcage outside. I can’t give it away yet. I can’t get another bird yet. So it sits on our back patio, waiting.

Meanwhile, Sparky jumps from the floor to the top of the printer, which rests on a bar stool. He sits on the back of my chair, higher than me.

Brat.

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