Of course, that’s not news, to anyone who has ever had a cat. Cats are, by definition, neurotic, aren’t they? Look up ‘insane’ in any decent dictionary, and you see a cat. That’s why those women are known as ‘crazy cat ladies’, right?
Anyway, our cat (name of Lucky, short for Little Bastard’s Lucky He’s Still Alive), is currently tearing around my room for no apparent reason at all. He races across the floor, leaps up to my desk, and noses things off, making mewling noises the whole time. Then he tears across the room to my bed (where I’m sitting with my laptop writing this) and bounds up onto my headboard, going from there immediately to my shelf above my bed, where he then proceeds to nose things off to the floor, mewling the whole time. Then he zips to the window to sit there on the sill and stare out into the night, growling at nothing. We’re on the second floor — what can he be so agitated about? But this happens EVERY NIGHT. He’s completely destroyed the blinds – the slats are all warped and bent and broken from him peering through them. I’d keep them open, but I’d be hauled off for having a peep show, and blinds are cheaper than bail. Maybe I’ll get some metal blinds that won’t bend and break so easily.
At least he’s not laying claim to my laptop anymore. Used to be, laptops were his favorite napping place. If you had a laptop open, he’d hear it, or smell it, or something, and come running up, hop up onto the keyboard, do a very quick circle and plop down across the keyboard, staring at you as if daring you to make him move off of his nice, toasty butt-warmer. This was one of the reasons he got his full name, as you might imagine. Between this little game of his, and his little game of putting his toys in the toilet, or stealing toothpicks or nail files or Velcro strips that you have holding your computer wires in place, he certainly earned his name, thousands of times over.
Still, he’s very clever, and for every time he’s had us yelling at him for something felonious he’s done, there’ve been at least half a dozen times he’s had us laughing at his inventiveness. He opens drawers. He has one drawer that holds all of his kitty toys. When he wants a toy, he goes and opens that drawer, fishes around in there for something that catches his interest, and takes off with it. Every couple of days, we go around collecting the toys he’s pulled out of the drawer.
He plays fetch. He just LOVES playing fetch with plastic flosser-type toothpicks. He’ll pull one out of the drawer, come up to one of us, and drop the toothpick in front of us, then hop down and look ready to pounce, eyes locked on the toothpick. We toss it, and he races over for it, bats it around a few times, and brings it back to us. Usually, the one who’s got their laptop open is the one he’ll bring the toothpick back to, unless he just plops down on their keyboard. Or he’ll bring the toothpick to one of us as we’re sitting reading in bed, and want to play fetch for something like ten or fifteen minutes (which is an eternity for cats’ attention spans), and all the while we’re torn between wanting to enjoy his playing with us and wanting to get back to the book before we lose the flow of the story. Or wanting him to just stop playing already so we can get back to sleep, doesn’t he realize it’s 3:30 in the morning, why’s he want to wake us up to play fetch NOW?
He puts things into other things, and takes them out again. He reminds us of that scene in the old Winnie the Pooh movie, where it’s Eeyore’s birthday, and Pooh gives him a pot full of honey (except he ate the honey, so Eeyore got an empty honeypot) and someone else gives him a balloon (except the balloon popped, so Eeyore got a scrap of broken balloon), and Eeyore was so thrilled, because he was having so much fun putting the popped scrap of balloon into the empty pot and taking it out again. Lucky would play the ‘in-and-out’ game with his beloved toothpicks and our shoes. Of course, after ten or fifteen minutes, he’d get bored of the game, and leave his toothpick in the shoe and go wander off to nose things off of shelves, for a change.
One night, he discovered that, if he nosed everything off of one particular shelf in my sister’s bookcase, he could then get under the shelf and shoulder it up and it would fall on the floor, too! Oh, joy! A new game! After waking her up three or four times (and her cursing and shouting waking up the other two of us sisters), he miscalculated his shoulder shove, and the shelf came down on top of him instead of down to the floor, pinning him underneath. He wasn’t hurt, but he quit shoving the shelf out of the bookcase after that. Still, she’s removed that shelf and hasn’t put it back in anywhere else (it’s adjustable, and obviously rather a loose fit).
I have to find my camera, so I can post pictures of our crazy cat, Lucky. He really is adorable, and it’s a good thing he is, too, or he’d have been feline fricassee long since!
