I've created this journal to talk about my pets, and to keep an archive of my stories and memories. This journal is primarily for me, but feel free to add it to your friends list if you are so inclined.

When Kaia was younger, she was very, very feisty. She played aggressively and hard. She is also a very smart cat. She had a favorite toy, which we called "Ball" which was a rubber ball with mylar streamers. She would work herself so hard chasing that thing that she could barely walk and she would pant for the next half hour, if we let her. Usually we would put Ball away before she got that worn out though. We had to put Ball away, because if she found it she would have eaten it. We also had to keep moving the hiding place, because she would eventually find it. She learned how to open a kitchen drawer to get it out, for example.

When you got Ball out, she knew. I don't know if she could hear it, or smell it, or what, but if you put it in your pocket or under your shirt, and came into the room, she woudl run over to you, meowing and meowing and sniffing you all over looking for Ball.

When you put Ball away, she would follow you around a bit, complaining, and then she would go into wherever you had been, and meow and meow looking for it. For a good 20 minutes.

She was an excellent hunter...the sort of cat who would chase the mailman if we let her outside. I bet she could catch birds mid-flight 9 out of 10 tries. Fortunately, all she ever got to catch was moths.

To illustrate her methods and skill, here is a comparison:
Ding and Kaia were on the floor in front of the couch. I had one of those "fishing rod" toys, a long stick with a string and a bunch of feathers at the end. I'd wave it around first for one, then the other, back and forth so they both got turns. Ding isn't the brightest cat in the universe. She is very, very sweet, but a bit awkward and a bit ... well the first part about her not being bright is dead on. When it was her turn, she would flail wildly, up on her hind legs, standing up batting in all directions, leaping into the air, twisting around, falling over, and being generally and ineffectually acrobatic. I think she may have caught it once or twice total. She had a great time, though, and she had no idea that she sucked.

Contrast that with Kaia's playing: She would crouch down a bit, totally still. Just her eyes and sometimes her head moving to follow the toy, no matter how excitingly we made it fly and flop around. She would wait until she was ready, then she would move, like a spring uncoiling, lightning fast and deadly accurate. The next thing anyone knew, she had the thing in her mouth and was trying to drag it off under the coffee table. It was neccessary to go and pry it out of her mouth, because if you pulled on the string, she would clamp down and back away from you, never letting go. She broke the string several times doing this, and once the plastic rod even snapped. She caught the toy almost every time, in one move.

She also liked to play tag. The other cats didn't like this game, because she scared the crap out of them, so she played it with us. She would initiate the game by coming up to you, then running away, and looking back to see if you were following. Then you chased her, fast as you could, to the other end of the house. She would flee, and usually go right to some corner. Then she would turn around and pause. This was your cue to run. You would run to the other end of the house, and she chased hot on your heels. When you were cornered, you turned around and paused, and she ran away. She could play this game for hours.

She was pure muscle, built more like a wild cat than a domestic cat. She was strong and tough. She liked to beat up dogs (we occassionally had dogs at our house, and once we dog-sat a german shepherd/chow mix for a month and she trapped that poor thing in the kitchen more times than I can count) and she would break toys within days of them being purchased.

...but then she had a gentle side.

She knew what babies were. When we rescued two kittens from a nearby parking garage, she was gentle with them. When we got a baby ferret, she absolutely went nuts. She LOVED Spot. Spot LOVED her. They were best buddies. Spot liked to roughhouse. Kaia liked to roughhouse. Kaia was strong. Spot was unbreakable. It was a match made in heaven.

But Spot was a baby, and was a lot smaller than Kaia. We were amazed at how she toned down her play to deal with Spot... she totally pulled her punches, she ran slower, she let Spot "get her" sometimes when she could easily have gotten away. Spot would go nuts as ferrets do... hopping around backwards and flopping around making little ferret noises.

Probably the most disturbing part was that Kaia would carry Spot around. Ferrets, as you know, are very flexible. They tend to be very limp when carried. Dangling from a cat's mouth, they look fairly dead. Even worse was that Kaia sometimes picked up Spot by the scruff of his neck... but other times she picked him up by his throat. Spot didn't really care one way or the other. He didn't mind much, though. It was quite disconcerting to see Kaia stroll through the room with a limp ferret hanging from her mouth by its throat, though...

...

Nowadays, Kaia is about 10 years old. She has fattened up, mellowed out, and settled down. She is still strong, still accurate, but she likes to lay around more than chase things. She has become very snuggly and demanding. If she wants to snuggle with you, she wants to snuggle NOW and you drop what you are doing and snuggle or *else*.

Sparky was lying down, and he just farted really loud. It must have surprised him because he whipped his head around to stare at his butt. Then he sniffed a big, and kept staring. It was really funny!

I had a cat named Antoine who loved to watch our pet rats (when we had rats). When we had a litter of little baby rats, he was especially attentive. He would sit and watch them for hours. They were still pink and had their eyes closed...

One day I heard Antoine's "tattle" meow (he was always the one to let us know that another cat had done something wrong, like pulling the screen out and escaping [our cats are all indoor]) coming from the room with the rats. I went in to investigate and I saw something horrible.

Antoine was sitting above a little pink thing on the carpet. Oh god, I thought, he's killed one of the babies! He sniffed it and meowed again. I went over, not really looking forward to cleaning up dead baby....

...but it wasn't dead. Not even hurt. It had apparently fallen out of the cage and Antoine was very upset about it! I put it back in with its mom and Antoine took up his spot next to the cage and went back to watching 'his' rats. He used to put his nose right up to the wires of the cage, and the rats would come over and they'd touch noses, sniffing each other. He never once batted at the cage. I think he loved them.

Sadly, Antoine ran away the day before we moved from Arizona to Virginia. We lived in a fairly enclosed apartment complex, and I told all of the neighbors, so I think there is a good chance that someone took him in, but we miss him a lot :(

Were she not an indoor cat, our house would be buried under a mountain of dead mice, birds, deer, etc. I recall once seeing her peering into the rat cage. It made us nervous until we realized that the focus of her intense gaze was not the rat, which was moving around. No, her gaze was fixed on the Dorito that we'd put in the cage as a special treat.

Ding is possibly the world's sweetest cat. She is also, however, very very timid. We like to say that she is very fierce and ferocious, and very brave. I think it makes her feel better *wink*

Despite her extreme scaredy-cat nature, she is capable of overcoming it in the name of love. Her close buddy, Milo, had been spayed. Milo was very butch, and seemed to take great pride in acting tough and mean (but she really wasn't, it was all an act) and when she came home from the vet, she was not in a mood to be social. She hung out in a corner in the kitchen, so we put down a towel there for her and some water and food nearby and we tried to stay out of the kitchen. Every once in a while she would growl or make some noise.

Ding was extremely concerned. Milo was acting weird, and she smelled weird, and she was staying in the kitchen. Ding loved Milo very much, and she really REALLY wanted to see what was wrong with Milo (she probably wanted to give her head-bonks and groom her and make it all better, knowing her) but every time she went into the kitchen, Milo growled and hissed.

As I've said, Ding is easily frightened. We used to make jokes like "oh no! A dust bunny! Run, Ding, run!!" and you can well imagine what a hissing cat would do to her.

She ran away the first couple of times, but always went right back in after a minute or two. You could literally see the her building up the courage to face Milo. She was absolutely determined to find out what was wrong.

She went back into the kitchen, and Milo hissed. Ding flinched, but held her ground. Milo started to growl a warning, but Ding started to creep forward in extreme slow motion. Every time Milo hissed, Ding closed her eyes and flinched, but she kept creeping forward. She was obviously terrified, but she just had to see what was wrong with her friend. Cute as it was, we really needed Milo to have her privacy, so we picked Ding up and brought her back into the living room. We had to do this several times over the couple of days that Milo was recovering, because Ding was very persistant.

* * *

Ding was the next to get spayed. We had them spayed fairly close together, and in a hurry. Something quite disturbing had happened and we didn't want it to happen again. You see, they'd both gone into heat at the same time.

If you have ever experienced an indoor cat in heat, you know what a trial it is for the human residents. Yeowling was only part of it. There was also the very creepy attempted seduction. Having your sweet, innocent kitty back up into your leg, then look over her shoulder at you with that "do me now" look in her eye is just plain disturbing.

Then they discovered the joys of lesbian oral sex. They would lay on the couch in a 69 position and go at it. Again, these were my innocent babies, and I didn't want to see them like this!

One night we were in bed when we heard a really strange noise. Thud-rattle.....scrabble scrabble scrabble...thud. Over and over. I went into the living room to inspect, and what I found was nothing short of hilarious.

Ding was apparently scoping out the vast and hunk-filled world of Out Of The Door. Our front door had a grid of 6 small windows at the top, each surrounded by a thin frame of moulding. Ding was jumping up and grabbing onto that tiny ledge with her front paws (Thud, rattle) and peering out the window. Her back feet scrabbling against the door made the next sound. Slowly her strength would give out and she would strain to keep looking out the window as she steadily lost ground... then she would drop to the floor (thud!). She would do this over and over. She really wanted those hunky outdoor cats.

* * *

When Ding was spayed, she chewed off several of her stitches. We called the vet and they said that we could buy a $9 paper collar for her to wear, or we could cut the bottom out of a margarine tub and use that instead. We had an empty "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" tub and so we cut the bottom out and slipped it over her head. From the front, she looked like a cat with a circular thing around her head. From the back, she looked like a cat body with a margarine head. We took to calling her ButterHead.

She looked so silly that we couldn't help giggling. She was hugely insulted by this. You could see it in the way she drooped and looked at us with those hurt eyes... Finally she gave in and you could sort of see it... the "well this is staying, so I may as well get on with my life" and she started to try to groom herself. Her first attempt at cleaning her shoulder resulted in her licking the margarine tub, so she decided to do her back feet instead. She stretched that right back leg forward, but it was hopelessly out of reach. She strained, her toes splayed, her tongue sticking out as far as it could, but it wasn't gonna happen. You could see the defeat in her eyes when she finally just hunched down and started to sulk.

She had the Butter Head for about a week, and during that time we somehow decided that she would look cute as a bunny. She was sort of bunny-like anyway, and we frequently referred to her as one. So I cut out some paper rabbit ears and we taped them onto the margarine tub so they stood up. She looked SO DARN CUTE that way. It would send us into hysterics every time we saw her.

She was very relieved when she finally got the darn thing off.

Pics of the Butter Head are here