Items my cat thinks are her dead kittens

This is Annie.

She has many annoying habits, but chief among them is the example I shall now relate. Late at night, usually when I am the only one awake and have retired to my Mac to bang out another lame weblog entry, she sits downstairs and yowls. Excessively, loudly. It's not quite as bad as the noise cats make when they are in heat, but it's close.

Part of it is that she thinks whenever she hasn't seen me for more than twenty minutes, that I should be feeding her. Something about me being on a different floor triggers that mode all the time. But at night, this attitude is combined with the feline instinct for dropping off dead things as gifts.

Naturally, there are no dead things in our house (well, only a few), so Annie has to play pretend and use whatever she can find.

Cat toys are a pretty common grab in this situation. Particularly larger ones like this mouse.

She will carry the item to an area where she expects me to walk... like the entry hall, or in our centralized kitchen. Then she yowls over it. Continuously.

Or this plushie banana.

There is something in her tone that always makes me think she is mourning a dead kitten. It seems too charged to be her just going through the motions of leaving a chewed mouse on the back doorstep like some friendly stray.

Then again, this is why I can't plug in an electric cord without feeling like I'm stabbing some surprised guy in the eyes.

This stuffed 20-sided die is rather big, but she'll carry it around and cry for it.

The kicker is that she knows she is irritating me. Whether her end goal is to get me to feed her, or if she genuinely is nuts, she knows the sound will get me to show up and that I will be grumpy.

So when she hears me set foot on the steps, she vanishes. By the time I make the ground floor, she is gone and the proxy corpse is abandoned on the floor. And I mean super-gone. Like, she dives into the basement.

This is the worst one, the little Venom toy. You may recognize this character from about six minutes of Spider-Man 3.

I hate finding Venom alone in a hallway.

So we try not to leave items like this lying around for Annie to use to her advantage.