It's a Cats Life.

My cat, Nikita, is 6 1/2 yrs. old this month.

It's been a while since I've written about him.

In addition to being this establishments Bouncer, Nikita is my roommate, friend, and Best Buddy.

At times he has also been my creative inspiration: I've written, in previous entries, about the Memoirs Nikita "wrote" a few years ago, elsewhere, and even shared the only existing chapter ( I didn't save them. Long story ).

He may yet try to re-write them here, if he can get over his writer's block. :-)

As you can tell by his photo he is a BIG cat. :-)

He weighs 16 lbs., but is not fat, just well built, and with a dry food diet that, with a bowl set down 24/7, he can munch on at his leisure is a healthy cat who eats when ever he gets the urge.

He is not a talkative cat, picking and choosing his moments, which are rare indeed.

For whatever reason he has chosen to do so he confines his talk mostly to welcoming me home from work every day, and sometimes at other times when I've returned from a lengthy excursion from home.

He apparently recognizes my footsteps, and scent, the moment I step onto the 2nd floor, and walk toward the apartment, and either sits on my bed, until I approach the door, or is already sitting in his window "Observation Post", meowing up a storm.

I can hear his greeting 2 apartments away when he is at the window. :-)

Ahhh... the window.

It has always been his favorite spot in this apartment, and at the previous place, in Pomona.

The passing parade here, though, is so much more frequent, varied, and interesting, than the old place, and keeps him vastly entertained for hours on end when I'm home, and when I'm away.

He is not sitting on a window sill here, though.

He has ample room to stretch out, if he wants, due to the fact that I have stacked 2 14 gal. storage containers at the window.

The elevation gives him an even better view of the parking lot 2 floors below.

I've learned that he is never truly alone when I'm gone.

Last year it was 2 neighbor cats ( now gone ) that would come by and hang out on the walkway for a chat, but this year it's at least 2 neighbors who pass to, and fro, several times a day, and stop to say hello.

Right this minute Nikita is laying spread out, on his back, on my bed without a care in the world.

All I have to do is look at him, and he gets this mischievious grin on his face, and stretches out so I can scratch his belly, and under his chin ( he LOVES that ).

You see, I think the Ol' Boy has a sense of humor, and a playful streak.

And he is intelligent as well.

These traits manifested themselves in several ways.

I should have realized it by the way he acted the day I found him at the Humane Society.

As I looked at a cage full of kittens, and their Mother, I was about to look elsewhere because of the lackluster look of the litter when, from the back of the crowd, a smaller than the rest little critter pushed forward, approached the bars of the cage, climb up a bit, and meowed a tiny "Wassup?"

It was love at 1st sight. :-)

I took him home to be a companion to my old yellow Warrior, and the 3 short months they were together, before he passed on, taught Nikita alot, and livened up the once lonely life of the Old Man.

Nikita wasn't quite a year old when he discovered how making noises by shaking a piece of paper could be a useful skill for a cat to have.

He learned pretty quickly that I always filled his food bowl in the morning when I got up.

I guess he felt I should get up much earlier than 7am because one day I awoke at 5am with him quietly nuzzling my face.

I rubbed him, and turned over to go back to sleep, and the next thing I know I hear the shaking of a piece of paper on the nighstand next to the bed.

I ignored it, and a few minutes later I hear the sound of paper falling to the floor.

Poking my head out from under the covers I see paper on the floor, and Nikita sitting on the nightstand, with a grin on his face, looking at me expectantly.

Well, my first mistake was getting out of bed, and picking up the paper.

The 2nd was going to the kitchen and filling his empty food bowl, and returning to bed.

Here's where that superior IQ kicks in. :-)

It only took a week of this for Nikita to put 2 and 2 together, and his favorite game was born. :-)

And, truth to tell, despite my annoyance, I enjoy it too.

Even when he decides to play "toss the paper" from 3 to 5am, for no apparent reason whatsoever. :-)

I'll get up, cuss his Ass out, stack all available pieces of paper out of reach, and go grumbling back to bed.

When we lived in a 1 bedroom apartment there was a variation on this game that REALLY shows how smart this cat is:

If I didn't want to feed him at 5 am, I'd toss his Ass out of the bedroom, and close the door.

A few minutes later there would come the sound of a piece of paper being shoved UNDER the door!

Sometimes 2 or 3 would be needed to get my, in HIS mind, lazy carcass out of bed to fill his food bowl. :-)

His playfullness, and intelligence, also exhibit themselves when he chases a laser dot, or a mouse from a pole hanging from the closet.

And when I make like chasing him around the apartment or we engage in a little roughhousing on the bed as I pet and tickle him in such a way that he can't easily "get out of my grasp".

Unlike my previous cat, a huge yellow tabby, Nikita has never been allowed to be an outdoor cat.

The only times he has been out of the apartment have been in a cat carrier as I take him by bike, or bus, to the vet, and the rare time he has snuck past me to stand briefly outside after I open the front door.

There was only one stretch of time where his outgoing nature had a crimp put in it, and that was when I brought a kitten I named Maximus, into the household in 2002 ( a story found in my Cat Archives ).

It was a misguided attempt to give him a companion for when I was a work, and the fact that Maxie was a wild child of the streets, even at 4 months, didn't help matters.

They tolerated each other, and Nikita was not as outgoing as he'd once been, though he did try his best to take the troubled youngster under his wing.

I didn't realize this fully, until after I set Maxie free ( how, and why I did this is a story you can also read in the Cat archives ) a month before I moved to Orange County.

His personality almost immediately changed back to the cat I used to know, but hadn't realized was missing.

Anyway, I thought I'd spend the evening telling you more about my Best Buddy, and now I think I need to head to bed.

Just in case the little rascal decides to order up one of those 5 am wake-up calls this morning. :-)

The full Cat related collection of entries can be found in this archive:

Me and My Pussy ( Cat ).

Comments

[Susan]

I always love reading about him---reminds me of Lexie. She is now an outdoor cat, but only because she was destroying my screens in her attempts to get outside. *gg*

[Kiril]

Glad you liked the story! :-)