Max Gets Barked At

Circle Tail is a quiet dog. In fact, before last Saturday night, I'd never heard him bark. You may remember that Circle Tail is my brother's dog. Max has gotten fairly comfortable with having him around.

We were playing a board game, and not paying much attention to the animals. Circle Tail's food and water dishes are in the same room. They're in one of those elevated platform things that you can get so your large dog (or large cat, in some cases) doesn't have to reach down to the floor to eat. It helps ease stress on their neck muscles and bones.

When the other cats investigate Circle Tail's food dish, they are so small that their elbows stick up around their ears as they lean into the bowl, front feet on the edge. It looks like little fuzzy wings. One wants to go over and tweak them. (One is usually not quick enough.)

Max just kind of leans over and looks in. I don't think he was actually eating. Perhaps tasting, and just in general being a nosy cat.

Circle Tail knows he's not supposed to bother the cats, but this was really the end. I mean, just too much. He was whining, at first silently, and then louder, hoping to get one of his people to make Max go away so he could eat.

Like I said, we weren't paying attention.

So Circle Tail (much to our surprise and possibly his) let out a short sharp bark. Max backs off from the food dish, which was what the poor dog wanted in the first place, so Circle Tail moves up toward the food. This meant, since Max hadn't backed far, that from Max's point of view, the dog was coming toward him.

Oh dear no, we can't have this. (After the bark we were all watching to see how they'd handle the situation.) Max backed up another step, one front paw out and up, ready to give Circle Tail the smack down if necessary.Circle Tail hesitated, and that was all Max needed to get out of there; he put the paw down and turned and walked off in a little more haste than is normal for him.

For all the world like Max had been saying, "Don't you talk to me in that  tone of voice, mister -- and I'm leaving, I'm leaving, sheesh, you needn't bark."

By the way, when I say Max backed up, I mean it. Due to his Norwegian Forest cat heritage, Max is capable of backing up multiple steps using all four feet. He's also capable of walking down the cat tree (instead of jumping from it). It is fairly startling to watch, as it looks so normal -- until you think about it and realize you've never seen a cat do that before!

Max on high

Retrospective: Pippin as a kitten (now with pictures)

I am running into a problem here with my posts. My digitized photos only go back to 2006, and so if I want to put pictures of Pippin as a kitten, or even just younger than 2006, I have to manually scan in the photos. So I'm going to do that eventually (which means hopefully in the next two days over the weekend) but I had a post just bubbling up inside so I'm going to write it without pictures now. Maybe I will go back and insert them later ...

So, Pippin as a kitten. I have been thinking a lot about kittens lately, and reading on kitten behavior, and stuff, and trying to remember Pippin when he was a kitten.

And what I mostly remember is that I lived in a state of constant astonishment when he was a kitten.

Slowly, slowly, he sank beneath the sea ... I mean,
into the bed

Like, claws. Most kittens have these sharp little claws that they aren't quite sure of how to retract properly at all times. Pippin was almost ashamed that he had claws that could damage things and kept them always retracted.

This led to some odd difficulties. At the time my bed was a waterbed, and fairly low to the ground. Still, it was tall enough baby Pippin couldn't jump up on it. Thus he would try to climb onto it.

But since he wouldn't use his claws (on the comforter), he had no traction. Maine Coons have tufts of hair between their toes, so he had even less traction than a short-hair cat. I would look over, and see two ears slowly appear over the edge of the bed as he valiantly tried to climb up. And then he'd lose the battle with gravity, and the ears would slowly sink back down again.

Finally I had to take mercy on him (how was I to know he wouldn't eventually figure it out? Most kittens use their claws!). I actually had to teach him it was okay to use claws to get up onto the bed, by physically poking them out into the bedspread fabric and saying "yes, this is okay, this is a good thing, you can get up here with me like this."

Being a kitten, it took him a while to get the concept. I mean, when you're talking the attention span of a gnat and the retention ability of a toddler on halloween candy, it can be a while before a memory sinks in. But he got it, and soon was climbing up onto the bed like anything.

He didn't generalize. The claws didn't get used for anything else. I think he used them for the scratching post, but honestly, I'm not sure. It's not like I took high-speed film so I could slow it down and see if there were claws out or just paws scraping down the posts.

blurry Pippin enthusiastically using
his scratching post (he actually
got too big for this one later!)

Another astonishment moment. Kittens are usually quite willing to make a toy out of anything they happen across. I had lots of things that could be kitten toys like this. Pippin was also given a lot of his own toys. And I never once had to take one of my toys away from him. He always left everything of mine alone, even the Beanie Babies which were within easy reach, and soft and stuffed like his favorite toys. And I never even told him not to mess with my stuff. He just knew.

I got so I took it for granted. I had all sorts of breakables and knick-knacks on the bookshelves in front of the books. And even though he liked to lie on the bookshelves in front of the books, he always chose a place clear of my toys to lie down in and never knocked any of my stuff off the shelves.

Big ol' bat ears

I guess when they handed out the "gravity tester" badges to kittens, he was standing in a different line.

He just didn't behave like a normal kitten. I mean, yes, he played with toys. He loved to play elephant cat. That is when they thunder through the house from one end to the other making more noise than a mere cat should be able to accomplish, thus, elephant cat.

When I got two pieces of cat furniture he played on them like jungle gyms. But the normal kitten behaviors of claws and inappropriate toys and destructiveness ... he just never did that. The one time he missed the litterbox was because he was locked in a room all morning without one (we didn't realize he was still in Mom's room when we left for church) and not only did he pick the easiest thing to clean (her sheets, on a waterbed with no mattress to be soaked) but he was terribly ashamed of himself and didn't feel better about it till I gave up and half-heartedly scolded him.

That perked him right up, as if he'd expected to be scolded for missing the litterbox and wasn't going to be happy until he received said scolding.

Every kitten is a little bit destructive. Every kitten misses the litterbox at least once (without the iron clad excuse of not having one available!). Every kitten accidentally claws you at least once.

Not Pippin. He may have been a goofy cat who was rather clumsy, but he had standards and they were not going to be compromised.

I must say that his restrained kitten behavior has left me rather unprepared for any potential kittens coming my way at some point in the future!

Retrospective: It's the Little Things

I am missing Pippin a lot today. And it's the little things I miss.

Whenever I was at home, I wanted to know where Pippin was. I'm not sure why. I feel the same about any living being in the house. So if I didn't already know where he was, I would search him out, confirm that he was sleeping or napping or watching the outdoors in one of his favorite spots, and in the process, greet him and pet him. Or sometimes I would just look out the window with him for a little while. And then I'd go do human things (like books or email or tv or supper) and sometimes he would come with or show up soon after, and sometimes he wouldn't.

And that was okay. I didn't want to disturb him out of a sound sleep, or make him come be with me when he was more interested in the chipmunk antics out the window.

The thing I loved was that Pippin felt the same way. He wanted to know where I was all the time. Sometimes when I was home for long periods of time, like the weekend, he would lose track of me during one of his deeper naps.

Then I would hear him call out, the closest he ever got to a straight-up "meow". It meant "where are you!" and I was to respond with my location. "I'm in the living room reading." And usually after a few minutes I'd look over, and he'd be lying on the floor by the chair I was reading in, pretending he'd been there the whole time.

He liked to pretend that way. Any time I was in a room, chances are, he'd be there too. And he'd appear to have been there for simply hours. Even if I'd just walked in and he had been in the room I'd left minutes before.

He and I were equally susceptible to our imaginations. Luckily, we rarely "heard" a noise at the same time. I'd think I heard a noise, and I'd look over, and he'd look back at me, ears not twitched back, calm with no indication of having heard something. Ah, I'd think, I must have imagined it.

Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me the same way, and I'd shrug and say, "I didn't hear anything," and he'd lay his head back down on his paws and calm down.

Rarely, we'd check in with each other to find the other with ears alert (figuratively, for me) and eyes a little wild. Yup, we heard something all right. And then I'd get up and go track down the sound, and Pippin would follow behind, a little nervously. Sometimes, if it was a big noise, he'd hide and wait for me to come back and tell him what it was.

When we first moved into this house by ourselves, we had a lot of noise-tracking-down to do. Houses make all sorts of odd noises that don't sound house-like, and with a different house than the one we'd grown up in, we had to make sure all those noises really were house-noises.

A lot of "Pippin noises in the other room" have turned out to be house-noises. I wonder if he thought I was making them in the other room, the way I thought he was making them?

He used to greet me at the door when I came home from work. But this wasn't a dog's greet-you-at-the-door. He'd simply be in the kitchen (where the door was), looking out the window, or in his cardboard box, and my entry into the kitchen from the outdoors would be greeted with a lazy look. Oh, I didn't know you were going to be there.

This, of course, was more pretending, since the driveway ends at the kitchen window, and even if he wasn't actually looking out the window to see the movement of the car stopping in the driveway, he could certainly hear the car. And the car door closing, and me coming up the steps.

In the last year I had to start giving him lysine treats to prevent ulcers (yes, it does work for cats). He got two a day, one in the morning and one when I came home. The treats were thus kept in the bedroom (so I'd remember the one in the morning).

When Pippin discovered that I reliably went into the bedroom and gave him a treat when I came home, he started cutting out the middle man and waited for me in the bedroom rather than the kitchen. Instead of following me from the kitchen all the way to the other end of the house.

Once in the other house, when Pippin was younger (but grown), I came in the house and wasn't feeling too good so I didn't say anything the way I usually did to greet him. I didn't realize until that point how much he depended on voices to identify people. He freaked out and ran when this stranger came into the room.

I'm not the swiftest emotional thinker at the best of times, and it didn't occur to me at that precise point in time that he simply didn't recognize me. All I knew was I was feeling bad anyway, and here my cat was, fleeing me! I snapped in tired annoyance, "Pippin, it's just me!"

He stopped, halfway out of the room, frozen in a running pose for half a second, sat down, and nonchalantly washed himself. Of course it was you. Who else would I think it was? I meant to do that. And I realized then he just hadn't known who I was, and apologized for snapping at him. I made sure after that I always talked when I came in the door, and he never had to leave at high speed to escape the "stranger" again.

He was very fond of being with. I like to watch thunderstorms. From inside the house, through the patio doors, not from outside! The wind driving the rain into the patio bricks, the massive oak tree in the back yard flowing back and forth, the thunder crashing and vibrating through the air -- I love thunderstorms. Pippin didn't feel the same way about them. But he would sit with me on the floor at the patio doors and help me watch them anyway. Although most of his watching ended up being curled up against my side or washing himself.

I don't think he was scared of thunderstorms. I think, quite honestly, they bored him. The large movements of wind and rain and tree that I find so fascinating were possibly too large for him to see. Cats are small movement focused (like a mouse skittering by) and once you add his cataracts on top of that, I don't think he found much of interest in thunderstorms, aside from the fact they were great ways to make me sit still where he could be next to me.

Cats like routines. They like to know what's coming next. I really like routines. Pippin really liked them too. At bedtime I had a certain routine. This routine, in my head, did not include the last minute "I forgot something" trip out of the bedroom (which involved re-opening the bedroom door). But in reality, my bedtime routine almost always included a last minute trip into the rest of the house.

Pippin turned this into part of his routine by insisting that I follow him around the living room and back into the bedroom, no matter where the thing I needed to get was (water from the kitchen, my hair scrunchy from the tv room, etc.) I tried to get him to stay in the bedroom and "I'll be right back." This generally didn't work unless he was half asleep already.

Sometimes I was so tired that the last thing I wanted to do was make another circuit around the house. But Pippin insisted. He wouldn't come back of his own accord, but if I walked toward him (to pick him up and bring him back), he'd slowly walk away, at the same pace I used, and would walk in a big circle and end up back in the bedroom.

And then we would both eventually settle down in bed (sometimes Pippin had to go to the bathroom or get himself a snack or a drink, all of which were in the bedroom for his convenience) and turn the lights off and go to sleep. He would almost always lay down within touching distance (for me). I would reach out a sleepy arm and stroke a paw or tail or back, whatever I happened to touch first, and then we'd go to sleep together.

Retrospective: Pippin's Friend, the Chipmunk

I don't have any pictures directly related to this story. They'd be either boring or blurry anyway. You'll see.

When we moved in, there was a chipmunk, a cute little thing, who hung out on the back porch. He soon figured out that the new cat in the house didn't come out on the back porch. So he stayed. Pippin quite looked forward to his visits. The chipmunk would pretend he didn't know Pippin was watching, and Pippin (who if you've read the story of Pippin and the mice, you know he's not after the chipmunk for prey) would quietly and happily watch the chipmunk. Probably with dreams of playing with him, friendly like.

The next year the chipmunk turned up again. But it was this year that I started letting Pippin out in the backyard when I was out making the patio and the various flower beds.

The chipmunk wasn't stupid. He knew cats, so he made sure he was nowhere to be found when Pippin was out. He had a network of tunnels under the ground that let him go anywhere he wanted under the deck and the one side of the house.

But once the chipmunk made the mistake of poking his head up out of his hole before Pippin went back inside, and while Pippin was looking in his direction.

Pippin was fascinated and intrigued! The chipmunk wasn't just cat tv! It was real! He dashed over to the hole where the chipmunk had already ducked away. Pippin sighed, and with a cat's legendary patience, settled down to wait.

He outwaited the chipmunk. Up periscope came the chipmunk, and he was too far out to reverse direction when he realized Pippin was still there. (To be fair to the chipmunk, it had been about an hour). The chipmunk dashed madly for another entrance to his tunnel network. Pippin dashed madly after him. The chipmunk made it, just in time.

Pippin gave the hole a glare, sighed again, and settled down for another long wait.

About half an hour after that, I was ready to go in. I called Pippin from the patio door, wondering what his reaction would be.

I really was expecting hesitance to come in, but it appeared as though Pippin welcomed the excuse to leave the frustrating hole that refused to produce the chipmunk. Pippin came in quite readily, without even hesitating.

That was the first and last time Pippin ever caught the chipmunk outside again, although the chipmunk continued the porch visits when Pippin was on the safe side of the door!

Retrospective: Pippin Goes Outside (on purpose)

Since I got Pippin from a Maine Coon breeder, he was born to a cat who had never had to fend for itself outside, and he was never outside to fend for himself either. Along with his cautious personality, this led to a cat who would sit in the kitchen while I brought load after load of grocery bags through a door open to the outside, and never once even try to investigate the doorway, much less run through it.

After Pizza and Tiger, who viewed Outside as the best toy ever and wanted to get there at every opportunity, Pippin's passivity in the face of access to the outdoors was quite startling, although very welcome. (It's hard to bring in the groceries when you have to do the cat dance in front of the door every time you want to go through it!)

When Pippin was about 8, we moved into our very own house. A year later, in 2008, I got a very strange urge to do things outdoors in my very own yard. Notice the house was "ours" but the yard was "mine." This was because Pippin showed no interest in it, aside from appreciating the cat tv provided by the chipmunks and birds on the porch. And I'm just as much of an indoor kitty as he was; being outdoors and doing things like planting flowers and making flower beds and all, that's just weird for me. I'm a book person, not a flower person.

But here I was, outside till it got dark every night, working mostly on a patio. My backyard is weird, and for this to make sense, I gotta describe it. It's surrounded by a fence. You go out the porch doors (which have windows down to the bottom) onto the porch. Then you go down a few steps to the deck. Then you go down some more steps to what used to be a circular above-ground pool, but was now just a flat area with sand.

The hardest part about making a patio with pavers is making the ground flat and sanding it. I already had that, so I was just placing the pavers.

Pippin was a little put out. Here I was, within sight, but out of reach. And he was bored after all day by himself. He wanted to be with me. And if I wouldn't come in and be with him, well, he'd just have to screw up his courage and come out and be with me.

So he asked. I considered the request. You see, he didn't jump if he couldn't see where he'd land. In fact, even then he'd usually just go around, and if he couldn't get there by going around, half the time he'd discard the idea. That meant a normal three foot chain link fence would contain him safely. And I could tell he didn't want to go outside. He wanted to be with me.

There came the big day when I opened the door and let it open. And watched, in mortal terror of my foolishness, for the great escape.

Pippin stood in the open door watching me work for a long time. (I didn't get much done, as I was watching him out of the corner of my eye.) Finally he ventured out onto the porch.

That's my brave boy!

The first day he didn't go off the porch, just sat on the edge and watched me.

The outdoors is a highly suspect place.

The first week, although he ventured off the porch, and even into the grass, he wouldn't sit down unless he was on a man-made substance. This led to a funny incident where he was far from "land" and got tired, so he sat down on the only thing he could find close by that was man-made--the downspout at the corner of the house.

To add insult to injury, the grass is also WET.

He inspected the patio quite often, approving of its slowly growing larger (more "land" for him to be on). I started from the middle, placing pavers until I got tired of doing it each night. They were heavy, and I could only carry one or possibly two at a time, so it exhausted wimpy me quite quickly. When I was tired of toting patio pavers, I played with planting flowers and stuff, and making flower beds.

The patio is almost finished, much to his approval.
I only had to put the triangle pieces in at this point.

This next series of pictures is Pippin on his third day out. He still wasn't sure about going off the porch, so he was investigating the flower pots on the porch. I'd previously observed his behavior with inside-plants, and I knew that although he sometimes opened his mouth and looked most alarmingly like he was going to bite into one, he was only using his Jacobson's organ to smell the flower/plant more intensely. (Cats, oddly like snakes, have a secondary ability to smell that's located in the roof of their mouths. If they open their mouths and breathe deep, pulling air across that, they get the secondary ability more intensely involved.) So I knew he wouldn't try to eat any of the plants.

I still watched him carefully, just to be sure no new plant sparked a sudden vegetarian desire.

Still not sure about leaving the house behind!

Sniffing the plants to see what I'd been doing
with the flower pots and plants he'd been
watching all this time.

All the way to the edge of the porch!
He's being so brave!

He even speculated about leaving the porch
for nature's ground.
He didn't, not this day, at least.

Much safer: no one can get him here.
But he's moved from the porch to the deck.

He's done exploring. Would I care to come in as well?

Now every time from the first time I let him out, I'd call him to come in when I was ready to go in, and give him a treat once we were inside the house. Even if he'd already gone back in, during the early days of his explorations.

At one point, when the outdoors had become commonplace, Pippin suddenly thought about this whole process. Wait a minute. I go out, I come in, I get a treat. Cool! He made sure I was watching him. I'd opened the door, but hadn't yet gone out myself. He stepped out onto the porch. He knew I had a tendency to be legalistic about things, so he made sure every bit of himself was Outside. Even the tail. Then he turned around and came right back in, and gave me the look that meant, "Treat"? 

I busted out laughing and said, "sorry, no, you have to come in when I call you in, not just any time you walk back in the house!" (Because by this time, that was the rule; he didn't need the reassurance for venturing outside anymore!) He looked most disappointed.

But the treat thing worked. He would come or not as he pleased when he was in the house and I called his name (which was fine by me; I didn't want him showing up every time he heard me say his name. Poor guy would be run off his feet, considering how much I talked about him.) When we were outside, though, I could call him and he'd come.

Even if he didn't want to. Pippin discovered that Outdoors had its own appeal besides me. He liked the little hoppy bugs in the grass. He liked to sit and sniff the breeze to see what was around. Most times when we'd come back in, he'd spend five to ten minutes vocally talking to me about everything he saw and did and heard and smelled Outdoors. I didn't understand exactly what he said, of course, but I understood he was talking about the experiences he'd just had.

The mighty explorer in his domain.

Once I remember especially, I called him to come in, and he really really didn't want to. It was getting on dusk, his favorite time when all the hoppy bugs came out. He was on the other side of the porch (there are only stairs to the porch on the one side, and he didn't like the deck stairs on the other side. Don't blame him--I don't like them either. They are rickety now and were rickety then.)

So he finally looked up from his hoppy bugs and trotted around the patio area, disappearing under the deck. "Pippin!" from me again. After a bit he appeared on the other side, hurrying now that he'd managed to tear himself away from his toys. He came right in, wanting his treat. Which he got, of course.

Once he scared the living daylights out of me. I left the stupid gate open. No, the gate isn't stupid. I am. I forgot he was out, because he was being his usual unobtrusive self, and I forgot. I left that gate open for ages. Probably fifteen minutes. I was taking debris from the trees out to the street. Back and forth, because there was too much for one load. And then I forgot to close the gate.

Suddenly I remembered. No, please no. I looked for Pippin, only to find him about five to ten feet on the wrong side of the open gate. Okay, good that I know where he is. Bad that he's out where there is no fence to corral him. 

And I can't let him know I'm panicked. It'll either panic him, or he'll find it amusing and want to continue the game. With him, it was more likely to be the first, but either way, I wouldn't be able to catch him. So, keeping my voice normal and cheerful like always, I announced that it was time to go in, and Pippin! Let's go in!

He looked up, grinned his cat grin which isn't a smile on the face like a human people but instead a whole body change, and came bouncing right over to me. Let's go!

I scooped him up, relief flooding my body, and hugged him rather more tightly than he appreciated (which he let me know with a mild squirm and a vocal comment rather like "meophf". I closed the gate, scolding myself internally to remember the next time to close the gate every time I went through it no matter how inconvenient it was, and took us both inside, where he got a treat. (Because he came when I called him.)

And then confused him by going back out again (as I wasn't done yet--the sun hadn't set). So that night he got two treats for coming in. Luckily he didn't figure out it was being beyond the gate that caused the multiple treat night. 

Although I didn't let him out while I was mowing (I'm not completely insane), he could observe this process from the patio door (the other side of it, obviously). He was very dismayed to find that the new room to the house I called Outdoors was subject to the same vacuuming monster that the Indoors part of the house was. Different sounding monster, but it worked much the same way, covering all the floor. I found him glaring at me indignantly when I came back in after the first time I mowed after he'd gotten brave in the Outdoors. It took me a while to figure out what he was ticked about.

Poor Pippin. I'm afraid I found it most amusing when I realized it was the lawn mower / vacuum cleaner comparison! 

I did have sympathy for the poor dear with one problem he had with the Outdoors. The first bird he encountered was a nasty mockingbird defending a nest (that he couldn't even get to; it was in the next door neighbor's yard!). If you don't know mockingbirds, be glad. They're worse than blue jays. It's intimidating have one dive bomb you even if you're a big human person. Imagine how much worse this menace from the sky is when you're a little cat! 

Pippin didn't know cats could make birds stop dead in their tracks (literally). All he knew was this scary monster was yelling and attacking him from the sky. (The bird knew cats. It stayed out of reach, so it wasn't physically harming Pippin.) He didn't like the mockingbird at all. Luckily it didn't put him off exploration entirely, since it made a lot of noise before attack, it could be avoided.

Unfortunately for my cat's reputation, he generalized the bird size and shape to all birds of similar size and shape. Which meant Pippin was afraid of even a mild robin (who wasn't paying attention to the cat who just emerged onto the deck). Pippin turned around and went right back inside. I felt so sorry for him, being scared of little birds, even as I found it hilarious (and thought I was quite the meany thinking it was funny!)

Pippin's flower bed

That picture is captioned Pippin's flower bed. This is because I made that flower bed from scratch. There was nothing but weeds there when I started. And I dug it up and put weed-stop fabric down and put holes in the fabric to have the plants come up through, and put an edging on it (the gray block in the left front corner of the picture). And I finished it on Pippin's birthday, so I called it Pippin's flower bed.

The patio is finished at last. Pippin approves.