Everyone loves to hear stories about their friends’ cats.
I can tell my friends like to hear about my cat from the way their eyes become fixed and slightly glazed when I tell the story about the cute way he meowed last Tuesday.
But the truth is, everyone’s cats are pretty much the same.
Some of them are more affectionate than others. Some of them are more independent. Some of them are aggressive, some of them are shy. But they’re still all cats. My cat follows the same routine that every other feline on the planet follows.
• Wake up call. My cat, Snowball, likes to make sure I get a good start on the day. Since he hasn’t figured out all the doors in the house, he can no longer do this by gently massaging my face with his claws. He usually resorts to sound – sometimes meowing, sometimes rubbing his hind legs together to generate a subsonic tone that rattles the dishes in the cabinets. That always gets me up right away!
• Feeding. Snowball gets mostly dry food, and a small selection of live skinks. I like to let them go, and watch him chase them down and snap them up with his prehensile tongue. I think he gets a kick out of it.
• Play.Snowball plays simple games – chase the moving toy, pounce on the toy, incinerate the toy with his heat vision.
He also plays Tic Tac Toe, or at least, that’s what I think all those scratched marks are on the walls around cat-claw height.
• Sleep. My cat enjoys sleeping in boxes, in sunbeams on the floor, and in the ovoid nutrient sac in which he was gestated. It seems to keep his coat nice and shiny, and that’s important.
• Affection. My cat likes to show affection the old fashioned way – he sends me a telegram.
They arrive about once a week and let me know how he think’s I’ve been doing as his owner, sort of like a performance review.
FEED MORE GRUBS STOP, read the last one. NEED NUTRIENTS FOR TIME OF MITOSIS.
• Science projects. Everyone’s cat has a project or two stowed away. Snowball is building a gravity wave generator out of our old, busted blender, a couple rolls of aluminum foil, and some kind of purple goo he brews up in mason jars.
It smells pretty bad, but he assures me he won’t use it to destroy me during “the coming invasion,” whatever that means.