Retrospective: Pippin and the Great Mouse Invasion

Before I moved out into the house I live in now, I lived in my parents' house in the basement room. Pippin lived there too, for what was actually the larger portion of his life, although it seems like he lived for the longer part of it here in my house with just me.

One year when Pippin was a fairly young cat, but still an adult--so maybe five or six or seven years old, we had a mouse incursion. Now I don't have any pictures of this, so I will be scattering random Pippin pictures through the post just because I want to.

May 2006: Pippin's goofy when he sleeps

The Mouse Invasion started out very small. Literally. Mom came into the den one day while I was at work, and saw what she thought was a kitty toy on the floor. You know those tiny furred mice that you can get in packs of twenty at the petstore? They look very realistic, like baby mice. Mom thought I'd gotten Pippin one of those. She was going to pick it up and give it to him, or toss it downstairs to the basement where it would eventually get into my room with other kitty toys ... but the closer she got to it, the more she doubted it was just a kitty toy. It looked far too realistic.

Closer, and she realized with a jump that it looked realistic because it was really and truly a baby mouse! EEK! But it was dead. Completely unharmed. No marks, not even ruffled hair. But the baby mouse wasn't alive. This was strange. Our previous kitties, when they played with mice, there was definite evidence on the mouse that it had been played with. If Pippin was responsible for this mouse being dead, how in the world had he done it without visibly harming the mouse? We were most puzzled.

Dec 2007: Getting settled in his hammock
takes some doing, considering the relative
sizes (it's theoretically too small but
since when did cats pay attention to physics?)

Well, my mom got an old newspaper to use to scoop the baby mouse up and toss it out into the backyard to join the circle of life, so to speak. She didn't realize that Pippin was watching her. At least, that's what we figure happened.

Because that's the only thing that makes sense out of what happened with the second and third mouse that year.

The second mouse: I was sitting at my computer desk in my room downstairs. It was a big room, and so had one half as my "bedroom" and the other half as my "everything else" room (I used the communal kitchen and bathrooms that were upstairs. Do you know how challenging it is to have to climb stairs in the middle of the night when you have to use the bathroom but you're still half asleep? Anyway, back to the story).

Pippin comes in and wants to show me something. He trills and purls at me, little funny noises that Maine Coons use to talk to their people. Doesn't want petted (although the offer is accepted briefly). Finally I got up and told him to show me what he wanted. He walked out into the basement past his litterbox (okay, that's clean then) and past his food and water (so he doesn't need more of either). He walked all the way to the base of the stairs where the washer and dryer stood on either side of the corner the stairs start from. Next to the dryer is a tall endtable that has a lower level that you could put like a plant or something on it. It's empty.

My cat who really wasn't a dog, swear it, does everything but point at the end table, at the base of it. He was so insistent that I got down on my hands and knees and peered under it. I mean, normally he retrieves his own kitty toys after he "puts them away" under furniture, so I wasn't used to him asking me to look under things for him.

And there I found the second mouse. This time it was a grownup mouse, a grey oblong field mouse. Once again, there was not a mark on it, but it was not alive. Okay, this is strange. The first one was a baby and babies can have birth defects and stuff like that where, while it would be unusual for one to drop dead on its way across the den floor, it wasn't out of the question. And Pippin had been nowhere to be seen.

But this mouse ... Pippin obviously had something to do with it, otherwise how would he know where it was? And why show it to me? Ah, but think. If he saw Mom take the baby mouse outside, and then this one shows up inside--obviously "outside" is a magical place. His toy ran down and wouldn't go anymore. Mom takes it outside, and then it shows up back inside, ready to play again.

Still ... how is he making them dead? The second mouse, just like the first, doesn't look played with. At least, not by a cat. So I got myself rolled up newspaper to scoop the mouse up with and took it outside. Pippin followed at my heels, stopping at the door and watching me take the mouse out, with apparent approval. So, obviously I was doing what I was supposed to do with it.

January 2008: Pippin loved that box.
Again, ignoring the laws of physics that says
he was too big for it.

The third mouse: Pippin had obviously decided that when these fun toys run down, it is our job to take them outside and repair them. When he found and played with a third mouse, I must not have been receptive to his entreaties to follow him to it. (I never would have found the other one if he hadn't showed me). So he took matters into his own paws and put the mouse where we would have to find it.

Only, um, we didn't. You see, I did my own laundry. My parents' laundry baskets were in the upstairs bathroom closet, whose door was often left open. The white laundry basket (a tall trash can with a lid) usually had the lid in the "up" position since it made life easier all around (you have white laundry every day, but not always do you have dark laundry). Mom, who is a routine fanatic just like me, did the white laundry every monday. 

From what we can figure out, Pippin put the mouse in the white laundry sometime Sunday night. I remembered smelling something off in the bathroom on Sunday, but I just figured it was, well, what normally causes a bathroom to smell bad. Pippin knew Mom always emptied the laundry on Monday morning. He just didn't realize that she emptied it by turning it upside down over the top-loading laundry machine. She didn't empty it by looking and reaching in it.

(The position of the shelving, the laundry lid, and the laundry basket made it highly unlikely the mouse simply fell in. As unlikely as it seems, Pippin must have put it in the basket. He was certainly tall enough to stand on his back legs and drop it in.)

When I got home from work that Monday, I was greeted by a highly indignant mother, who said "Do you know what your cat did?!" Um, no, what? "I washed a mouse!"

You what?! 

"I WASHED a mouse! In the laundry!"

Me: EEWWW!

Her: Precisely!

The mouse, luckily for the ew factor, didn't like, um, come apart in the washing machine. It just lost all its hair. Mom washed the laundry load twice without the mouse afterwards! Not that I blamed her for the "excess" washing. I might have run it through the laundry three times. With bleach.

July 2008: See, he does fit quite nicely

The last mouse was different. First, this is the mouse where we found out how Pippin was killing them. Second, this was not a field mouse, but a different mouse species. And third, this time the mouse survived.

I'm downstairs at the computer again. Being boring. Mom and Daddy are upstairs in the living room, reading and watching tv with headphones (respectively). Also being boring. So, to Pippin, two boring people were better than one boring person, so he was upstairs playing. This is where he found the last mouse. 

As he was a rather social cat (when he was completely at home and comfortable) he wanted to play with his toy in the living room with Mom and Daddy, so he picked it up by the nape of the neck, walked into the living room from the den, put the mouse down and starting rolling it back and forth between his paws.

Mom was curious as to which toy he had; got close enough to see, and then (so she tells me) she did a perfect imitation of the stereotypical farmer's wife where she jumped onto the coffee table and screeched for Daddy to kill it, kill it! (I imagine there was not much actual volume involved in the screech, or high-pitch in the voice, as that is not my mother's way, but let's not spoil the fun now). Daddy rolls up a newspaper and grimly goes about his duty.

Pippin is astonished and taken aback. If you people don't appreciate me, I will take my toy downstairs and play with it there! So he picks up his mouse by the neck again and trots downstairs where he sets up camp right outside my (open) door and starts rolling the mouse back and forth between his paws again.

The first I know of any of this is when I hear Daddy in the hallway, saying "Josie come get your cat!" (Notice how he was always "your cat" when things went south, but just Pippin otherwise! It was like having a child!) I came out of my room, nearly tripped over Pippin because I hadn't expected him to be right there and managed to regain my balance with the aid of the door frame.

"What's he done now?" I asked, not seeing the mouse as it was under Pippin's head where his paws were, and I was standing almost on top of him. (Pippin never even bothered to notice I nearly tripped over him. He trusted me not to, and that was that as far as he was concerned.)

Daddy explained the situation. I needed to get Pippin so he could get the mouse. 

This was complicated by the garage door which was right next to the whole setup in the hallway. The gloves that would fit Daddy were out in the garage, but if he went out to get the gloves, the mouse might take the opportunity to escape the lethal cat and run into the garage, and then we'd never find it. And mice, although I do think they are cute, are also deadly to humans in that they chew wires in the walls, cause shorts, which then cause house fires. So, no mouse colonies in my house thank you very much.

Mom happened to have left some small gloves in the basement. I can fit into her gloves but Daddy never could in a million years. Unlike cats, we have to obey physics, and his hands are too big for her gloves. So I said I'd get the mouse if he tossed the gloves to me. 

I caught the gloves (much to my surprise), knelt down next to Pippin, and told him, "Okay, playtime's over, I need the mouse now."

Would you believe he backed right off? I was amazed even as I was mostly focused on catching the mouse. I figured by this time the mouse was going to be bloody and probably not very intact, and I was cringing inside at the thought of touching it, even with gloves on.

The mouse was perfectly unharmed. I also think it was used to people, because it wasn't a field mouse. It was fat and round and brown, with ears that were like circles pinched on one side to fit into the head. It had a little tail and didn't try to get away from me at all. 

And it wasn't the least bit alarmed at having been played with by a cat for the last half hour, or being carried around by one. It sat in my fist and washed its ears and looked around with bright black button eyes. I was trying not to harm it any further, and if it had tried to get away from me, it would have succeeded, because I wasn't holding it at all tightly.

Well, now what? I wasn't about to kill it. But I thought that no matter how unfazed it seemed, it probably wouldn't come back into the house if I took it outside, not after knowing that there was a playful cat inside the house.

So I took it upstairs and out the back door. Pippin followed as far as the door and watched with interest. I put the mouse down, accidentally on my shoe instead of the ground because it clung to my glove and didn't want to be put down. And then I had to urge it gently off my shoe, because it didn't want to leave. But it didn't act like it was in shock or anything.

Later it finally occurred to me that it was probably someone's pet mouse and had grown up with a cat. I wished I would have kept it, gotten a rodent house with a ball like you get for gerbils or hamsters. It was such an adorable mouse, and I don't think it was used to surviving in the wild, so it probably was lunch for something out there very quickly. The poor thing seemed to be very used to people, and cats, and wasn't inclined to run away from Pippin.

Because you see, that's how Pippin killed the previous mice. He wasn't harming them directly. When he batted them between his paws, it was very gentle and he didn't have his claws out at all. He just rolled the mouse back and forth like a toy ball. The mice kept running away from him and he'd retrieve them, and finally they just ran themselves to death. This mouse survived because it didn't run away from him, just let him roll it around. I do wish I'd kept it!

My mother is probably quietly grateful that I didn't.

Dec 2008: Inquisitive Pippin

Retrospective: Pippin Goes Canoeing (June 2009)

My parents have a canoe. It holds four adults. My sister came from her place to visit us the spring of 2009, and my mom wanted to go canoeing. This was somewhere new for Pippin, and I trusted him enough that I knew he wouldn't go swimming (unless we dumped the canoe over) (and there were dire warnings issued to all the humans involved: you dump my cat in lake water, you get to give him a bath!) (Not that he was particularly hard to bathe, actually).

I shall try to refrain from excessive use of parantheticals for the rest of the tale. But no promises.

Driving to the River

We went to a new place since the lake we used to go canoeing in wasn't really open anymore for canoe people. I think. Not clear on this. But instead we went to what is a lazy wide river with very little current. The principle is this: you pack the canoe with your people, your lunch, and your canoe equipment, and you paddle upstream till you get tired. Then you tie the canoe to an overhanging branch and eat lunch. After a lazy lunch and possibly a short nap, you untie the canoe and leisurely paddle back downstream with the current helping you along till you get to where you put the minivan.

Pippin is loving it

Here's what no one expected. Pippin, instead of being his usual resigned self (she's dragging me somewhere else. Again) loved it. I think it had something to do with being in a safe, confined space surrounded by stuff no one could get through to get to him, but he could sniff and hear and (limited) see all he wanted to. Plus the water magnified the scents and sounds. He was fascinated.

He also got wet, because it had been such a long time since we went canoeing that I forgot how you have to flip the paddle from one side of the canoe to the other, and in doing so, you drip all over the inside of the canoe (and the person in front of you). My father, in the back, steering the canoe, always took quite a lot of glee in dripping water down my back between my lifejacket and my clothes. This time I do believe he tried to avoid dripping lake water on Pippin, but it's not really something you can avoid altogether.

Pippin didn't seem to mind. In fact, he didn't even seem to notice.

My mother was in the front of the canoe, and my sister and I were side by side in the middle of the canoe, trading the paddle back and forth (we only have three paddles). And Pippin, as you saw, was on my lap.

No, he doesn't get Gatorade.
He won't eat or drink anything till we get home.

As we were traveling upstream, we were passing lake-front housing and some of the people were out in their backyards, doing back yard stuff. One backyard had two dogs in it. The wind was blowing toward them, and so they smelled Pippin.

There was a cat in the middle of the river. In that canoe!

This was a horrible state of affairs and must be corrected immediately! The dogs rushed down to their little pier and went barking like crazy, trying to get their humans' attention to rectify this awful error. It is a good thing the humans couldn't understand the dogs. It was bad enough that they were visibly annoyed with their dogs suddenly barking at a passing boat (you could tell it wasn't a usual thing the dogs did based on the humans' reactions to the barking) but if they'd been able to understand what the dogs were protesting, those poor dogs would have been told they were a bunch of liars.

Because Pippin, hearing the dogs, decided to duck his head down below canoe edge level, and thus could not be seen from the shore!

When we tired of paddling and found a nice place to tie to an overhanging branch, we stopped for lunch. We used to tie to a branch on the side of the river/lake, but when I was younger we had a snake drop in for lunch (quite literally) as we were snugged up against the land. This then involved the snake, my shoe (no foot in it at the time) and my father using a paddle to eject my shoe into the water, along with the snake. While I wasn't sorry to see the snake go, I was rather indignant about the shoe. Granted they were worn out dirty boat shoes, shoes that weren't fit for anything else from the holes in the sides and the wear on the tread, but still.

Anyway, now we make sure we have a nice branch that overarches the water, where we aren't right next to the shore, and we can see if there's any snakes (or wasps' nests, or giant spiders) hanging out on the branch.

We ate lunch and had our food coma nap afterwards. This wasn't like deep sleep or anything, and I kept an eye on Pippin, because I figured he'd take the opportunity to investigate once everyone stopped moving around and things settled and became quiet.

This is what he did. He was curious about this stuff the canoe moved through. Pippin had had plenty of baths at this point, so he knew what water was, and unusually for most indoor cats, he knew what "deep" water was (water that isn't just running like from a faucet or kitty water fountain).

Look, I know he's out in a canoe. But he was an indoor cat unless he was escorted. I never let him run loose without me around and either a harness or a fence involved. You could fence Pippin since because of his poor eyesight meaning he wouldn't jump the fence. I was still there the whole time. So, indoor cat.

Now I didn't see the other side of the canoe edge because I was behind Pippin with a hand in his harness, making sure I hadn't misjudged his level of curiosity. If he was going to suddenly become brave kitty and go for a swim, I wanted to be sure I could nip that idea in the bud. My father, however, was in a position to see what happened on the other side of the canoe where the lake was, and he told me.

Pippin very cautiously and carefully reached one paw over the side of the canoe. He had his paw bent like he was going to walk on the top of the water. He lowered the paw, still slowly and carefully.

The paw reached the surface of the water, but unlike the leaves floating around us, Pippin's paw kept going into the water up to the first paw joint (where it bends when they walk on land). He didn't react like you'd expect, yanking his paw up and shaking it.

No, he just slowly and carefully pulled his paw back out of the water and (I saw this part) looked at the damp paw rather mournfully, as if to say I knew it. I just knew it. Water. Humph. He didn't even wash the paw then, although I did my best to dry it off with a towel (or possibly the edge of my shirt). He washed it later, putting it back into order, but he was so disappointed that he couldn't go walkabout on the water around the canoe that he just left his paw slightly damp for a while.

May 2010: It was a smidge too hot to have taken him
with us, so he spent most of his time under the
umbrella while inside the canoe. Mostly sleeping.

We went canoeing several times after that. Pippin came along for all of the rides. He quite enjoyed them, and when we got back to the house he would tell me about how much he liked it and what he saw and smelled. At least, I'm assuming that's what all the little purls and trills and mrups were about. He certainly seemed happy with his canoe trips!

Retrospective: Why Pippin Became a Travelling Kitty

Pippin was rather an unusual kitty. I recently found a blog called The Way of Cats which perfectly sums up my ideas about cats and dealing with cats. Only her ideas not only match mine, but it's like my ideas are still in elementary school and her ideas grew up and went to college and got an advanced degree in cats.

At home he's not afraid of anything!
Except strange noises and people knocking on the door.

Pippin was what she calls a gamma kitty. You can read more about it there, but basically if you put a kitten in a box that's possible to get out of but challenging, an alpha kitty will knock over the box leaping out of it because there are more interesting things to do outside the box; a beta kitty will investigate the inside of the box thoroughly before leaving, and a gamma kitty will sit in the middle of the box and implore you to pick him up and put him elsewhere, please, as this was not his idea.

So all I knew back then when Pippin was a kitten was that Pippin was very scared and wary of any new situation. If only I could never have him leave the house, we'd be fine. But unfortunately he would have to go to the vet, and I didn't want the only place he'd go besides the house to be a scary one (because vets are scary in and of themselves). I knew from my own experiences with myself that the only way to make new places not be scary was to visit as many new places as possible.

And so I started taking Pippin to as many different kinds of places as I could think of. My brother's house with his cats. My friend's house with a single cat. Petsmart. Hiking.Then the poor guy gets diagnosed with cardiomyopathy (a common Maine Coon ailment) and while the one pill a day kept the disease in check, it didn't exactly lend itself to leaving him behind when I went on vacations. So he went to Pennsylvania by car and by plane on multiple trips, stayed in hotels and relative's houses, and even flew to Seattle.

By the time Pippin went on a canoe, he was quite the seasoned traveler. And by the way, it worked. He was very calm and accepting of anything new, observing quietly from my arms or the front pack he stayed in when he got too heavy to be held over my shoulder. (I could only do the shoulder thing for short periods of time).

Although the normal shoulder was the other one.
He's not scared. If he was scared the paws would be
around my shoulder and his face would be buried
in my neck.

I knew him and his reactions, as well, by this time. I knew that if something scared him, he'd bury his face in my neck and hug my shoulder/neck with his paws. He didn't use his claws, but sometimes he'd grip so hard he left bruises. And as long as I was with him, and in contact with him, he was fine, even if he was scared

I realize now that part of what made him so wary of new situations was the fact that he had cataracts from the time he was a kitten. He was partially blind his whole life, and thus he couldn't see new things or new places in order to assess them. He learned to trust me and my reactions to tell him whether something was safe or not. (Do you have any idea the burden this put on me at the vet? I don't like doctor's offices: they make me nervous. But if I was nervous, he'd think there was something to be nervous about. So I had to be all calm and stuff. It was decidedly difficult, I'll tell you that!)

Megacoons

Now that Max is settled with my brother, I have no kitties. I have learned things from Max, though.

1) My house is boring and lonely. Therefore, if there is to be kitty, there must be two kitties.
2) I'm a hard person to get used to when you're already set in your ways and thinking humans come in this style. (You know, it's downright irritating to realize that what holds true for other humans relating to me also holds true for cats!) Anyway, therefore, if there is to be kitties, there must be kittens first who grow up with me around so they're used to me and my behavioral quirks.
3) Just any cat won't do: I need cats who are gentle, and predisposed to like being around humans, and are rather lazy and content (when they're grown, anyway). Cats who are well socialized and don't have dark patches in their personalities where someone when they were little was mean to them or scared them.

Which means, to me, Maine Coon kitties!

One Sunday recently I drove 4 hours to a place called Megacoons (you can look it up on the web if you want) that makes Maine Coon kittens on purpose. The man who runs the place has been doing it for twenty years. He's now retired and this is his whole life (well, he does have a girlfriend who was there when I got there, so I suppose he does things other than take care of the cats, but he spends most of his time with them.)

He is very passionate about the breed and making them better, both healthier and in appearance. They're already sweeties in personality. He was showing me something about the coloration on a very young kitten. These kittens were just old enough to have eyes open and ears up, but not old enough to be able to retract claws yet.

I always thought kittens were kind of fragile. He's treating this kitten like he's playing with a slinky. He's trying to show me a tummy color detail. The kitten isn't objecting, but it's small in his big hands and squirmy simply because it's a kitten, so the kitten keeps pouring from one hand to the other. Like a slinky. I have no idea what he was actually telling me. My brain just fixated on this kitten handling. I mean, wow. Talk about yes, your kitten will be handled and socialized to humans from a very young age!

Pippin was a CFA Maine Coon.
Note the sweet, elegant lines (amid the fur)

Also, I discovered that my sweet Pippin was a CFA registry Maine Coon. The registry is who holds the cat shows and who determines what physical traits make a show-winning cat. CFA Maine Coons are more elegant and slender. These Maine Coons are TICA registry. They look like small bobcats. They have massive bone structure and look wild.

They're sweet natured, though. The wild look is all on the surface. In an enclosure with two mommies and their kittens, because they'd been born so close together that he raised them all together (this is what cats do when they're feral - they all babysit the kittens) one of the mommies, named Layla, introduced herself to my lap without me doing anything and promptly curled up on it. She was big, and kept dripping off the edges of my lap and, like I always had to do with Pippin, I kept having to move bits of her back up onto my lap. And like Pippin, she didn't mind. Seemed to think it was part of my job as a sitting-down-human.

Mommy needs time out from the kittens!

Johnnie (the Megacoons guy) sat down on the floor and started luring kittens out with a felt strand toy (like a feather wand). And kittens kept emerging. It was their nap time -- they weren't afraid of us or anything. They were just all asleep when we first showed up. More kittens kept emerging. They were all colors, seemingly. You see the mommy cat on my lap is a tri-color tortoiseshell cat, so she can give three different colors to her kittens. Johnnie says that he has difficulty producing all black cats with the assortment he has, but there's one in here somewhere. He finally locates a cute little black tuxedo kitten and holds it up to demonstrate.

I envy men their big hands. I would have had to use two hands to pick up the kitten (these were about 8-10 weeks old) simply because my hand couldn't span its back successfully. Johnnie just picks up the kitten with one hand without even thinking about it. 

Kittens keep appearing. Finally I asked in amazement, "Just how many are there?!" He shrugs and says "Ten. Five from each mommy." Wow. No wonder the mommies wanted some adult human time! (The other mommy was asleep on top of a carrying crate that was in there probably to get the kittens used to the concept.)

Of course, the kittens were fascinated with my shoelaces. I made the mistake of picking one up that was particularly into trying to get them loose. He was a little red classic tabby who looked exactly like Pippin did when he was a kitten. (The visible structural differences between registries' Maine Coon types come later.) I held it together until about an hour down the road coming back home, and then fell apart.

Hopefully I will be ready for kittens in the four months that it will take, minimum, to make me some. (All the kittens I saw there were already spoken for.) But if I'm not ready in four months, I can wait. Johnnie was very adamant that no one ever has to take a kitten they aren't perfectly happy with.

I would have taken more pictures but it was all a bit overwhelming. There were a lot of cats in a small space (so it seemed to me). He had a room that was closed off that was storage. He said it was supposed to be a birthing room but the mommies didn't like being separated from the other cats. They are separated, but it's just wire and they can see, smell, and hear each other.

And obviously the cats prefer it that way. 

Max LOVES people!

The stuff in this post happened a week (and a day) ago. Life sort of sideswiped me. It happens a fair amount.

Anyway, Max had been at my brother's house for a week when our friends descended on his house Saturday night for board gaming, like always. (Well, it's not always at his house; we alternate houses. But we all get together Saturday night.)

No one was quite sure how Max was going to respond to an influx of strangers when he'd only been in this new place for a week. We made sure everyone knew that if Max retreated to the sunroom he wasn't to be followed, and don't push him, and be careful he bites when provoked. And it doesn't take much to provoke him.

Well, Max set us all straight. He's no shy kitty to run and hide. He quite enjoyed having all these different people around. He mingled and never once retreated to the sunroom - the only thing that came close to making him retreat was Circle-Tail the dog, who was hardly a new person.

Max hanging out on the fireplace hearth

Despite it being the first day of March, it was cold, so Chuck had a fire going in the stove. (This is a most disappointing thing, since it is wood and burning but there aren't any flames -- if you're doing it right -- and the only fun thing you get out of the stove is warmth. I think a fireplace should have leaping flames to stare into, not just warmth coming out of the sides.) Max, who doesn't really get cold and didn't stay here long, decided to arrange himself prettily on the hearth. He was watching the floor (see the shiny spot of light? Max likes shiny spots of light) and not making a good photo opportunity, so Dawn called his name from where she stood next to me, which is why Max is looking up expectantly.

Max pretending to be a new game

When we finally divied ourselves up into two groups to play games, Rob came downstairs (where the group I was in had settled) to get some game choices. The minute he opened the game cupboard and removed some games, Max inserted himself quite happily in their place. So we left the door open until Max got tired of that game (ha ha) and jumped down.

The 6th player

We were playing a 5 player game and there were six chairs at the table. The sixth one (empty) happened to be next to me. So, after everybody stopped moving around and being interesting, Max jumped into the empty chair and stayed there for quite some time, just hanging out with us while we played our board game.

No wonder he was acting out at my house. Where no one but me ever comes in the door and it's quiet and boring all the time. He apparently thrives on stimulation and there's none at my place except window-watching!