Today we celebrate Chris turning fourteen. As I mentioned before, we don’t know his actual birthday but we celebrate today because Chris was about six months old when we adopted him on November 14, 2009.
I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at his life in pictures.
I hope you enjoyed our little trip down memory lane.
You may remember me writing about how Chris started tipping his food bowl over so he could eat the food off the floor because he was too lazy to stand and eat. I ended up purchasing a wooden bowl stand that prevented Chris from tipping the bowls over. To celebrate my victory I wrote a post called “Checkmate.” I was happy that I could finally outsmart my cat. Or could I?
I saw this the other day.
He always has to win. I don’t know how he does it.
Read to the end for a free copy of Chris’s book.
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.
I don’t know why Chris likes to scratch but he has gotten worse these last few years. He especially likes to scratch me, although he does target Rose on occasion.
If you haven’t followed Chris yet on YouTube I invite you to open the video on YouTube and click the follow button.
While I was at work the other day, Rose sent me pictures of Chris going through the toy box looking for a particular toy. He likes the turtle but that was already out. Apparently, this time he was looking for his purple ball.
My wife is looking for a housekeeper so our next door neighbor, April, recommended somebody that she knows. April is at our house quite often and she watches our cats when we go away sometimes, so our cats are very familiar with her. Of course, when April came over to introduce her friend to Rose, Frankie ran out the door and escaped.
It seems that everything interesting that happens with our cats lately happens while I’m at work. Rose sent me the following text yesterday morning.
A few minutes later I get this one.
When I got home I found out the whole story. Apparently April went back to her house with the lady and must have had her door open because Frankie ran inside her house. I don’t know what happened while he was inside but April then carried Frankie home.
It reminds me a lot of what happened when Chris was young. This might be my favorite story about Chris. You can read it here.
Frankie loves his little green blanket. We always put it on our bed for him when we make the bed. Lately, though, he seems to have lost interest in it until recently. Perhaps they had a fight and then made up.
This photo is from 10 years ago today on June 10, 2010. Chris was good at opening cabinets and finding where we hid the catnip.
I remember changing the location several times and he always found it.
Recently my wife and I started watching a show called 1883 which is a prequel to Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a show that my wife likes but I couldn’t get past the first episode because it is just a prime-time soap opera, like Dallas, but with much more violence. I thought 1883 was pretty good but Floki really liked it. Almost every time the show started, Floki was there to watch it.
Sometimes he would be in our way but often he would watch from the coffee table. Of course, he never watched the entire episode. No cat has an attention span that long.
I took a couple of videos while I was at the shelter last and forgot about them until yesterday when I copied them from my phone to my computer.
There were a couple of friendly black cats at the shelter that day and this one wanted to play with a cat hanging out in a tunnel but the cat just wasn’t in the mood or he was a bit too nervous to come out with me in the room. If I remember right, that cat wasn’t exactly afraid of me but he was a little leary of me.
The black cat was pretty funny and he worked on getting the cat out of the tunnel for quite a while before I thought to start recording.
Bad Cat Chris 