Our cat...

We have a very interesting cat. She's just over 5 years old, a grey and white fuzzball. She's on the small side for a cat, but a bit paunchy. We can only take so much whining every time we walk into the kitchen before we give in and give her her all-natural snacks. We made it a week. Once. I think we were out of the snacks though...

The only thing the cat isn't is docile. Lap cat does not apply. She does join us on the bed but mostly it's to suck our heat or clean herself. Loudly. At 3 am. I had no idea how loud claw licking could really be.

My attitude toward her is in constant flux. One moment I appreciate her company, another I'm grating my teeth at the pulled threads in our bedspread quilt or sighing as I pick yet another cat hair off myself, and other times I'm simply amazed at how much she lives up to her 'tardo nickname.

Yes, 'tardo. It's not P.C. in the slightest. She's not human. And she's definitely not bright. I'm sticking with it.

Part of it's amusement at cat quirks. They focus on movement. So it's very easy to completely enthrall her with a tiny bit of light, or flipping the pages of a book, or putting your hand under the covers. But the rest is all her. We've always laughed and sighed at her seeming inability to control her own claws. She extends them, gets them stuck, then seems to forget she has the capacity to retract them so she can move freely. She gets stuck in carpet, in sheets, in the stuffed dog in her cat bed...but none of it compares to her recently aquired ability to get her claws stuck...to her own claws.

She's decided in the last few days, for efficiency sake, maybe, that she's not going to lick one paw at a time anymore. She's going to put her front paws together and lick them at the same time. You can see the realization dawn. At first she keeps licking, while slightly tugging. The tugging begins to steadily overtake the cleaning as she pulls her linked paws closer and closer to her body in the attempt to separate them. You'd think she'd get better at the separation or even learn not to link them but instead she's trending the opposite way...

I really want to 'lolcat' her...


more cat pictures