Last night, I heard the sounds of a catfight. Not the kind of fight typical of cats living in the same house but the significantly noisier kind of fights that two cats who don't know one another may engage in, with the loud wailing, the hissing, and the spitting. It sounded like it was coming from my office but I knew that Bubba was upstairs, so I couldn't imagine what was going on with Ella. As it turned out, two cats were fighting in our driveway and Ella was participating, as she could, from her side of the window. I couldn't hear the cats outside. All the noise I was hearing was coming from Ella. Then, this afternoon, I hear someone banging on my window. My neighbor does that sometimes when he can see that I'm in my office, rather than ringing a doorbell like a normal person. But no, it wasn't him. There was a stray cat outside and Ella was banging on the window, still trying to control who does what outside.
Besides the fact that she was gone for four days the last time I let her out, this is the main reason I don't let the cats out.
You don't know how much I envy you. My cat -Amadeus- passed few years ago -22 with me) and soon after the co-op board decided "No pets allowed". I would love to get another Russian Blue like Amadeus...docile, adorable, funny, mischievous .........
Ken, You guys may think Lew and I were nuts but we liked to name our cats after famous people; we had Amadeus (Mozart), Lance (Armstrong), Blair (Underwood), Jean Paul (Belmondo)....
Names of cats that I have had since I have been an adult: Kitty Schickelgruber Jude Cousin Little Girl Baby Girl Wall Kitty Skunk Cutie Lydia Bird Obadiah Ella Bubba For the first ten years of their lives, Cutie was "Kitty Who Like Me" while Lydia was "Kitty who Hates Me". When I got married, Michelle made me give them real names.
As mentioned earlier, Ella has discovered commerce. Over the past week, she has brought me a bottle cap at least once a day in exchange for treats. She makes this known by dropping the bottle cap in front of me, then immediately walking over to the drawer where I keep the treats. A couple of times, I heard the bottle cap fall but didn't register what it was, so she tapped me on the leg to remind me that I owed her some treats. Unless cats have an innate capacity for commerce, she must have learned this from Cutie, who would bring me cat toys or pretty much anything she could pick up, expecting me to follow her to whatever it was that she wanted - to refill her bowl, let her outside, give her a treat, and so on. Some mornings, I would wake up to find a line of toys from my bed.
Bubba gets by on Ella's coattails. Whenever she is getting treats, he knows that he will get treats, but he hasn't figured out how to ask for them himself.
This is still his favorite bed although he doesn't even come close to fitting into it anymore. From the size of his paws, I'd say he still has some growing to do, too.
Yesterday, I brought some canned food out for the stray cats because neither Bubba nor Ella would eat it. By the time any of the strays came around, it had frozen to the bowl so they didn't eat it either. I brought it back in and placed the bowl in my cleanup sink to thaw so that I could dump it in the compost. Bubba went into the sink and ate all of it. He wouldn't eat when I put it in his bowl, fresh out of the can, but once it freezes and thaws out again, he likes it.