I've Got Big Bags

We’re trying to put Midgie on a diet.

Midgie came to us from the pound, and we don’t know a whole lot about her life prior to being picked up by the humane society.  I’m guessing it wasn’t happy and that it involved a great deal of hunger.  She’s still, 6.5 years later, pathetically grateful to be here, and she’s still ferociously aggressive about her food – or at least as ferociously aggressive as a cat with no teeth can be.

For one thing, we finally had to separate her food from Mithra’s because otherwise Midgie would just guard the bowl and not let Mithra eat.  We even had to set up two water bowls.

For another thing, we’ve had to ration their time to eat as well.  Most cats – such as Mithra – will eat until they are full and then go do something else, and they therefore tend to keep a fairly constant weight to them.  Midgie will eat until there is no food left, which means she tends to inflate like the national debt after yet another shortsighted giveaway to the already wealthy.

This is not good, for cat or country.

Lately we’ve noticed that even these restrictions are not really helping.  But this is MURCA, which means that there are roughly a hundred million different kinds of cat food available for every specific cat-owner need.  One of these varieties is basically diet cat food – long on bulk and short on calories, designed to fool your cat into thinking that she’s full even as she slowly loses weight.  Silly cat!  So easily fooled!  I’m glad nobody has thought to try this with human food.

What?

Anyway, I bought a small bag of the stuff a while back, thinking that if Midgie didn’t like it I wouldn’t be stuck with a ton of it going to waste.  Really, though, who was I kidding?  She hoovered it up without a second’s hesitation and asked for more.  Finicky, she is not.

When the small bag ran out I went back to the Pet Food Warehouse Store to get another bag.  This time I figured I could get a bigger bag without worry.

You really need to envision the Pet Food Warehouse Store at this point.  It’s a cavernous place, roughly the size of Vatican City but with fewer tourists.  It has sealed grey concrete floors that can accommodate the fleets of dogs that are always welcome there without getting stained, and the unfinished commercial ceiling is roughly a half a mile above your head.  Floodlights beam down on you, even in the middle of the day, because otherwise you’d need a miner’s headlamp to get around.  It’s designed to make everything in it look small, in other words, and it works like a charm.

So I go in and start looking around for the specific food that seems to be working for Midgie, and eventually I find it.  There are three different bag sizes, and I do the math.  The big bag is in fact the most economical – something that is not always guaranteed, by the way.  Ketchup and mayonnaise, for example, are almost always more economical in the middle size for some reason.

Being the Smart Shopper that I am I hoist up the big bag and lever it onto the cashier’s counter, and – having paid for it – I hoist it back up and tumble it into the car.

It’s only when I get it back to the house that I realize I’ve been Warehoused.

This is a Tribal Size bag of cat food.  It could feed a horde of cats.  You could take this bag and a feline army and invade Russia in winter and come out well fed.  It’s very much like back when Tabitha was little and we’d go to Sam’s Club for toddler supplies and she’d convince us to buy her some M&Ms and we’d pick out what looked in the store like a reasonable sized bag of candy only to come home and realize that we’d ended up with a burlap sack of M&Ms straight off the freighter, not that anyone complained too hard about that, though, now that I think about it.

I’ve divvyed the cat food into four large plastic containers now and there is still more left in the bag.  This is the TARDIS of cat food bags.  We may never see the bottom of it.

Not sure this is really going to accomplish the goal, all this food, but we’ll see.