City Kitty v City Mouse

Monday I brought home my new kitty cat in a family-sized Raisin Bran box and named her City.

It took her a few hours, but she soon became familiar enough with me to be doing sweet things like curling up in my lap and going to sleep. Her purring is as loud as a monster truck and she can be so cute and affectionate. She likes to drink water from my water glass, and sticks her whole head in the glass when I tip it over for her. At night she jumps around my bed, waking me up so I jiggle my toes under the duvet and send her into a frenzy of pouncing with her tail and back hair sticking straight up. She was also litter trained the moment she walked into the house, and already at only two and a half months is fully capable of taking care of herself.


But when she is not acting cute she is a hellion, and she does much more rabble-rousing than cuddling. She insists on hanging out on the dining table whenever I'm eating, sticking her poopy butt or tail into my plate when I push her nose out of it. If I am successful in actually getting her off the table she climbs over the dining chairs and onto the kitchen counter and still-hot stovetop, which forces me to stop eating AND COME FETCH HER. Argh. Her other favorite activity is walking over my computer keyboard while I am trying to check my email or get work done. This time she only walked over the caps lock key but she has turned it off before, closed windows and files, and turned the screen light down to darkness while I wasn't looking - until I figured it out I thought my computer was dead for good because all my pushing of the power button wasn't doing anything.

This picture is from her very first evening at home - apparently she likes the dirt in the treepot and refused to stay out of it. Instead she would jump in, paw around, then jump out to trail dirt crumbs all over my livingroom. I solved the dirt problem by tightly covering the inner pot with plastic bags, which makes it a pain to water every day and is I think slowly killing the tree (still a preferable outcome to dirt all over my floor).

Just looking around my apartment now there are signs of City destruction everywhere. Yesterday's mail is scattered on the floor around the dining table (where I had placed them originally), teeth marks on all the corners. My dishcloths are strewn on the floor of my kitchen even though I've put them back on the oven rail a million times already this morning. When I tried to explain to her that she shouldn't play with them because they would fall off the rail and onto the floor again, she responded by jumping on them and suspending herself a few inches from the floor by digging her nails into them. Of course she looked so funny I couldn't bear to let go and drop the towels and her onto the floor to teach her a lesson.

There is even a ghetto-looking cardboard box that my peaches came in that I personally covered in catnip and filled with an envelope, plastic bag and dishcloth. Of course, after all my effort, she hasn't even looked at it and instead continues to wreck everything else in the house except what I've tried to distract her with. And now she's managed to get into the kitchen sink and is licking my sponges.