After Chris died, I read the book I wrote about him for the first time since I published it over eleven years ago. I’m embarrassed to say I found a lot of errors, most of which were commas. I feel I am a much better writer today, but commas are still my kryptonite. Either I don’t put them where they belong, or I put them where they don’t belong.
I went through the book and corrected the mistakes I found without changing the story. I also updated the backmatter with information about my current books. In addition, I changed the cover. I was never entirely happy with the cover. I don’t know why I didn’t change it years ago.
I decided to offer the corrected version for free today through Saturday. Unfortunately, it is only available on Kindle, so you can’t get it as a physical book. Maybe someday I’ll look into doing that. To get your free Kindle book, click here.
As always, writing a review of any of my books would be very helpful and I would appreciate it.
As most of you know, we keep the cats out of our bedroom at night because Chris is far too annoying. Lately, Floki has been crying outside of our bedroom door every morning starting at around 4:15. Chris decided that what Floki was doing was not annoying us enough, so he took over. Now, every morning starting at 4 a.m. Chris is out there scratching on the door. He is relentless, too. Sunday morning I thought I could wait him out. I thought he would give up after fifteen minutes. Instead, fourty-five minutes later, I was the one who gave up.
I gave them all wet food and went back to bed. My wife asked, “Did you give them dry food, too?”
“No,” I said. “If I put dry food down, Chris won’t eat the wet food.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but he will surely be back scratching on the door in five minutes.”
I don’t know how many minutes passed, but he was scratching on the door a short time later so I had to get up and put dry food in his bowls.
That day I went to Target and bought a child gate and put it so Chris could not get down the hallway to our bedroom door. It worked but I returned it today because my wife often gets up in the middle of the night and I feared she would trip over it in the dark.
The other bad thing he has started doing is dragging his water bowl across the floor, spilling its contents along the way.
The bowl belongs against the wall, left of the coo coo clock cables.
This one is a head scratcher. I had a tall bowl there before but he started tipping it over. Now that I have a shorter bowl, dragging it across the floor is his alternative. He has done this several times now, including ten minutes ago, which reminded me to write about it.
I am at a loss for what to do about both of these new issues.
It has been thirteen years since Chris came to live with us and I don’t think it is a stretch to say that he changed our lives. I imagine things would be very different if I didn’t need to fill in for someone that day at the Petsmart adoption center where I first saw Chris. For one thing, I probably would not be blogging today and would have missed out on knowing so many great people . . . and pets.
I think this is a good time to walk down memory lane.
I believe this is the first photo I have of Chris. It was taken with the low-quality camera that was on my non-smartphone at the time. I had met Chris a few times before while volunteering at the shelter and thought he would make a good candidate for adoption. I even spoke to my wife about him. Another volunteer snapped this photo with my phone and I texted it to my wife, who was out of town on a business trip. I wrote, “Can we keep him?”
When Rose first came to see him he did not disappoint.
After we got him home he continued his affection.
But first, there was a home to explore. Here he is moments after we arrived home and I opened his carrier.
He basically took over the house and our other cats just let him. In return, Chris was very affectionate to the other cats, weather they liked it or not.
He even influenced others to misbehave.
But he has always been the glue that holds the group together.
I will leave you with a “Best of Bad Cat Chris” video that I put together about seven years ago.
Many of you know I wrote an ebook about Chris over nine years ago. Much of it was taken from this blog and tells the story of our early struggles with raising a bad cat. I have made the book free until the end of the day Wednesday. To get your free kindle ebook, click here.
Today marks twelve years since we adopted Chris. He has been with me longer than any other pet I have ever had and has become such an integral part of this family that I can’t imagine what life would be like without him.
I met Chris while volunteering at a shelter in Myrtle Beach called Save-R-Cats. They were in the local PetSmart on a rotating basis and I went in one morning before work to clean the cages. I let all of the cats out of the top row of cages while I cleaned them. Suddenly, a kitten, about four or five months old, jumped from the floor onto my back and clawed his way up to my shoulders. He then proceeded to nibble on my ear and then on my nose. That kitten, of course, was Chris.
We didn’t adopt him right away. At some point, he was adopted and then returned the next day because of his bad behavior, although I don’t remember when that occurred.
Sometime later my wife came from the shelter and met Chris. That meeting went pretty well.
Chris meets Rose
Still, we didn’t adopt him because we were not ready. We had a cruise coming up and my wife had a business trip to go on after the cruise. While she was on that trip, I went to the shelter and saw that Chris was not only still there, but he also climbed up onto my shoulders again. A shelter worker took a picture of me and Chris with my phone, which had a bad camera even for 2009 standards.
I sent the picture to my wife with the text, “Can we keep him?” I think she agreed but I wanted to wait for her to get home from her trip so we can make the decision together. That way, if Chris turned out to be a bad cat, it wouldn’t be totally my fault.
When Rose returned, we went to the shelter one more time to see Chris before making a decision. Once there, we couldn’t go home without him.
When Chris got to our house he immediately took over to the surprise of our other four cats.
The next few years were pretty difficult as we dealt with problems such as Chris pooping where he shouldn’t, getting on the counters, opening doors he should not be able to open, bothering us while we were sleeping, trying to escape, digging the carpet and I’m sure many other things I can’t think of right now. But during this time we also knew that he was worth it because, besides being a constant source of entertainment, he was probably the most loving being this Earth has ever seen.
While Chris can still be quite annoying, he doesn’t get into as much trouble as he used to. What hasn’t changed is the love. Chris is a shining example of pure love in physical form.
My wife left for Virgina on Tuesday Morning for a work trip. I thought it would be a good time to set up my security camera so that you can better understand why we have been closing Chris out of the bedroom all these years. The camera only records when it detects movement. Even so, it recorded over 25 minutes of video. I was able to cut it down a little but it is still long. I should have quadrupled the speed during processing but I just now thought of that. I think after a few minutes you will get the idea.
There is a time stamp on the video so you can see what time it was for each disturbance. Chris was actually pretty good and didn’t start with his shenanigans until almost 1:00 a.m. It’s hard to see but he likes digging his claws into my skin which is what is most disturbing.
Here is my sister-in-law’s cat, Holly, from ten years ago today. Holly was the original bad cat and my wife and I loved watching her antics. Being naughty can be quite entertaining. Before adopting Chris we would joke that we wanted to take her home but we knew that Felice would never part with her.
Chris was like a male version of Holly, perhaps even a little more naughty, but Chris eventually became overweight and his naughtiness died down a bit while Holly is about fifteen now and can still hold her own in the bad cat category.
Our cats were so happy when we got to the hotel yesterday. Well, okay, once Frankie and Floki decided to remove themselves from under the sofa, then they were happy.
We were happy too. Our trip was extremely unpleasant and way longer than Google predicted. I don’t want to do that ever again and yet, here we go for day two.
We went to bed relatively early last night, before 9:00, but because we were not able to shut the bedroom door, Chris spent the night bothering me. He bothered Rose too but his focus was on preventing me from sleeping.
I don’t know how many times I put Chris off the bed or pushed him to the foot of the bed where Frankie and Floki were quietly behaving. Each time he would stay away for some time between ten seconds and then minutes and then he would be back clawing, scratching, biting or lying on my head.
Not long after 3:00 a.m. Rose decided to get up because she couldn’t sleep. I was so tired I didn’t want to get up with her so she fed the cats hoping that would distract Chris. That worked for about two minutes and then he was back bothering me. After ten minutes I couldn’t take it any longer and put him off the bed ad tried to go back to sleep.
I then heard the sound of a cat digging in the litter box and my wife laughing. Of course I had to know what was so funny so she told me what Chris was doing so I had to turn to see for myself.
I should say that I bought a small, disposable litter box for the trip and then decided it was too small and bought a small non disposable litter box with a small bag of litter. Chris was in the bigger of the two boxes pushing all the litter out and the trying to scoop litter into the box from the smaller box.
Now that I am up Chris decided to take a nap next to me. Why couldn’t he do that last night.
Frankie has developed quite the reputation in our neighborhood for being the escape artist cat. He has escaped many times lately and people are beginning to notice.
The other day, my wife was outside when the mailman came and he asked her, “Are you looking for Frankie again?” She told me the mailman helped her catch Frankie one day. She also said the UPS driver knocks on the door when delivering a package and says “Watch out for Frankie!” when she opens the door.
Frankie escaped last week and disappeared for an hour and a half. I searched the area for him three times without success. On one of those searches, my next door neighbor saw me and asked, “Did Frankie get out again?”
He escaped on Thanksgiving when company arrived. He waited across the street until I got close enough and then bolted across the field like a cheetah until he reached the neighborhood sales office. There he hopped up onto a tree just low enough for me to grab him and carry him home.
My mother is in town so we decided to go out to breakfast with her yesterday, among other things, but Frankie slipped out and disappeared. We waited for him for a while and then ended up eating breakfast at home. He did come back once and I let Chris out hoping that would distract him enough for me to catch him. It didn’t. He again disappeared for about 45 minutes. When he finally returned he walked in the house when I opened the door like nothing had happened.
Frankie reminds me a lot of Chris in his heyday. The main difference is Chris almost always stayed close to home while Frankie goes off to who knows where. My biggest concerns are people that drive like idiots and coyotes. I keep hoping he will slow down like Chris did but there are no signs of that.
Moving to a new house did not interrupt Chris’s naughty behavior. In fact, it may have rekindled it. One of the things he used to do is pick at the bottom of closed doors. He destroyed the bathroom door in our last house and we had to replace it (read about that here). He stopped doing that at the old house but now he has started up again. I was awakened this morning by the sound of scratching at the door. I lied in bed thinking he would stop but then heard the sound of cracking wood. That wasn’t good. When I opened the door to see what happened this is what I saw.
Later that morning I heard the same familiar sound of wood splintering. This time Chris was trying to get into the hall closet.
Fortunately, we had already decided that all the interior doors needed to be replaced and I ordered six new doors just two or three days ago. There apparently was a flood in this house at one time and the bottoms of all the doors were not, shall we say, in prime condition. Some of the subfloors needed to be replaced too which we had done when we had the flooring installed.
Cabinets are another problem area with Chris. It seems he has to get into every cabinet he can find. Sometimes it takes him time to figure out which side opens.
He is most annoying standing by the pantry and crying. We kept his dry food in a very similar pantry cabinet at the other house so I think he assumes it is in this cabinet, but it is not. It is on top of the fridge. I tried to show him several times his food is not there but he is not convinced. This morning he pulled out a can of wet food. I don’t think he can smell it through the can so I assume he knows it by sight, which surprises me, especially since that was a can of Earthborn that I haven’t fed them for a week. What I have been feeding them is in the cabinet above and the cans are a different color and shape.
Hopefully, he will settle down soon. I would hate for him to destroy the new doors.
Bad Cat Chris 