Apricot Has a Busy Morning

It is the Fourth of July, Independence Day here in the US of A. And Apricot has had a very busy morning.

I have the day off, and so does his friend Lynn from the shelter. I invited her to come see him. But she has a very busy day too, and on the phone asked if it would be okay if she came really early in the morning since the rest of her 4th was packed. I asked how early, and when she reluctantly said, 7:30, I tried very hard not to snort in derision as I explained that by 7:30, I'd already have been awake for two and a half hours, and in that time gone for an hour walk and had my breakfast, so that was a perfectly fine time to arrive.

I'd been telling Apricot that Lynn was coming for two days now; and this morning when he followed me into the kitchen pre-walk, I told him that Lynn was coming and she'd come through that door, right there. I acted all happy and "something special is coming" in these demonstrations, although with Apricot you have to be low-key with the emotions or he gets alarmed.

So when she got here (I said she's here, she's going to be coming through the door any second now), he didn't leave the living room, just stayed on the far side and observed her. And that was after he watched her entrance into the house from the kitchen/living room doorway.

She sat down on the floor about a third of the way into the living room and talked to him. He walked around, never getting too close initially. But then she pulled out the ribbon toy she has, which is a gift-wrap long ribbon attached to a small plastic wand with a bend on one end that keeps the ribbon tied on. He knew that toy. And she got him playing with it quite easily.

Playing with the ribbon toy and
allowing a nose touch

It took longer to allow her to touch him. He wasn't too sure about that part. But she only stayed half an hour or so, and by the end he was letting her pet him ... mostly. The problem was that he was all revved up to play, and he doesn't want to be calm and petted when he's in a playful mood.

I think one of two things was going on: first, he just didn't remember her very well, seeing as she was not in the location he was used to encountering her and that he hadn't seen her for a month, or second, that he did remember her, but also remembered that she was from the shelter and wasn't sure if she was going to somehow make him be back there. Either way it took him a while to let her hands get close.

But she has fingernails, and mine are short, so she can rake her fingernails through his fur down his spine in a way I can't. And did he ever enjoy that. Whoo boy. Plus there was the whole chin rubbing thing which I just can't seem to get the hang of.

In the middle of her visit he went over to the toy box and asked for Da Bird to come out, so I got it out and had him playing with that. When Da Bird went over near Lynn at first he'd stop short, but after a while when she didn't move, he decided that it was too much fun to play to bother with being wary.

A few times later during her visit he went bounding down the hallway, but once was just to give himself a momentary break, and he came back as soon as I came into the hall and asked him what he was doing, and another time was simply because he was hungry. (He came back after going crunch crunch crunch in the bedroom where his food is.)

Lynn had to leave eventually. He was a bit tired, though not much. It takes more and more to wear him out these days.

Now I had a little dilemma. The house needed to be completely vacuumed this weekend at some point. If I do it this afternoon, I'll get too hot. If it do it tomorrow morning, it'll be a dreadful roar scare after a night of fireworks, and probably not the best thing to do to poor Apricot. If I do it this morning, like now, I not only have the benefit personally of getting warm (I'm always very cold during the morning hours) but then I have a three day weekend in a nice clean house, and we get the whole scary thing over with.

And having Lynn here hadn't seemed to faze him a bit. (She was quite impressed when the dryer buzzed to alert me that my sheets were dry and Apricot didn't flinch or even show that he noticed.)

So, well, I vacuumed. First I picked up all the movable stuff off the floor in the back three rooms. Apricot was following me for this, and seemed a little puzzled. I kept telling him I was going to vacuum, and this is how it's normally done. By the time I got the vacuum out, he'd gotten the idea something was up, and he put himself up in the living room cubby hole.

I cleaned the back half of the house, and then I needed to clean the living room/kitchen half. Well, I didn't want to do that with Apricot actually in the living room. It's one thing to clean for a few minutes across the room from him, but I'd have to get right up to the cat tree with him in it, and that's a bit too much. At that point he'd feel scared and trapped, never a good combination.

After I turned the vacuum off and stood it in the middle of the living room and changed plug locations, I gathered up all the toys on the floor and put other stuff "up" or moved from their original places while Apricot watched with wide eyes from the cubby hole.

Then I went to him and told him that he needed to move out of the living room and would he mind coming with me, please. He emerged just a smidge from the cubby hole, and I gathered him into my arms the rest of the way, feeling extremely glad I'd walked him down the hallway in my arms just yesterday so at least that had happened before.

I took him into the pink room and put him into the cubby hole of that cat tree, and then hurried back to the vacuum cleaner and started it up.

You see, I have a policy of one free ride per cat per vacuuming session. Pippin often tried to get more than one by racing me back into the half of the house I hadn't vacuumed yet. He pretended to be terrified of the vacuum, but honestly, I think it was only a little bit scared and mostly just playing games. So I am well-trained to race back to the vacuum cleaner and turn it on in order to deter the resident cat from coming back into the area I just tried to rescue them from.

I don't think Apricot would have raced me back to the living room, but then again, he does feel safe in that cubby hole, and he might have decided that there was a better place to be than where I'd put him, not knowing about the fact that the vacuum cleaner goes everywhere.

After I finished up the house and redistributed the toys across the living room floor, I went to tell Apricot everything was fine and it was safe now. Of course he wasn't where I left him. I think there's this thing where no self-respecting cat stays where you put them, even if that was originally where they wanted to go.

I told the couch it was safe and you can come out now, only to find out that I really had told just the sofa that it was safe, because Apricot wasn't under the couch. Could he actually have retreated all the way back to the hidey hole under the headboard?

Yup. Poor guy, that's where he was. But on the good side, he came out the minute I sat down by the headboard and told him it was safe--I didn't even have to reach in and pet. And then after a required petting, when I asked him if he would come out to the living room with me, he followed me right out there, seemingly no harm done to his burgeoning confidence.

And whenever I say "follow", I don't mean he trailed after me. I mean he walked beside me on both sides alternately, trying to trip me every few steps. This is his normal mode of "following" me around the house, and it requires quite a bit of attention on my part so I don't trip over him! He has already been run into by a leg several times.

Once in the kitchen I stepped back from the counter only to find that he'd been standing between my feet, kind of diagonally so that one leg bumped into him on its way back. There was some hasty maneuvering on my part to ensure I didn't come crashing down on top of him, which would have been painful on my part and startling on his (you really think he'd actually still be there by the time I hit the floor? Nah, he'd be standing to one side watching with astonished eyes.)

Apricot's busy morning wasn't over yet, although almost. After getting extremely warm fighting my vacuum cleaner through the house (something is wrong with the vacuum cleaner's wheels and it's really hard to move it sometimes), I had to take a shower and wash my hair (that takes longer than just taking a shower, obviously), and this makes all kinds of weird noises come from the bathroom.

He is getting used to it, though, and when I emerged wearing a towel turban and a robe, he just peered around at me from where he was looking out the window on the cat tree. I've made it a point to take the towel off my hair where he can see the two separate so he knows it's just more cloth. Since cats don't (willingly) wear clothing, all our clothing and towels and stuff can seem really weird to them, like we're changing our skin all the time. It took Apricot a while to realize I was the same person no matter what I wore or if my hair was up or down, so I am trying to be cautious and explain visually and verbally when there are new things to do with clothing, like when I wore a dress for the first time around him.

After all of that, I am tired and he has calmed down, so hopefully the rest of our day can be just rest!

Gleeful me: just think, he had a visitor--a different human in the house (albeit one he'd met already before) and I vacuumed the entire house with no accommodation for him (no doors closed, etc, nothing that I don't ordinarily do) and he is perfectly fine, no left-over scared, just strolling around checking out the windows and sideswiping toys on his way past them!