Eh, this is about cats.
There are a few meaty topics I want to dig into, but to do justice to those requires more time and attention than I have, thus I will write about my cats.
It occurs to me that while I’ve described various different behaviors of my cats at times, I’m usually describing the outliers, not our normal day to day.
Anytime I’m sitting at home, its quite likely that one of the cats is sitting on or near me. At this very moment Shaun is sitting on my arm. He’s engaged in a well practiced dance where he puts one paw on my arm, then another, and the next thing I know he has migrated to putting himself in the middle of everything. (Apparently this cat can read my thoughts, or I can read his, as during the process of writing this paragraph he has now managed to perfectly parallel what I’m typing.)
Shaun likes to hold my fingers at times, and he has a thing for putting his paw on my MacBook. (The cats aren’t actually allowed to touch my computer. I started this since George managed to brush the side of his face upon my iBook G4 enough that the hinge is off kilter and when the computer screen is closed its misaligned from the rest of the computer by a good 1/8th of an inch.) At times this gets annoying as he wants to touch my thumb, which is right over the MacBook’s trackpad. Now Apple is good at what they do, but their devices don’t yet differentiate between human fingers and cat paws, so the computer does all sorts of odd things.
If George is the one wanting to sit near me, he always wants to be pet, to the point that he’ll push his nose under my hand on the keyboard if I’m not paying attention to him. George is much more direct about what he wants, whereas Shaun is sly and sneaky.
When I come home George invariably greets me with a cloying meow requesting my attention. He’ll follow me around the apartment until I provide some to him, even if it is what I consider to be “negative” attention. Sigh, he as me trained quite well. George has meowing down to a science. I’ll listen to him try to continue to get my attention, and like P&G he’ll constantly vary his output, which I presume is mostly to keep my interest. At times he’s experimented with two and three syllable meows, although at the moment he is going for a siamese type short meow. He’s quite the innovator when it comes to meows.. (He’s not the first cat I’ve lived with folks, there have been a whole clowder of them in my past.) I’ve been telling him for the past nine years to speak english, although he still hasn’t made any progress with that.
At bed time the cats usually cuddle up with me on the bed. Shaun is consistently to my left and George is consistently to my right. Its one of those wonderfully regular things in my life, and part of the clowder that I’m an honorary member of.