The Cats, Part 1

I promised pictures of cats, and I suppose I should deliver.

My wife and I are fairly recent cat owners. My wife had been talking for a while about wanting to get a cat. Eventually, she just up and said that she would like one. We talked about it, and decided that we would adopt a cat that’s about two years old — not a kitten, but also not a senior cat. I have never had large pets before, and she didn’t want my first experience as a pet owner to be either a rambunctious, crazy kitten or a cat with end-of-life issues.

So, anyway, we got two cats: one senior cat, and one kitten.

Gilligan

‘Sup

Gilligan is ten years old, and he has settled well into his role as resident old man cat. His hobbies include napping, roaming the house looking for food, and he’s a gold medalist in the amateur circuit of competitive flumping.

Twenty-third annual state flump-off semifinals

We didn’t name him Gilligan; that’s the name he had at the rescue we adopted him from. We figured if he’d had it for ten years, he should probably keep it. We mostly call him Gillie, though my wife and I disagree on how it should be spelled (she writes it ‘Gilly’).

Gillie generally carries an aura of faint disapproval about him, except when he’s getting cuddles or scritches. He has an endearing trait of meowing until either I or my wife sit down, then climbing up to lie on the torso of whomever sat down and nestling in, purring contentedly and sometimes making biscuits. He will generally cuddle as long as he wants to and no longer, though at various times one or the other of us has fallen asleep in mid cuddle, and he seems relatively content to just hang out (unless there’s the prospect of food, at which point he will depart with the quickness and we’re on our own).

The cats are not allowed on my desk. This is how much Gillie cares about those rules.

Gillie is in general quite a chill cat. With both of us working from home at the moment, he’s quite spoiled for choice. I find he often hangs out downstairs with my wife, probably because that’s closer to the food, but at least a couple times a week he’s up with me in the office. There’s only one thing that can get him really riled up, and that’s:

Kiwi

Who, me?

Kiwi’s name when we adopted her was Delilah (or Dalilah; they were very inconsistent on spelling). We didn’t particularly care for either spelling, and my wife suggested Kiwi because when she curls up she looks like a little kiwi. When I asked “bird or fruit?” she replied “yes”, so that clears that up.

Let’s play my favorite game, called “run around really fast for no reason”!

Kiwi is our kitten, at nine months old, and she is an absolute bundle of energy. Most of my photos of her are very blurry, and that’s only slight commentary on my photography skills.

Did you see a bird? Because there’s totally a bird out there! Come look at the bird! I call dibs.

When we first got her, Kiwi was extremely skittish. She spent basically the first three days in our house under the couch. It’s hard to imagine that now, given how she boldly tears through the house like a furry rally driver, but that skittish nature still comes out from time to time and when she’s feeling overwhelmed or intimidated she’ll still retreat under one of our pieces of furniture for a short break. This is usually due to us vacuuming, a habit that neither of the cats are fond of.

My wife took this photo, and it’s amazing. I’m jealous of her skills. Kiwi was trying to eat the fake flowers.

Kiwi has aspirations of being a lap cat, but she has two challenges: first, she’s incapable of sitting still for more than a few seconds; and second, she’s so tiny that she tends to slide off whatever lap she’s on whenever she does wiggle around, which as previously mentioned is constantly.

She has an amazing purr that she turns on very easily, which is a quite endearing trait. She hasn’t quite figured out how to meow though. She can chirp and coo and peep with the best of them, making me wonder if she’s actually part bird, but her meows sound like she’s crying even when she’s happy. She also will sometimes make a little chirp and then take off at nearly three quarters of the speed of light. I assume she’s so young because she’s undergoing relativistic time dilation most of the time.

The only time you’ll see Kiwi stationary.

These are our two cats. There will be many stories about them, so I’ve already preemptively entitled this post “Part 1.”

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