MY CAT’S BETTER THAN YOUR CAT

Cats Are Predictably Unpredictable

Who am I kidding! My cats are no different than your cats, your neighbor’s cats or even cats in foreign countries. Though I have found those in other countries speak a different cat language than those in the U.S.

The din from all of you disagreeing whole-heartedly with me is deafening.

But admit it, all cats are predictably unpredictable, which is why I have selected that for this blog’s tag line.

If you have come to expect them to do something with regularity, they won’t. Just when you figure out what food she likes, she turns up her nose, tries to bury it and then turns and walks away in a huff. A few days later she is wolfing it down again.

If your cat is doing something silly or adorable, he will stop the minute he sees the camera. But, unexpectedly and on occasion a cat will come along who doesn’t do this. Our Mauricio is one of those. He is an attention “hound” and a chance to pose offers an opportunity for the ultimate amount of  “me” time.

 

 

If your cat has been curling up to snooze in the same spot for the last couple of weeks, he will vacate it for a new one never to return to the original. But, if you try to guess where he will perch next…good luck!

If she constantly plays with the same toy, dragging it around the house, taking it to bed and attacking any person or kitty who picks it up, again she will abandon it for a different one.

In the same vein, when we ride our tandem bike I always count the kitties I see along our route. Some of these I will see day after day and year after year and then suddenly one will disappear. Of course, some do move away or pass away, but they are just as likely to reappear weeks, months or even years later. I hadn’t seen Emma, a neighborhood calico, in at least three years and now I am seeing her with regularity. (Sometimes I can make cats along the route reappear. If I disparage one for not being around for a ridiculous amount of time, it will show up on that exact day.) I am always excited when a new cat pops up, but the likelihood exists that years can go by before I see it again.

Reader Challenge

As much as they are capricious, however, all kitties will do much the same things at sometime during their lives. I challenge any readers who have cats to let me know if their cats have never done any of the following things:

 

• Blocked your view of whatever you were reading. Almost any one of our cats could serve as the poster puss in support of illiteracy.
• Stripped the leaves and flowers off your house plants. We haven’t had a house plant since Steamer ate every last leaf off of a topiary teddy bear. In the picture below you can see how difficult it can be to have fresh flowers in our house.
• Shoved everything off a table or countertop. I was fortunate that the vase pictured here was inexpensive and easily replaceable by a similar one. As a novice cat owner, I was devastated when Steamer knocked an antique, amethyst glass vase (an anniversary gift from Tom) off of a window sill. We had no idea that cats enjoyed sitting in the window and “reading the news.”

 

 

• Shredded or chewed up the newspaper, wrapping paper, napkins, styrofoam peanuts or anything that leaves bunches of small pieces to clean up.

 

• Drunk out of the toilet, the sink faucet, your glass or any scummy puddle they could find.

 

• Helped out while you were working on the computer.
• Helped you make the bed or change the sheets.
• Burrowed down into a basket of clean, warm laundry.

This is a short list of a cat’s quirks and foibles. If your cat hasn’t done any of these things, he will. And you can expect that it will be when you least expect it. After all, a cat’s main goals, if he actually has any, are to keep us guessing and to prove us wrong always!

 

Tags: AstridCatnipFionaMauricioNip HeadsSteamerTom