Saturday, January 17, 20091:29 AM - warning: yucky kitten content aheadgrodiness that only a mother could loveSo, as I may have mentioned before, Monty is a bit... different. He was born feral, and he still does some of the things that may have kept him alive in the wild. Most cats will wake you up at an ungodly hour begging for food, but Monty just starts hunting and pounces on insignificant things like dust or shadows or nothing. Most cats, when you give them wet food from a can, will eat the whole thing immediately. Monty will eat a bit of it and then ration it out for later; in the meantime he tries to bury it for safekeeping by pawing at the hardwood floor. In the same spot. Every day. Twice a day. Most cats, if their litterbox is not clean enough, will use the carpet or some other inappropriate place. Today, Monty was acting crazy. Really super crazy, hiding and pouncing and scrambling around and meowing while I did some chores. Any time I tried to touch him, he was all claws. He also had eaten all of his dry food, which is actually very unusual. So part of today's chores was the 1x/week complete change of the litter, so I cleaned out the box completely and put in new litter. A few minutes later, Monty goes in there, and starts digging and digging all the way to the bottom in a couple of spots. Then, right in front of my eyes, he made the biggest, most enormous, stinkiest poo I have seen to date. So this was a valuable lesson for me: if Monty doesn't think the litterbox is pristine enough, he doesn't use another spot, he just allows himself to get constipated until I clean the box. ... Since we are already talking about poo (hey, I warned you!), I will confess that one time while scooping the poo I found another extraordinary specimen. One end was shaped like a normal poo, but the other end flared off into many sharp spiky branches, each the same thickness as the original poo. It looked like a hydra or a caltrop or something. This leads me to conclude that either a) Monty had a really unhappy experience with that one, or b) Monty was trying to sculpt a model of a tree using the raw materials that he had available. I am, frighteningly enough, more comfortable with the first option. Wednesday, January 07, 200911:22 AM - red and green make bluea new friend!Lookie who I adopted from the SPCA a couple of weeks ago!  I love him to pieces. He's super soft and cuddly, likes to play, and never wakes me up to feed him. I named him Monty, after Montecore, the white tiger who attacked Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy. Monty was born feral, which means he had a few issues with fear and undersocialization when I first got him, but I've slowly exposed him to larger and larger rooms and he's pretty confident now. The only times he gets scared are when he's on the prowl and something (usually me) moves unexpectedly, or when he surprises himself by looking at the mirror. "Who's this other cat in my territory?" *arches back angrily* "OMG he's arching his back at me! Evil other kitty!" ... Other than that, he's quite smart. He also gets very clawful and bitey at night, so he's not allowed in the bedroom any more when I'm asleep. Of course this means half the time I try to sleep on the couch so he can cuddle with me if he's not feeling rambunctious. Also... his adult teeth are starting to come in, and the teething process is making him very sensitive and bitey. White cats with blue eyes are genetically predisposed toward deafness, but Monty doesn't have this problem. There are few clues that he's got some mix going on, like the 10 black hairs on the top of his head (I call it his mohawk) and the fact that his eyes reflect differently:  One red and one green! If anyone knows what causes this... I'd love to hear it. And finally... after ~4 years of having this layout for my blog, I finally decided to write some PHP code so that the archives calendar gets generated automatically. And... it works! Yay! ... maybe I'll fix the comments one day. heh. |
