Mumbling Madly

Hobbes is the first cat I have ever met who really, really, likes to lick stuff. She’s into licking plastic bags, price tags, garbage cans, your face…certain things just set her off and she’s licking manically like her life depends on it. This is a picture of her licking the fold out tag of my Levis…you know how companies like to attach a product brochure instead of a simple price tag? Well, Levis is no exeption. We actually have footage of her manically licking this Levis brochure for Girl’s jeans, and than several months later Josh bought a pair. So of course we baited her with the tag off his Levis and she ate it right up.
I’m actually having big problems with Hobbes…she keeps escaping. We have a very nice (well, maybe not NICE) fenced in backyard filled with tall grasses and weeds for our cat to romp in. Now this is for her own good, there are several very busy streets nearby and we live next to a parking lot and a gas station. Can’t a cat see this is for her own good? She’ll have none of it. Since we moved here she has been imbarking on Operation Jump The Fence. She has gotten stuck trying to scale the fence twice. Both times I’ve come outside and heard this pitiful meowing and rescued her. Usually she’s balanced, pricariously, on top of the rickety fence in a way that prevents her from going up or going down. The second time I had to literally pry her off the fence, because her claws were so deeply imbedded into the wood. Both times I have (naively) thought she had learned her lesson and would never go near the fence again. WRONG.
Yesterday was no exeption…I thought after her second terrifying rescue the days of climbing the wooden fence were over and I let her outside. An hour goes by and Josh asks: “Where’s Hobbes?” He found her wandering around behind the Laundromat. She scratched him during the rescue mission. Damn Cat. So now we’re debating tossing a little barbed wire on top of the fence, see if that deters her.