Blur

Bongo on the go

Chair

It's all about the furniture. I brought this new chair into the house last night, and the cats immediately took it over as a multi-purpose feline jungle gym (Bongo) and lounging arena (Lola). At this rate, I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to use it. It looks really comfy though...

Luxury

There's a new perch in town...
It's built for one, but since Bongo and Lola have yet to master the concept of time share, reinforcements were necessary. With the help of a small coffee table and a stack of books, the window seat can now accommodate the combined weight of two luxuriating felines.

Walkabout

Lola escaped from the house the other day, and had a bit of an adventure. I sealed my reputation with my neighbors by walking through their back yards whistling "Happy Birthday" (the tune that normally brings her running) and crooning "Lola...Lola...Lola...Here KittyKittyKittyKitty" for close to ten hours.

I finally found her just before midnight, hiding in someone's side yard, sitting quietly on a small cement outcropping near a basement window. I approached her very slowly, and with lots of cajoling she finally took a few steps toward me and allowed herself to be picked up.

As soon as we got home, she went to her food dish and looked at me expectantly, apparently unfazed by the events of the day. After eating, she took up her favorite spot on the couch and sat there, looking rather contemplative.

Stupefaction

Bongo woke the neighborhood at 5:45 this morning, yowling mournfully by the window as though his heart had been broken by some Persian princess. Turns out, it was a 22-pound calico with a mangy tail, passing through the side yard. I got up, turned on a few lights, and gave Bongo a quick pat, hoping I could pull him out of his jag and go back to sleep. But his whiskers twitched and he carried on with his mewing and chirping and chattering as he continued to track the calico--a rather disgusting creature with a mud-caked tail and a lumbering gait. "Bongo, what the hell?" I hissed. He ignored me. Lola blinked disdainfully from the foot of the bed.

Finally, I fell back asleep and managed to squeeze in another hour and a half before the meows cut through my consciousness once again. It was 7:30am on a Sunday morning, and I was hungry for some form of revenge.

There is very little that can stupefy a cat, but I know of at least one thing. So I brewed some coffee and settled down in the living room with a bottle of bubble solution, and enjoyed the ensuing display of feline consternation, startlement, and cautious intrigue.

Glow

I don't know what's going on with Lola, but she's had such a glow about her lately...

Workbench

I suppose I should be flattered that any place I spend time is a place my cats want to spend time. But they seem to have taken over most of the space on my workbench, which kind of makes it just a bench. Or a large, industrial cat bed.

Spring

Yesterday was an exemplary spring day, and Bongo & Lola chose to spend it convalescing in bed. Perhaps they're exhausted from all the window-to-window bird watching they've been doing. Or perhaps they're overcome by the cyclical, repetitive nature of their days. Sleep, wake, kibble, nap, windowsill, nap, bath, nap, kibble, repeat.

I relate, which is why, whilst they slept, I looked at airfares online and daydreamed about the trip I'll be taking later this summer. I do have a destination in mind, but honestly, any change of scenery--even a trip to the blandest place I can think of--would get my lazy synapses firing again after that impossibly long winter.

Languor

Waking up from a long winter's nap...

Perch

I would imagine that living in the containment of a three-room apartment might get boring after a while. Bongo has taken to sitting on the windowsill and crying mournfully at sunup each day. Maybe I'm projecting, but it seems that this must come from some deep existential feline despair, borne of restlessness and a need to climb trees. Each time I hear that pitiful window-side meowing, I feel a mixture of guilt and irritation. It's not my favorite way to wake up each morning, and I've taken to throwing a small, decorative pillow at him (that's why they're called 'throw pillows', right?) to snap him out of it.

Then he'll scamper into the kitchen, crunch on some kibbles, and find an appliance to climb. These days, it's usually the heating unit, but sometimes it's the fridge top, from which he seems perfectly content to survey his surroundings for hours and watch for small and barely discernable movements in the room.

Cohabitation

No matter the angle, I can't seem to properly capture how cute this situation is. Bongo is sitting up, half-asleep, like an old man in a recliner. Lola is happy to be involved, even if just as a footrest.

Abundance

Lola is starting to look pregnant again. I have reduced her portions at mealtime, but it hasn't helped. Perhaps she's just destined to an extravagant girth. She's still plenty active, but she just lands a little (or a lot) harder when she jumps.

She has a somewhat frantic attitude toward food, and I sometimes wonder if it has to do with having lived an Oliver-Twist type lifestyle before I adopted her. It can't have been easy, scrounging in a dumpster for enough food to sustain her teenaged, pregnant body...

Heatseekers

The colder it gets, the closer the cats stick to one another--and to any warm, inert object they can find (radiators, sleeping humans, modems and routers...). Rather than tearing around the apartment or hanging out inside paper bags (fair weather pursuits), they now curl up on the couch together and take turns grooming each other.

Brothers

These photos came from Bruno (formerly Rabbit) and Rocco's new owner, who has been giving me regular updates on their progress. They are happy, healthy, and just took their first round of vaccinations like champs.


Brotherly regard, demonstrated while napping.

Two

The kittens have left the premesis.

The boys went to a new home together, and from all reports, they are having a great time. Their new owner sent me a batch of pictures today, which I will post here soon. Rabbit is now called Bruno, and his brother is Rocco--the perfect name for him.

The little girl, always the pioneer, went off to live in a beautiful farm house in Conway, where I hear she will soon be acquiring siblings. She left on Monday morning. It was sad to see her go, but the ensuing feeling of stillness and calm in the apartment has been quite novel.

Lola and Bongo are oddly unfazed by the household change. The only difference I've noticed in their behavior is that Lola has started to chase her tail (on me, in bed, at 5am each morning...) for the first time ever. I try to reason with her, but she just won't listen. She still thinks she can catch it.

I don't know for sure if this behavior has anything to do with the departure of her babies, but I do have a theory that with her new position as the youngest creature in the house, she now feels obligated to demonstrate her youth with playful antics. I totally understand. I do the same thing whenever I am in a room full of grown-ups.

Captains

Captains of the industry of cuteness.

Kibble

The kittens made their first foray into the world of kibble last night. It took a while for them to grasp that you only eat the contents of the bowl--not the bowl itself. Once they got the hang of it, however, the food disappeared fast.

The water bowl was another story. I'll just say that there was a lot of snorting and rearing involved.

Lola seemed a bit taken aback to see her babies eating from a bowl, but I think that once she's processed the situation, she'll be relieved that the onus of feeding is on someone else now.

Meanwhile, I'm trying (unsuccessfully) not to get too attached to the little monsters, who will be going off to their new homes within the next two or three weeks...

Rabbit

I got back from vacation yesterday. I was only gone a week, but it turns out to have been a pivotal seven days in the kittens' development. They are huge (relatively) and cat-like, and have completely foregone the cardboard box where they were born.

Now, they are explorers of the Underworld. Under the bed. Under the couch. Under the radiator. Underfoot...

This one is called Rabbit. You can't quite tell from the picture, but he has the hindquarters of a rabbit, and until recently, he dragged them around behind them in the most disconcerting way. I was actually starting to worry that he'd never walk like a normal cat, but he seems to have figured it out sometime in the past seven days. He now scampers around unhindered, just like the other two (who are as yet unnamed).

Faces

I really admire cats' ability to appear deadly serious one moment, and utterly ridiculous the next.

Fur

I try to imagine what it would be like to be dressed in fur on a day like today. It's seven thirty in the morning, and already the temperature is near 90 and forecasted to go up to 98. A skunk sprayed somewhere outside last night, and my window fan pulled the smell inside and filled the apartment with it. Bongo looks mildly disgusted and slightly intrigued. Lola doesn't seem affected, and neither do the kittens.

Awake

The kittens just slept for three days straight. It turns out they were building up to this.

Locomotion

Attempts at locomotion have begun. The kittens will push themselves up on trembling legs, dodder in mid air, take in the new vantage point for a moment, and then resume a prone position.

Nap, repeat.

On other fronts, Lola and Bongo have resumed their ultimate fighting, on a nightly and morningly basis. I am once again sleep deprived. But somehow, here in the midst of late spring, it doesn't bother me a bit.

Bellies

All of Lola's rotundness is gone, but the kittens have it in spades.

Project

This morning, Bongo was grooming the kittens so vigorously that the sound of it literally woke me up. Lola was sleeping peacefully at the foot of my bed, and didn't stir, even when I turned on the light and got up to go check on the kittens. There was so much slurping coming from the box, I was slightly alarmed by what I might find.

It was a festival of grooming! The kittens lay on their backs looking blissed out, while Bongo methodically licked at each of them with enough force to rock their little bodies back and forth. Everyone in the box seemed utterly entranced, but Bongo most of all. I've never seen him undertake a project that lasted more than 30 seconds, and judging from the spikiness of the kittens' fur, he'd been at this a good long time.

After all was said and done, not only were the kittens very clean, they also seemed quite invigorated. There was more movement in the box than I've ever seen before. I brewed a cup of coffee, and sat there watching while they belly-crawled around like giant furry frogs.

Guard

Lola's getting more and more intense in her motherhood. Each time I approach the kittens, she trots over, hops in the box and curls herself around her spawn while looking at me warningly. This is code orange. When I bring out the camera, she kind of goes to code red, and will lie on top of the kittens in an apparent attempt to hide them. This makes me feel, at least momentarily, like the paparazzi that spent a year desperately trying to get a shot of baby Suri.

Meanwhile, the kittens have started to open their eyes, and seem to be growing at a rapid pace--especially their heads. The cuteness levels have doubled in the past few days, and if I can't document it with the camera I may need to write a poem instead.

Character

Kitten Milestones:

Birth
Development of character
Opening of eyes
Standing
Walking
Using litter box
Eating solids
Finding new homes

The first one and a half have been achieved, and the last one is pre-arranged. The rest are yet to come.