Friday Catblogging

Look, catblogging.

This is Iala, which is pronounced "Yaw-law" and is a kind of bipedal Romanian cat vampire. She's got claws, you see. She's about thirteen, or so. She's a mutt, we really have no idea what she is. She is, though, extraordinarily furry. We sort of got her by accident. She was a little thing who hung around outside our door. My theory is that she had been tossed out from some second-floor apartment in our complex when she and her littermates weren't cute, tiny little kittens anymore, and she couldn't find her way home again, so she picked a different second floor apartment since they all look alike. We tried ignoring her for about two days while posting "Lost cat" signs, but she was skinny as hell, and she never left our doorstep, and she cried all night. It was summer, but she was clearly pathetic. When I left the house to do stuff, she'd try to follow me. I ended up grabbing her out of the path of a truck as she tried to follow me across the street, and that was that.

We put her on our enclosed balcony, gave her food and water and an aluminum-turkey-roasting-pan litterbox and some towels to sleep in,
and took her to the vet. No ID, of course, and they (the vet across the street, so theoretically the one her owners would have used) had never seen her before. We were told she was healthy, so
we started thinking about keeping her, though at the time I didn't realize how much my then-two-year-old cat Cypress would hate this idea. Cypress had spent all her time right on the other side of the door from this new fluffball, meowing plaintively back, so I had hopes they might get along. That was thirteen or so years ago. They still hate each other.

After a month, still no response to our signs. I was prepared to do some screaming at the jackasses who had managed to lose her, but no one ever showed up or called, and after a month we were increasingly reluctant to give her back to anyone who'd treated her like this anyway. She's a very affectionate cat, highly socialized, which leads me to conclude that the people who'd had her were delighted with a litter of kittens, and less so with actual cats that now have to have something done with them. All of this is a lot of conjecture based on very little, but it does seem to fit, and gods know it's a common enough story.

At this point, she's a huge fluffball, and a joy to our home, though she does think she's a puppy. She plays fetch, she's louder than you'd expect from a cat, she likes to carry her toys around in her mouth, she licks people. Also, she drools in her sleep, which is probably funnier than it should be. And she's really pretty clumsy. She used to like to go out for a walk around the pond on a leash, but one of the neighbors has a dog that barked at her once too often, I think.

She's my partner's cat, really, she doesn't like me quite as much. Possibly because I'm the one who's always taking her to the vet or brushing her fur or teeth or putting little clawcaps on her. My partner just pets her and doesn't twitch when she licks.

Anyway, this is a photo from a few years back. We're on the second floor again, and our balcony has a ton of frogs on it, since the pond is about twenty yards away and they like my plants. And yes, there really is a window between Iala and the frog.