Adventures in Cat-Sitting, Part I
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006This evening begins our week-and-a-half long stint as cat-sitters. And boy, what a beginning it’ s been! I’ve always been more of a dog (and rat) person, but I’ve been warming up to cats over the past few years and have cat-sat many a time. Similarly, Trevor adores cats, particularly the frisky and playful types, so all in all, this gig sounded like it would be a breeze. Well…
Around 5:30 the two cats, whom Trevor and I have affectionately dubbed Good Cat and Bad Cat*, were brought over. They’re beautiful kitties, but they’ve definitely got some, ummm, interesting personalities. The one cat, Good Cat, is your average curious, playful cat. When she got here she just started spinning in circles trying to look around the apartment and take it all in. Within about half an hour, she’d made herself right at home and now she likes to follow us around the apartment.
As for Bad Cat… he was described by his owners as “lik[ing] to cuddle a lot.” Um, hiss at everyone and everything in the apartment is more like it! At first I thought he was just a little scared when he got here. He didn’t want to leave the little kitty carrier and I wasn’t going to force it. He’ll adjust, I thought. So I focused on spending time with Good Cat. We were playing with one of those fishing-pole type toys with the little glittery poofs on the end and all of a sudden Bad Cat started to look interested. I thought this might just be the thing to coax him out of his carrier. And it did. Unfortunately, he came out of the carrier hissing like demon and arching his back all crazy-like. Not wanting to be attacked by Bad Cat, I put the toy away and tried to steer Good Cat out of the way. Bad Cat eventually retreated back to the carrier, but I was certainly surprised by his hostility. This surprised increased when later Bad Cat decided to venture out of the carrier again, hissing his way around the living room and trapping Good Cat and I in the kitchen when he decided to plop himself in the middle of our hallway and glare and hiss at anything approaching.
And that’s pretty much where things stand right now. I’m not still trapped in the kitchen or anything, but Bad Cat wanders aound the apartment, hissing furiously at Trevor, Good Cat, and I. I mean, he’ll walk right up to us like he wants little scratch behind the ears and then just hiss at us, like we had come after him. Not to mention he likes to hover outside the bathroom door when either of us goes in there and then hiss at us as soon as we come out. In short, we’re terrified of this cat, this “cuddly cat” that apparently likes to “suckle on people’s fingers” sometimes. Let me just say that my fingers are coming nowhere near this cat’s mouth ever. :-(
If I can muster up the courage, I’ll try to get some photos up soon. Updates are sure to follow.
*Why do I keep putting their names in italics, you ask. Because apparently WordPress does not like to publish the word cat. You can say cats, you can put punctuation after cat, but if you want to just have cat in a sentence, you have to put some html code around it :-P
