2004-2-19 3:53 p.m.
TheCat Does Not Adapt Well To Change
So other than that closet fetish, how's TheCat adjusting to her new digs? you didn't ask.
Not so well.
You'd think that a big house (well, "big" in comparison to my old place in Stately Penis Car Manor, anyway) would be a world of adventure to an indoor-only cat. So many windows! (Why, could those noises outside be birds?) So many new things to sniff! So many new hiding places! But the only thing she's consistently interested in (other than the closets, of course, which she still pursues with a single-mindedness that taxes every neuron in her tiny walnut brain) is her designated hiding place under my old coffee table.
When I first moved her in, I put her food, water and box in a separate room and set up a hiding place for her by draping a blanket over said coffee table. (She'd spent many Christmases under that table and the ad-hoc tree skirts I'd set up for my pitiful little apartment trees, lying in wait for passing ankles, so I knew it would bring her much joy.) After an unfortunate episode where she crawled under the bedcovers and nearly gave herself kitty heatstroke from hyperventilating, she spent almost all of the next week under that table. When she finally started venturing out, she'd spend much of the night pacing, and thanks to the hardwood floors you couldn't miss it. The soundtrack of many nights in the first few weeks in the house went something like:
tik tik tik tik tik.
tik. tik tik.
tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tiktiktitktiktik whump
"Yow. Yow. Yowrrrrrrrrrr. Yow!Yow!Yow! Mauuuuuu."
Later, rinse, repeat, rip hair out, stuff head under pillow, sob like a little girl.
Now TheCat is willing to venture out of her room, but she'll hurtle headlong back into it if she's the slightest bit startled or uncomfortable. And since she's one of the most skittish animals I've ever known, with apparent early kittenhood traumas that would take years of therapy to sort out, this is often. Complicating this is that she's spent almost all of her post-feral life in carpeted places; the one place I had with hardwood floors wasn't really big enough for her to get any speed up when she was running. And the door to her room is on the side of a slippery hallway that runs most of the length of the house. I think you can see where this is going.
One afternoon I was sitting on the couch, happily geeking away with TheCat at my feet, when something startled TheCat. She jumped, went tearing down the hallway and overshot the door. In her attempt to get turned around, she lost her footing and did a 180' skid on her stomach, still sliding down the hallway almost as fast as she'd been running. She then somehow managed to get her feet back under her again and bolted into her room. I just about choked laughing, and I didn't see her for the rest of the day.
The outside world poses both danger and abject humiliation. No wonder she wants to hide all day.