Friday Five: Five Things about Alice

If you’re my friend on Facebook, right about now you’re probably making that really mature, fake gagging gesture and saying, “Oh, puh-lease! Have we not heard enough about that cat in the last week?!” But for those of you who haven’t seen all the pics and those of you who just, you know, LOVE CATS, let me introduce you to Alice.

We went to Humane Society Silicon Valley last Saturday, basically all a-twitter at the possibility of finding a cat, or–you know–being found by a cat, and at the possibility of not finding one. I cannot recommend this shelter enough. The animals went way beyond clean and healthy; they were all happy, relaxed, and friendly. And the people who work there, with the animals, are also happy, relaxed, and friendly! There were lots of cats we could easily have decided to take home.

But I fell in love with Alice.

Five things about Alice.

• She is bee-yo-ti-ful. I know, I know. beauty is only skin fur deep. But she is. At first I thought she was a funny mix of grey tabby and orange tabby. (No, I wasn’t listening when we did the whole Mendel pea thing in school, so what do I know?!) But then I thought, hey, no, she’s a calico-tabby cross. Because she’s all calico colored, but each patch has tabby stripes. And then someone on Facebook said something about diluted or pastel calicos. So now I think she’s a pastel-calico-tabby cross. It doesn’t really matter, because all they want to know at the vet is that she’s a DSH (Domestic Short Hair).  They probably wouldn’t put DSHT (Domestic Short Hair AND Tail) into the computer, even if I asked nicely.

• She is probably somewhere between a year and two years old. Old enough to be NOT a kitten (one of my criteria), but young enough to act kitteny a little bit of the time AND to not put us back on the elder-kitty path too soon. I loved, loved, loved our last cat, Lacey, but the past couple of years were pretty stressful. Obviously, I’ll go through that stage again and again with every cat we have, but I am ready to see it as way off in the distance for now.

• She likes low places and high places. She likes to be under things–under the chair, the coffee table, the couch, the futon in my office. Obviously, part of this is her transitioning into our home and family and just taking shelter to feel quiet and safe. And her time underneath things is already lessening, but she still does it enough that I’ve taken to using the laser pointer to find her–flick that around a couple of times, and out she comes, saving me from having to get down on my knees and peer under all the furniture. She also loves to be up high, though, and she will climb onto your shoulders and use them as a launching pad–she landed on a shelf so high in my office that she accepted my help in getting down, and she was eyeballing the oven hood while she rode around on my son’s back the other day. That would have been interesting to watch…KITTY SLIDE! She is an awesome jumper, which is not making Bard, our cockatiel, the happiest bird on the planet. We’re trying to keep an eye on things, make it more difficult for her to get to his cage, and see if they’ll work out their own relationship.

• Like most cats, she rejects all the actual toys we offer, and chooses her own playthings. She spends a little time each day “killing” a rope that hangs down under the futon in my office, is making it clear that I can no longer leave hair bands just laying around, and is true to the bag-loving nature of all felines. Where’s Waldo Alice?

• She is making me very, very happy.