Our rescue kitten has recovered from her diarrhea and is doing well. Felice sent these pictures of her, taken yesterday morning. She has grown into quite a cute little kitten. 
Compare her now to her rescue day.
This post was from three years ago and Chris has gained some weight since then so he tends to stay closer to the ground these days, but not always.
Chris on kitchen cabinet
Cats, by nature, seem to like being up high. I suppose it is the predator instinct and it is no more obvious than in a cat like Chris. I mentioned before that he likes getting on top of things and our new apartment seemed like it was built with him in mind.
For starters, our kitchen cabinets do not go to the ceiling so there is a gap above them that Chris loves to get into. he usually jumps on the counter, then to the refrigerator and from there it is an easy step up. Sometimes he will leap from the fridge to the cabinets on the opposite side. I worry that he will miss and hurt himself but so far, so good.
I don’t know how he does this
Then there is the handrail at the upstairs landing, it overlooks the living room and is…
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Oh, the jealousy that follows when one finds a new place to investigate.
Puck: What’s going on Frankie? Frankie: Chris got the door open to the towel closet and is inside.
You guys go find your own closet.
How much longer are you going to be in there, Chris?
Wait your turn, Puck. I’m next.
Ok, that’s long enough. Get out of the closet, Chris. It’s my turn.
I think maybe this is a good place for a nap.
I just wanted to catch you up on some of the stories I wrote about recently.
The feral cat I have been feeding at work is doing okay (see Feral Cats at Work and Feral Cat Update). I worried because he didn’t show up on Tuesday and the food went uneaten all day. I had Wednesday off and Thursday the cat was back like nothing happened. This time he left a fair amount of food behind. That tells me there is a good chance that he is either a good hunter or someone is feeding him elsewhere too. Of course, he may have also been scared off before he finished but I doubt it. In that situation, he would have backed off and waited for the person to leave but there were no people in sight when I came outside, nor was the cat anywhere in sight.
Chris has pooped on our new sofa twice more since I first mentioned it (See A New Level of Badness). I stopped using the Dr. Elsey’s Litter Attractant a couple of years ago when Chris’s pooping problem stopped but I bought some again in hopes that he would leave the sofa alone. I bought it at Petco for $20 and then noticed it was on Amazon for $7.63. It has worked for me in the past but this time It made no difference.
Chris is very finicky about his litter boxes and when we brought the sofa in we changed things around a little. Perhaps the space between the sofa and litter boxes was too small. It was plenty big enough for a cat to get through but who knows what goes through his mind.
I decided to pull out the boxes a bit so that they were more easily accessible. It is better now but one box is still too close to the couch. So far, so good but we will see what happens.
The kitten we helped rescue ( see Newborn Kitten Rescue and Kitten Update) had been doing well until recently. Rose wanted to name the cat Luis, after her maintenance supervisor who started the rescue process, but the cat turned out to be female so now she is named Lulu. Felice has worked hard to keep Lulu healthy but she has recently developed diarrhea, which can be very bad in young kittens. Bottle feeding a kitten is not a good replacement for mother’s milk and we can only hope she will get better. I have every confidence in Felice’s ability so I am not too concerned. Unfortunately, I have no new pictures of the kitten to share but here is one from July 4th in case you missed it.
I was looking through my pictures and I found this one of Chris taking a cat nap on my leg and thought it was cute enough to share. It was taken July 4th. I’m not sure but I would guess it was after our guests left and the day was winding down.
It seems like we are always moving. This was two moves ago.
Late in 2011 we decided to move out of our waterfront condo and live where Rose works. Part of the reason for doing that was to save about $400 a month. The other reason was for convenience. Since Rose managed the property that we were moving to, she would not have to drive to work and she could better keep an eye on the property. It also cut in half my drive to work and eventually led to me being able to ride my bicycle there. (See newlybent.wordpress.com)
It was also better for the cats. I don’t think they appreciated the waterfront view as much as we did. What they wanted, especially Chris, was to go outside. Well, that wasn’t an option, but the new place had a screened in patio that the condo did not have.
We spent weeks packing, during which time our home was basically turned…
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Chris used to hang out in the bathroom with Rose while she got ready for work but he stopped doing that until recently. Now he is in the bathroom with her every morning taking up the little space she has. There is even less space in this house because there is a fan on the counter to compensate for the lack of an air conditioner vent in the bathroom.
Chris can stay with her as long as he stays on the other side of the sink, but that is too far for Chris so a conflict always arises. Rose either has to push him off the counter or she can ask for help in the form of, “Chuck, Come get you cat!”
This morning, Chris decided he was going to get attention one way or another so he got on the toilet and unwound the toilet paper roll. Maybe next time rose will think twice about sharing her space.
“If this behavior continues, I will take that cat to the animal shelter so fast your head will spin!” Yes, those words actually came out of Rose’s mouth on Thursday morning. She wouldn’t really do that but she was very angry, and rightfully so.
To explain, I need to back up this story to last weekend when we got new furniture for our patio. We got a sofa/sleeper along with a baker’s rack and a dinette set. The sofa came with a sign in cat language that said, “SCRATCH ME,” so Chris and Frankie complied.
I covered it with a blanket and a couple of towels over the arms, not just because of the scratching but also to keep it clean and free of cat hair. When guests would come for a visit, we could remove the covers and they could wonder how we keep it so clean with three cats.
The covers didn’t completely stop the scratching. Chris would get under the towel and scratch the edge. That prompted Rose to buy a product called 3M Petcare scratch protection film, which is basically wide packing tape for ten times the cost. I put in on the corners and have not seen any cat scratch there since then.
Rose must have decided that the blanket was ugly so she folded it in half and placed it over the top of the couch only, leaving the seat cushions exposed. By now you probably see where I am going with this.
Thursday morning I did my usual chores. I gave the cat’s wet food, made coffee, scooped the boxes, swept the litter, put down fresh water and dry food, etc. Shortly before we were to leave for work, Rose walked onto the patio and said, “It smells like poop out here!” For this story, I have decided to substitute the word “poop” for another word.
“Can’t you smell that? Someone has pooped out here!” I did clean the boxes but they do tend to use them when they are clean.
“Oh my God! There is poop on the couch! Chris has pooped on my brand new sofa!”
Sure enough, there was a pile of poop on the seat cushion. That was bad enough, but instead of a nice hard poop that would be easy to clean, this was like soft serve ice cream. What a mess.
Chris has long had a problem with pooping outside the box but that problem went away two years ago when we moved into our last home. He always had a chronic loose stool but around the same time he stopped pooping on the floor, his poops got better too. I hope this doesn’t cause Chris to fall off the wagon.
To make matters worse, we hired a painter to paint our cabinets. He was here Wednesday and removed all our cabinet doors and drawers and brought them to his house to sand and paint them. With no doors, Chris was in the cabinet with our food, probably looking for treats or catnip. That happened right after he was yelled at for pooping.
I had enough and yelled at him and tried to pull him out but he put up heavy resistance. I finally got him out and finished getting ready for work. When I was leaving, I gave him a little pet goodby and he growled at me. I pet him again and he growled some more.
I don’t know why but I was actually upset about it on the way to work, even though I wasn’t the bad guy.
Chris isn’t always bad, although he was very, very bad yesterday morning. Before I tell that story, let’s just look at him and Frankie, on our new sofa, actually getting along.
Chris was a bit younger when I first posted this but he hasn’t changed much.
Even though Chris is a bad cat he has a few good qualities. Besides being the entertainer in the house, he also keeps our home relatively bug free. To be honest, Tigger deserves partial credit for that but Tigger is more of a spotter, Chris is a take action kind of cat. Weather Chris spots an invader first or Tigger, it doesn’t matter, Chris is on it like a fly on…well, lets just say he is extremely focused.
It is funny to watch him too because he doesn’t just catch insects, spiders, lizards or whatever other small creature enters our house, he has to play them. He keeps them alive for a while and watches them, when they try to escape, he corrals them with his paw.
More than once I saw him catch a fly and play with it like that. Somehow he knows how to disable the fly’s ability to fly…
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Bad Cat Chris 