Friday Cat Blogging

As I don't have a digital camera, I am reduced to text only to hype my kitties. So here goes....

The older of my two is Puff, and is now just under nine years old. She is one quarter (wild) bobcat, one quarter siamese, and one quarter neighborhood something, and was one of only two (out of seven) of her littermates that has a tail. She has grey and brown stripes on her back and her belly is spotted like her wild ancestors. Her black and grey ringtail most resembles that of a squirrel (meaning wide and flat with a droopy tip), which makes me wonder what that unknown quarter really was. Her claws are definitely those of a wild cat - thick and long and sharp as razors. She also has (proto) opposable dewclaws; she picks up small things including food, to examine, just like a human.

She epitomizes the phrase “fraidy cat” - will run from a breeze. But she is an incredible ‘hunter’. Once, a small bird flew into my loft apartment. I barely had time to register this fact before Puff leaped down from her favorite perch, dashed across the intervening thirty foot space and pounced. Before I could even leap up out of my chair, the bird was a snack. Another time, a mouse had the great misfortune of finding a way into ‘the secret lair - aka ‘73 Winnebago’. Said mouse took two steps and was history.

Puff’s favorite game is chase the laser dot. The loft I used to live in had one wall that was cinderblock and she would actually climb it all the way to the ceiling (over ten feet) to chase that dot. Her second favorite game is leaf spotting. In the fall, she sits in the south facing kitty screen porch I built on the side of ‘the secret lair - aka ‘73 Winnebago’, and runs back and forth, just waiting for one of those evil leaves to get close enough for her to snag through the screen.

Puff joined me with her brother Stuff - yes, they were Puff -n- Stuff (I'd wanted a pair with those names for a long time, ever since my sister had a pair named Kit and Kaboodle). Stuff was a gorgeous spotted orange and cream gigantokitty. He was the alpha male of the litter and he picked me when I visited his mother’s home one night. Puff was the omega runt of the litter, and I took her as much out of pity as anything else.

Poor Stuff thought he could fly, but was found to be wrong when he jumped out a third story window and landed on the roof of my Jeep Grand Wagoneer. I gave him a grand funeral and laid him to rest on a mountaintop.

Which is why I came to get my other kitty, Callisto. I’ll save her for next week.