Here be cats.
Okay, I know at least two people who read this are curious, but since it varies by taste...
Willow continues to be a gorgeous, gorgeous slim little gray cat. (No, I don't have photos. Someday this will be remedied, and then you will all suffer.) Her adult weight seems to have stabilized at about 9 pounds, which is pretty close to normal for her probable breed; she's not overweight despite being an indoor cat, which makes her probably the healthiest and most fit member of the household.
Actually, Willow isn't just an indoor cat, Willow is a third-floor cat. This is because Willow has a vendetta against a particular chair. Everything we can think of has been tried - from spraying the vicinity with supposedly non-cat-friendly scents, to spraying the *cat* (water bottles, normally so useful, failed miserably), to applying anti-scratching strips, to nail-trimming more frequently, to putting a scratching post nearby. No soap. So Willow's been confined to the third floor for most of the day; she gets let down often enough to do her patrols and run around like a cute fuzzy little freak, and then taken back upstairs again.
She's working on figuring out how to open the door herself, though, so eventually all our efforts are doomed.
As it's getting along toward winter, Willow is naturally becoming more friendly. Which translates as "All your body heat are belong to cat." Rather than standoffish, Willow has picked up once more her annual habit of lurking in Tree's lap or on my chest. (Yes, on my chest. Very rarely will she settle for my lap. This is how I pay for indulging cuteness when she was a kitten.) If she's not sleeping on one of us, on top of the monitor, or on the heating vent, she's nesting in the blankets (Tree has to be very, very careful when he goes to bed, lest there be sudden streaks of clawing grey vengeance) or demanding play time.
Play time for Willow is a little different than play time with most cats.
Willow plays fetch.
Pick up the little battered worm from one of the fishing-pole toys. Throw it. Willow will chase it - and then wander off with it somewhere for ten minutes to have a little private time, and then come back and demand another round. If you try to hang on to the string, Willow usually protests; the string is for the bat-at-it time, not for the FETCH time.
To further discourage this, she's recently taken to leaping up and catching the thing out of the air, like a dog with a frisbee, and instantly running off. This made us both stare the first several times, but we're sort of getting used to it.
The other good thing about winter: Tree and I both wake up most mornings with a lump on our feet, or our sides, or our pillows. That, actually, is what finally made Tree admit that Willow was *our* cat (or occasionally *his* cat) rather than *my* cat - when he caught her for the third day in a row sleeping in the same place his dog Nutmeg used to when he was a little kid.
... okay, that and when he came back from a trip to the grocery store with a bagful of cat-treats and, when questioned on why, admitted that he'd run across some other cats on the way and been unnerved by how long their tails were. The ... you know, *normal* length tails. (Willow's is barely a few inches long, from some pre-shelter pre-adoption kittenhood mishap, or possibly for reasons of heredity; we'll never know.)
We continue to want to get another pet - probably a fairly small-sized dog, since another cat might affect Tree's allergies more than Willow does, and since Willow's territoriality plus a large-sized dog would be likely to equal trouble - but that's of necessity postponed till we're living somewhere that we *can*.
And besides. In the mean time? One shedding pet is enough. ("Vacuum cat hair off the stairs" is an explicit entry on the list of things that need to get done by next weekend...)
Willow continues to be a gorgeous, gorgeous slim little gray cat. (No, I don't have photos. Someday this will be remedied, and then you will all suffer.) Her adult weight seems to have stabilized at about 9 pounds, which is pretty close to normal for her probable breed; she's not overweight despite being an indoor cat, which makes her probably the healthiest and most fit member of the household.
Actually, Willow isn't just an indoor cat, Willow is a third-floor cat. This is because Willow has a vendetta against a particular chair. Everything we can think of has been tried - from spraying the vicinity with supposedly non-cat-friendly scents, to spraying the *cat* (water bottles, normally so useful, failed miserably), to applying anti-scratching strips, to nail-trimming more frequently, to putting a scratching post nearby. No soap. So Willow's been confined to the third floor for most of the day; she gets let down often enough to do her patrols and run around like a cute fuzzy little freak, and then taken back upstairs again.
She's working on figuring out how to open the door herself, though, so eventually all our efforts are doomed.
As it's getting along toward winter, Willow is naturally becoming more friendly. Which translates as "All your body heat are belong to cat." Rather than standoffish, Willow has picked up once more her annual habit of lurking in Tree's lap or on my chest. (Yes, on my chest. Very rarely will she settle for my lap. This is how I pay for indulging cuteness when she was a kitten.) If she's not sleeping on one of us, on top of the monitor, or on the heating vent, she's nesting in the blankets (Tree has to be very, very careful when he goes to bed, lest there be sudden streaks of clawing grey vengeance) or demanding play time.
Play time for Willow is a little different than play time with most cats.
Willow plays fetch.
Pick up the little battered worm from one of the fishing-pole toys. Throw it. Willow will chase it - and then wander off with it somewhere for ten minutes to have a little private time, and then come back and demand another round. If you try to hang on to the string, Willow usually protests; the string is for the bat-at-it time, not for the FETCH time.
To further discourage this, she's recently taken to leaping up and catching the thing out of the air, like a dog with a frisbee, and instantly running off. This made us both stare the first several times, but we're sort of getting used to it.
The other good thing about winter: Tree and I both wake up most mornings with a lump on our feet, or our sides, or our pillows. That, actually, is what finally made Tree admit that Willow was *our* cat (or occasionally *his* cat) rather than *my* cat - when he caught her for the third day in a row sleeping in the same place his dog Nutmeg used to when he was a little kid.
... okay, that and when he came back from a trip to the grocery store with a bagful of cat-treats and, when questioned on why, admitted that he'd run across some other cats on the way and been unnerved by how long their tails were. The ... you know, *normal* length tails. (Willow's is barely a few inches long, from some pre-shelter pre-adoption kittenhood mishap, or possibly for reasons of heredity; we'll never know.)
We continue to want to get another pet - probably a fairly small-sized dog, since another cat might affect Tree's allergies more than Willow does, and since Willow's territoriality plus a large-sized dog would be likely to equal trouble - but that's of necessity postponed till we're living somewhere that we *can*.
And besides. In the mean time? One shedding pet is enough. ("Vacuum cat hair off the stairs" is an explicit entry on the list of things that need to get done by next weekend...)