cats

Jack is fourteen, going on fifteen, but he's still a hyper, kittenish little thing. It's only been the last couple of years that he hasn't been able to clear six feet from a standing jump, and he sprints around at night singing to himself. He loves his toys. He loves them so much that he drops them behind this ancient tank of a sofabed in the family room for safekeeping and ends up playing with garbage he takes out of wastebaskets. He's technically Mom's cat. He crawled in her classroom window one fall while she was teaching and was a total momma's boy until she decided that she could not live without a dog. If he'd ever seen a dog before, it was trying to eat him when he was a feral kitten. I don't like their dog much either, so he's decided I'm his new best friend.

Jack is a very smart little cat. And he does things. Which is always novel to me since my cat was dumb as a sack of bricks and didn't do much but lie around all day. He's a bit hard to photograph since he's very curious. When he sees the camera, he has to come find out what it is that I have. He knows how to help himself to treats out of the packet if someone opens it for him, and he tends to investigate things by poking and nipping at them. But he's very tolerant of my bullshit, even when I've spent like ten minutes putting his toy animals on his head or trying to get him to look at the stormtrooper when clearly the interesting thing is the treat I'm holding behind it. He's bopped me with a soft paw a few times when I was really on his last nerve, but mostly he just flicks his whiskers and makes a chf-chf-chf noise when I'm pissing him off.

(and I'd been meaning to not get into the "I had two cats but now I only have one cat woe" thing since it's been eight months, but this is my cat, doing what he did best--

)

Jack is also smart enough to know that he's adorable. When he wants attention he wriggles around on his back and pulls his paws up near his face until I come fuss over him.

He loves my laptop, too. It's warm and it's right next to me. We have a pretty much nightly fight over whether he's going to sleep sprawled out over the keyboard while I'm using it. He likes to sit next to the computer and stick his face and paws into any drinking glass I leave out, and eventually he'll just floomf down half-on the computer unless I physically block him from doing so. Then he tries to reposition himself around or under me, or reaches over and punches some keys just to be a brat.

He's a chatty little thing, too. If he wants something, if he's mad about something, if he thinks the room is too quiet, he'll just start talking to whoever happens to be close. It's one of the things that, with that pointed little face of his, makes me wonder if he has some Bengal or Siamese in him.