Womancat Wensday

 LORI:  Well, if Marley and Taz are going to post about The Lap, I will too...  I love being there.  Safe, comfy, warm.

No, those aren't mishapened toes.  But neither he nor I can figure out what those are either.

Toy Thursday

TBT:  THIS showed up on the living room floor recently.  

I don't know where it came from.  Lori is a real searcher and finds stuff I haven't seen in a while so it is probably something she found in the basement (where many toys go to hide for years).  I don't even know what it was.  In fact, I can only guess it was a cat toy from the black tassle still attached.  The part on the right might have been a head.  I can imagine seeing legs in the lower left.  

My best guess is that it is left over from Iza.  She had a real love and talent for skinning and shredding her toys.  I have a dozen saved plastic mushroom containers.  They are the same shape and color and nest together.  One is full of Iza's skinned rattley mousies.  Seriously, the container of toy mousie skins and the plastic bodies the skins were wrapped around is a happy memento of her essential lethality.

Like a dragon, she watched over her hoard carefully...

I could drop one of those cardboard egg cartons on the floor at night and in the morning, there would be nothing left but shreds on the floor the next morning.  

Ayla seems to enjoy biting cardboard too.  I keep Christmas decorations in those sturdy Chewy.com boxes, and she has chewed off all the corners.   So I have bought 6 matching plastic bins to store them.  Lori likes to chew on cardboard too.  But she is more interested in pulling Kleenex tissue out of the box and chewing on the box corners.  It's always corners.  I suppose corners are easier to bite..

But Iza was a champion!  She was the one who shredded any cardboard, unrolled the toilet paper, and  destroyed toys with a vengeance.   I can't count the number of rattley mousies I bought over her years, but she might have kept some company profitable, LOL!

Marley and Laz never do that.  Is it a womancat thing?

Flashback Friday

This week we present  pics from this week 2010, with addition.

 Sometimes they slept near each other...

The bed was "Neutral Territory".

But sometimes they slept closer.

As much as they sometimes had hissyfits sometimes, and fussed, and even after I laid Iza out on the floor so Marley and Ayla might understand she wasn't in our world anymore, Ayla still went looking for Iza in Iza's favorite spots for weeks.  Ayla did not love Iza as some cats do with others, but she sensed a loss in the household.  Or maybe she loved Iza in ways she didn't show.

I will never understand fully what cats understand or think about existence, or what they truly understand about each other, but Ayla was disturbed by "No Iza" for a while.  She stopped suddenly one day.  I don't know if she even remembers her now after months.  But who can tell?  

Which makes me think of Laz.  He drove Ayla crazy for months.  He didn't react to me at all at first.  When I finally let him outside (with Marley and I watching him) he never paid the slightest attention to call-ins or "dinnertime".

And then suddenly one day, it was like a switch flipped in his mind.  I saw it happen one specific day.  He suddenly reacted when I called him.  Suddenly came in when called.  Suddenly understood "dinnertime".  Suddenly stopped chasing Ayla.  Suddenly started sleeping next to me in bed.

Some mental switch twitched...  Something about his past life changed for him.  Maybe something about all the silly songs I crooned to him changed things.  But he went from aloof to me and aggressive to Ayla and recognizing my words to paying attention to calls in a single day and accepting Ayla as a part of his house.

Did he reach the limit of his memory?  Did he suddenly come to some realization that he was in a safe place?  Did he just change his mind about "us"?  I'll never know.  

Dogs are bred to let us know EXACTLY how they feel.  Cats are not.  Some people love the "obviousness" of dogs.  I love the "mystery" of cats.

Mystery Monday

MARLEY:  TBT saw us all unner the chair, but by the time he got the camera he only got this picture of us all leavin quickly.  We dont remember it. 

Can you suggest some ideas about what might have been goin on?