Stray Cat Strut

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back after a 10-day absence!  Sorry about that.  Last week was a really long week for me, work-wise, and we also had a house guest that occupied our evenings. 

This little lady is Allie and she belongs to Mr. and Mrs. FBI.  Mr. FBI is working on a special assignment in another state for a while, so Mrs. FBI went to go visit him for several days.  Allie needed to be tended to, so I asked L if he would mind if we cat-sat for 5 days and to my complete and total surprise, he agreed without any coercing on my part.  Back story: although he grew up with several dogs throughout the course of his childhood, he is not an animal person.  He's one of those people that doesn't dislike animals/pets, but he would absolutely be 100% okay never having a pet of his own and if we weren't married, he wouldn't ever get one.  Luckily he already knows (and has known for a long time) we will get be pet people, just not yet.

Anyway, I picked up Allie on Tuesday night and she returned to her home on Sunday night.  She really is a sweet little kitty with a gentle yet perpetually curious personality.  L and I found that she LOVES closets (she spent a large amount of time going in and out of them and even learned out to open them when they were completely shut), hiding under the guest bed, sitting in windowsills (as seen in the first picture) and behind TVs, and that she is definitely a climber, as seen here:

If I was going to give her a cheesy motivational-speaker theme for her stay, I would call it Allie: Reaching New Heights.  Because yeah, that's her at the top of a closet.  Saturday morning, I found Allie in the top of the closet in our little office/den, which was shocking in that there was no logical way for her to get up there, but somehow she managed to do it not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.  Let me tell you, when you're responsible for someone's pet and you can't find them anywhere even though you know it is in the house, and you start looking all over the place and calling her name to no avail, it makes you panic.  But luckily she does respond to her name and when I went to the closet floor for a second search and said her name, I heard a little meow from up high, and sure enough, there she was.  Getting her down was an issue all three times (she was all about splaying all 4 legs to try and grab onto the wall and the drawer she's pictured on top of, but luckily I'm bigger and stronger than her so it wasn't much of an issue) because she really liked it up there.  She actually tried to get down on her own once, but she shifted her weight and the drawer slid, which scared her, so I still had to come to the rescue.  I expected Allie to like the windows and the TVs made sense to me (due to the warmth they radiate), but the closet fetish and climbing were new to me.  I had a cat growing up that I loved, loved, LOVED and one thing she definitely didn't do was jump/climb on furniture.  I'd occasionally catch her on my desk from time to time or I'd wake up to find her trying to drink out of my water glass on my night stand on the rare occasions I'd have one there.  Also my mom kept fresh flower arrangements on the dining room table and for a short while during my junior high years, my cat went through a phase of getting up around 6 a.m. and pulling stems out of the arrangements and trying to bring them upstairs to me before school.  Mom and Dad would find flowers strewn all up and down the staircase and down the hallway to my room.  What can I say?  She loved me and wanted to bring me presents. :)  Anyway, back to Allie.  Since my cat wasn't into walking on furniture, it was a big change to host a little kitty who is very much into that sort of thing.  Kind of annoying, but what do you do?  She's a cat.  Our solution was to crate her at night and keep her out of the bedrooms and office during the day.  This did not prevent her from learning how to open the sliding door to one of the hall closets and curling up on top of the luggage, but no harm, no foul.

L had fun playing with Allie and her ribbon.  He'd never played with a cat before, or at least not like that.  Honestly, watching cats act nonchalant while keeping one eye on their prey and then pouncing is kind of hilarious.  Allie is much more like a bull fighter (it's basically a top speed run-by pounce instead of a tackle) when she plays with her ribbon.  Here's a pic of me playing with her and the ribbon:

L went so far as to say that he enjoyed her 900 times more than he thought he would, which is pretty impressive for anyone but especially him.  We both have commented that we kind of miss her already; it's funny how quickly you get used to having a little furry friend around.  Who knows, maybe we'll be expanding our family with some kind of pet sooner than we'd thought!  Time will tell.  We need time to figure out what kind of pet we'd get, anyway.  The one thing I didn't love about Allie (besides her high closet shelf fetish) is that she sheds (and yes, I realize pretty much all animals do), which I'm not used to.  But it's part of the deal.  A factor we keep in mind on a much lesser degree is that both of our moms are allergic to cats, as is my sister and plenty of our friends.  But you know what?  None of those people live here and so far, all of them have visited once and only my parents have made plans to come back for a second visit, so we're not totally ruling out the idea.  But until we're ready and we live in a place where whatever our chosen pet is welcome (our current house is only cat-friendly), we'll continue pet sitting for our friends here.

OH- important note: In addition to helping out our friends, we had a selfish motivation here, which was seeing if Allie could eliminate our little rodent problem or at least figure out where they were coming in from. Allie recently made a name for herself as a huntress while staying at her aunt and uncle's house (we're told there was quite a bloodbath involving 2 mice... shudder), but luckily she did not find any mice to slay during her stay here.  It seems that whatever was under our bed ate the entire box of poison bait in the attic and left the house to find water/die.  Hooray!  Hopefully that's the end of that.  And now I'm too grossed out to say anything more.  Sick.  But hooray for sweet kitties!