Colby's phrase is, "if it's going to happen, it's going to happen to Colby." Despite the two of them spending equal time underfoot, it's Colby I end up tripping over most often. If someone's going to fall off the cat tree and hit the edge of the hearth with his back, it'll be Colby. (He's okay.) If someone's going to get a pill stuck halfway down their throat and have to wait for it to dissolve while breathing around it, it'll be Colby. (Again, okay.) If someone's going to be washing their neck ruff and get their fur tangled around a tooth and be unable to disentangle themselves, it's going to be Colby. (Not pleased at use of scissors to cut the hair and then me pulling the hair off his tooth, but okay.) He seems to attract bad luck.
He's my puzzler cat. He likes to figure things out and sort out the way things work. I was playing with them with a wand toy and tossed it into the cubby hole of the cat tree in the nursery. Colby was on the tree at the time, but he was facing the wrong way and didn't see where it went. It took a minute or two, but he figured out by tracing the string where the toy was, and you should have seen the ecstatic look on his face when he came out of the cubby hole holding it in his mouth!
Colby's also the one that figured out the baby teething toy. I got some teething toys for human babies because the selection for cat babies is a bit thin. This one is a segmented thing that each segment can rotate at the point it joins the next one, so you can deform it out of shape. Each segment is a different type of plastic for chewing on. I come home and find it in a different form than the way I left it, and given that I've only seen Colby playing with it, I believe it's Colby who figured out how to change it around. Even without opposable thumbs.
He's the one that plays with the food dispenser ball. It's a ball with a maze of plastic inside (it looks like it'd be fun to run matchbox cars down the plastic maze if it was larger and you could get them inside somehow). I put their normal food in it, not treats, and Colby rolls it around until the food comes out. He'll do it when he wants a snack and doesn't want to leave the living room, but he'll also do it when the other two ask him. I've seen him rolling it around, with Thimble and/or Apricot following close behind and scooping up the food bits as if they were quiet vacuum cleaners, and Colby only bothers to eat one if enough fall out that the other two are busy and some food is left over.
Sometimes the other two don't understand the difference between Colby dispensing food from the treat ball for them, and Colby doing it for himself ... I can tell because of the speed with which Colby goes after the dropped food bits! He doesn't growl at them or anything like that; he just darts in under their heads and snipes the food out from under them.
Colby's also in the process of figuring out the vacuum cleaner. Today as I vacuumed, I saw Colby in every single room I vacuumed, watching me. I never actually saw him follow me, but he must have. He's figuring out how it works. Oh, not the electricity and the suction and all that part of a vacuum cleaner. That's of no interest to a cat. He's figuring out that it doesn't move without me; that it follows a pattern across the floor where it rarely covers the same area after leaving it; and that there are certain points throughout the house where it stops and I disassemble it and do things off the floor and then reassemble it. Once he figures out all of this, he'll be able to hang out and watch it without the worry that it might suddenly race across and attack him. But as I only clean the house once a week, he's not had a lot of observation time yet.
The tent is a popup kind of thing, and Colby figured out if you jump on it, and then get off of it, it will collapse and then pop back into shape. To Thimble, this is really kind of a "and? so what?" revelation; he doesn't see the fun. Colby loves to jump on it and make it collapse. He does it even when he's not trying to get another cat to leave. I come home and I find this tent moved and sometimes on its side. I anchored it (it has an elastic band for the purpose) but he didn't play with it then, so apparently, he doesn't mind if he turns it over or upside down.
Colby takes a while to warm up to you. In fact, he takes a while to warm up to me every time I come home. But I actually understand this, although I doubt I can explain it. And it's not like he watches me from across the house; he hangs out with me and stuff. It's just that, well, like if I try to kiss his head--if I've only been home a few minutes, he'll back up and stare at me. If I've been home for hours, he'll move in for a head bump. Thimble doesn't have the same hesitation, so it isn't just that I smell funny from being outside the house.
But Colby prefers a less interactive type of interaction than Thimble. He likes to be asleep on my lap, or a cat's half-awake napping on my lap, while I do other things. If I'm sitting down and reading or playing phone games, he's likely to be on my lap.
However, if Colby decides he wants attention, heaven forbid you don't give it to him. He can be the worst pest when he wants to be. I've discovered that when he jumps up to be on my lap, it's best to shower him with attention until he indicates he's had enough and he'd like to curl up and be "with" without all that direct interaction now.
Once he kept giving me the "go back to what you were doing" signal and then contradicting himself a moment later. Really being a pain. Thimble was beside us on the settee, observing. When I said something along the lines of "would you stop?", Thimble got up, put a giant paw across Colby's neck, and pinned him down onto my lap, as if to say, "now look, you really are being a pest right now, behave."
I love giving him attention, don't get me wrong. It's just the mixed signals were getting a bit much.
Colby plays harder than Thimble does, but that's nothing new. What is new is Colby's increased desire to look nice and have his fur be all sorted out. In fact, it was his distress over his neck ruff getting stuck in his harness' collar that led me to take the harnesses off them both. There were other reasons, but that's the one that made me decide to do it. (Of course, a few days thereafter, we had the aforementioned hair getting wound around a tooth incident.)
They each have a special thing they do with me. These things were initiated by them and continued by me. Colby's is jumping on the antique end table that Apricot's food and water are under. (They both prefer to eat from this bowl rather than the two in the nursery. I can't wait till I can put all three bowls in the same area!) When Colby jumps onto the table, I say, "Oooh, does Colby want a kiss? Colby wants a kiss!" and stop what I'm doing, whatever that is, and go over to him and kiss him on his head.
The first time I did this I'm not sure what exactly Colby wanted when he jumped up there, but that's what he got. The fact that he continues to do this means that he enjoys it and likes to be able to have me do something just with him, whenever he wants.
And I enjoy not only kissing the top of his soft, warm head, but also the communication between us that is plain and clear and no guessing involved. If he gets onto the end table, it means he wants a kiss!
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