Monday, November 22, 2010

Miss Willow

So few people besides me have ever seen Miss Willow I sometimes feel compelled to post proof of her existence lest I be accused of only having one actual cat and one hallucinatory cat.

Miss Willow is very shy of people, being semi-feral due to being rescued from a crazy cat lady from the NYC suburbs who had a big place and lots of land and no interest in neutering her cats.

Miss Willow has rules. For example, I'm allowed to pet her, but not pick her up. She also has the "one-hand rule" - that is, you may not put more than one hand on her at any time, lest you get any ideas about picking her up. Getting her to the vet is a holy living hell and an all-day project.

But usually she's much more low maintenance than Mr. Fuzz, who pesters me whenever I'm home to play with him - mostly he likes to play with his real-fur mousies - I throw a mousie and he fetches it. But sometimes I throw a paper airplane and he likes that too.

Miss Willow has a few games that she invented. One game she likes to play is "capture the tail" in which she sits just far enough away from me so that she can wag her tail and hit me with it. I have to capture the tail by grabbing it as it sweeps by to hit me, every now and then, but I have to let go almost immediately or she gets annoyed. But if I don't at least try to capture the tail she also gets annoyed. So those are the rules of "capture the tail." It's not an especially sophisticated game, I'll grant you, but whaddya want, she's a cat.

Another game she likes is "Q-tips." I have a box of Q-tips that I use as emergency mousies when I run out of them and Mr. Fuzz is frantic for playtime, and believe me, he goes through ALOT of mousies in a week and we often do run out at incovenient times. But Miss Willow likes Q-tips too - she doesn't fetch them, she just likes to take them out of the box and throw them off the table. Again, Milton-Bradley is never going to come calling for her ideas and she'll just have to live with that.

But who cares, she's so cute!