Both cats have been begging for food all weekend. For Linus, this takes the form of a waggle-sprint into the kitchen any time he notices one of us looking at him, as in ‘Look at me, owners, going to the kitchen in a hurry! Because I am ASSUMING you’re going there, too, to FEED me.’ For Mia, it takes the form of a lot of slithering around the bases of the kitchen stools while making a sound like the wreck of five meow-trains.

The weird thing is, they have food. A whole bowl of it, which, after comparing notes yesterday, Steve and I realized neither one of us had filled all weekend. It’s the same brand I always buy them except for that one … little … change …

It’s the “lite” option.

They have rejected this lite option with a team effort (their only team effort to date, aside from their team efforts-to-drive-us-insane-with-hiss-scratch-banshee-noise-scrabble-fighting, of course) of delusion: ‘Food? What food? I do not see any food in this bowl.’

For Linus, this is another in a series of disappointing rejections of our attempts to improve his health. A lot like the time we bought him the prescription diet food (yes, as in, the vet had to provide this food, and each week it cost us roughly as much as our own groceries for a month) for months and months, and he lost … get ready … one-tenth of a pound. Sigh. Or the time the vet, in response to my concerns about Linus’s joints, advised that we give him glucosamine pills. Shoving pills down Linus doesn’t work, and since Linus doesn’t want to eat anything besides dry cat food—anything, say, you might be able to hide a pill in, like tuna or cheese—we tried hiding it in his food dish. He responded by eating every single morsel of food and leaving the pill all alone in the bowl. So I ground it up and sprinkled it on his food. He cleverly took to shaking the morsels between his teeth before eating them, dusting the linoleum with glucosamine.

It appears we will have to give up on Nutro-Max “Lite,” as well. Linus continues as of this posting to telepathically plead for real food, staring intensely into my brain. And last night, he foraged around our room, managing much to our amazement to open the sticky, super-magnetized closet door.

Mia, meanwhile, has only stepped up the foraging that is her usual habit. She has always loved leather. Mm, leather licking, yum. She has licked bald spots on many a leather or suede shoe, and once, investigating a strange noise in the closet, I found her upright on her hind legs among the hanging clothes, guiltily licking the back of my leather jacket.

This morning, she has attempted to nibble off a piece of the straps to my bag (I’ll admit, they do look a lot like beef jerky), licked the shiny varnished knobs of the footboard of the guest-bed, been shooed more than once from gnawing at the corner of the screen of this very laptop, and, in her most pathetic attempt to find nourishment yet, tried to eat the arm of my wooden desk chair. Not that Mia needs the lite food. She’s all ribs these days. I guess a lifetime of eating mostly rubber bands and houseplants has made her into something of a waif. In any case, I am off to the pet store soon to buy these cats some fatty food so they will leave me and my home furnishings alone.