welcome to camp telophase

Yay, Toby has me set up on his laptop until I get a new computer so I am not totally incommunicado but as I don't have any of my data and programs on it, it's half-assed.

However! Nefer has expanded her culinary horizons! This is the cat who, in her eight years of life on this earth, has recognized almost nothing as food except for dry kibble, taco chips, saltine crackers, and the usual assortment of dry crusty whatsits found on the floor.* (Well, pork products and milk, which make her throw up so she can't have it.)

Every time I offered here gooshyfud, she sniffed it and turned up her nose. We switched Sora to part-gooshyfud for his pee issues, and she still turned her nose up at it. Until just a couple of days ago, when I was in the living room and Toby was making coffee and called to me that Nefer was going to town on the gooshyfud left out for Sora.

Well. So she was. We started putting out two plates and now they're both empty. Nefer is a convert!

She also decided that she liked peanut butter** and Lemonade Girl Scout cookies. Maybe she'll actually try some chicken next!



* All cats love this.

** Interesting aside on feline cognition: she knows that spoons are not food, and when I present her with a spoon that has some small treat she actually likes on it (ice cream, mostly - a couple of licks won't make her puke), she'll lick it but not bite. She doesn't know the same for knives - when she asked to sniff the peanut butter, I held the knife out to her and she kept trying to delicately bite it! I just wiped some up with my finger and offered that to her, which she licked off because she knows for damn sure that my finger is not food!

And a further note...in reference to the video in this post, I can now confidently say that one thing Sora is not scared of is me walking around with a book on my head.

So I posted a video a few days ago of Sora playing fetch with his recently-uncovered feathers-onna-stick toy.

We have created a monster.

Now that he's rediscovered the toy, and how much fun it is to play with it, playing with that toy is ALL HE WANTS TO DO. myrialux reported that during the day yesterday, Sora dragged the stick over to him at his desk, asking to play with it, several times. I got home from work and sat on the couch, here comes Sora with the stick. We go to Jason's Deli and get dinner to go and as we're sitting down and eating, Sora drags the stick over. I'm watching Top Chef bundled up on the couch with Nefer sitting on my feet, and Sora keeps picking the stick up and dropping it, hoping I'll get the message.

Last night, at some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to hear the strange almost metallic sound the stick makes as the end not in his mouth drags against the hardwood floor, all the way down the hall to the master bedroom. God help me, I pretended to be asleep to fool A CAT.

A short, unscientific survey of my received comments on LJ over the past three months shows that you guys have stronger opinions about food and duvets than just about anything else.

Also, Nefer had a BIG ADVENTURE last night, which consisted of getting locked in the garage for four hours. Apparently she snuck out of the kitchen into the garage while myrialux was getting his laundry out of the washing machine and I was cooking Brussels sprouts (and the rest of dinner). I didn't notice a lack of Nefer for a couple of hours, and checked the bed where she'd been nesting for the past couple of days in my clean laundry*, and didn't see her. I thought it was a bit odd, but as she'd disappeared before into various hidey-holes around the house for several hours at a time, I didn't bother to look for her.

Two hours later, after I'd watched Top Chef and two episodes of House Hunters International, I noticed that she still hadn't shown up, and mentioned it to myrialux, who poked about the house for a while, then opened the garage door. In came Nefer.

She seems to be none the worse for wear after her experience - her fur wasn't even cold, which leads me to think she nestled up against the washing machine or something - but she did snuggle up to my leg as we were falling asleep, which she usually doesn't do, preferring to sit on the warm heating pad thing I heat up for her on cold nights. (Ans also threw up in her food bowl. God only know what she ate out there.) And when we tested her by opening the door to the garage, she looked at it with interest and started walking over before we shut it.

I, however, am a TOTAL WRECK when I think about it. Which I know is overreacting a wee, tiny bit, as she's fine, no harm, no foul. It's just that I'm oversensitive on the subject of my cats. Hell, if I take a shower and afterwards find one of them sitting outside the bathroom door, I feel all guilty that I couldn't hear them meowing and let them in. So, y'know, four hours in the garage, no water, no food but for bugs, at some point of which she must have meowed next to the door, unheard... WAAAAARRGGGHHHH!!!! I mean, she was TRAPPED OUT THERE IN THE GARAGE WHILE I WAS TYPING OUT A POST ABOUT BRUSSELS SPROUTS! THE HORROR!

I am, however, wondering if another aspect of her behavior will change now that she's fully familiar with the garage smells. myrialux reports that he's seen it several times when I'm gone all day for work, and I've seen it once when myrialux has left to go game for the day: she picks her stuffed hamster** up in her mouth, trots over to the garage door, drops it on the mat, and meows at the door. She often takes the hamster around the house, drops it, and meows, but we didn't know if it was a sort of instinct, calling for kittens to come so she can teach them to hunt, or if she's doing it for attention, or both. The garage-door thing means that she's made the connection with us leaving the house through the garage, and may be calling for us to return.***

Or we may, perhaps, be witnessing the birth of a religion.




* I dump it on the bed in the morning, so that I will have to put it away before I go to bed. What happens is (a) I dump it back into the laundry basket right before I go to bed instead of putting it away and (b) Nefer makes a nest and sleeps in it.

** A Hamtaro which is, alas, not much longer for this world. I'm in the market for a small stuffed animal no larger than my fist, about 4" on the longest axis. We found a stuffed quail, but it's a bit too big and she doesn't pay any attention to it. Any leads?

*** EVEN MORE HEART-RENDING, I TELL YOU

Look what I caught Sora doing!!