my self-indulgent cat blog
Oct. 27th, 2006 01:19 pmSo we (and I use the term "we" loosely, because its like pulling teeth to get him to express an opinion) picked out a cat and adopted him two weeks ago tomorrow.
Sammy, the cat, caught my attention because he was labeled a maine coon mix on petfinder. I don't think any of us are convinced that he actually has any maine coon heritage, but he's certainly large, and has a huge fluffy tail. At the Humane Society, he seemed curious to explore once out of his cage, but didn't have any personality to speak of. We brought him home, and introduced him to the apartment, and he seemed a little freaked out. That lasted about 3 hours. Every day since then he's been more active, and more athletic. He is the superman of cats, able to leap tall buildings of cat furniture in a single bound.
Sammy can entertain himself for hours. He is fascinated by the shadows in the apartment, and I hope he has an active imagination, because he seems to expect them to not just move, but respond to his actions. Yesterday, he found a 6" screw by the television, and dropped it into a box, then spent the next 10 minutes perched on the edge of the box trying to fish it back out. This morning while I was getting ready for work, he sprinted from the front door of the apartment to the window in the back of the bedroom and back, over and over.
Sammy and Boyfriend have invented a version of fetch, where Boyfriend holds a cat toy above the top perch on the cat furniture, and Sammy runs up to catch it, and then carries it back down and drops it, so he climbs back up and get it again. This amazes me, because it is the only time Sammy will drop the toy. After a couple hours, on the first day, of us pulling it out of his paws so he could chase it again, he discovered he could wrap himself up in the cord so we couldn't get it back without physically untangling him from it.
Sammy is, not surprisingly, strongly nocturnal. We've lured him out of the worst of it by keeping him active in the evenings before we go to sleep. However, he still wakes up either at 2 or 6 in the morning, and comes into the bedroom, sits on my head and purrs. He doesn't want to be held, petted, fed, or played with, because we've tried all those. He just wants to sit there and purr like a motorboat, which is ingenious really, because there's no way we're going to train him out of being content. We can discourage him from attacking us, but no one in their right mind is going to try to train their cat not to be friendly.
He is definitely the most well-adjusted and catlike cat that I have ever spent time with, and certainly the friendliest one I've ever owned. I am endlessly fascinated by him, and can spend hours watching him entertain himself, which is I guess not saying much considering some of the things that fascinate me. His adoption was definitely the best $85 I've ever spent (which is now, of course, like $500 in miscellaneous cat supplies, but it's still up in the top 10)
Sammy, the cat, caught my attention because he was labeled a maine coon mix on petfinder. I don't think any of us are convinced that he actually has any maine coon heritage, but he's certainly large, and has a huge fluffy tail. At the Humane Society, he seemed curious to explore once out of his cage, but didn't have any personality to speak of. We brought him home, and introduced him to the apartment, and he seemed a little freaked out. That lasted about 3 hours. Every day since then he's been more active, and more athletic. He is the superman of cats, able to leap tall buildings of cat furniture in a single bound.
Sammy can entertain himself for hours. He is fascinated by the shadows in the apartment, and I hope he has an active imagination, because he seems to expect them to not just move, but respond to his actions. Yesterday, he found a 6" screw by the television, and dropped it into a box, then spent the next 10 minutes perched on the edge of the box trying to fish it back out. This morning while I was getting ready for work, he sprinted from the front door of the apartment to the window in the back of the bedroom and back, over and over.
Sammy and Boyfriend have invented a version of fetch, where Boyfriend holds a cat toy above the top perch on the cat furniture, and Sammy runs up to catch it, and then carries it back down and drops it, so he climbs back up and get it again. This amazes me, because it is the only time Sammy will drop the toy. After a couple hours, on the first day, of us pulling it out of his paws so he could chase it again, he discovered he could wrap himself up in the cord so we couldn't get it back without physically untangling him from it.
Sammy is, not surprisingly, strongly nocturnal. We've lured him out of the worst of it by keeping him active in the evenings before we go to sleep. However, he still wakes up either at 2 or 6 in the morning, and comes into the bedroom, sits on my head and purrs. He doesn't want to be held, petted, fed, or played with, because we've tried all those. He just wants to sit there and purr like a motorboat, which is ingenious really, because there's no way we're going to train him out of being content. We can discourage him from attacking us, but no one in their right mind is going to try to train their cat not to be friendly.
He is definitely the most well-adjusted and catlike cat that I have ever spent time with, and certainly the friendliest one I've ever owned. I am endlessly fascinated by him, and can spend hours watching him entertain himself, which is I guess not saying much considering some of the things that fascinate me. His adoption was definitely the best $85 I've ever spent (which is now, of course, like $500 in miscellaneous cat supplies, but it's still up in the top 10)