The Singing Feline

You may remember from an earlier post (LC and Sir, December, 2005) that we have quite a menagerie including 7 cats, one dog – Tina Turner – and about a dozen gold fish. Well, the number of cats has been reduced by one. No, she didn’t die, she just got sick of being beat up on a daily basis by our only male pet and moved next door.

The male cat is named “Sir,” but we normally just call him PITA, short for Pain In The Ass. I know that “Sir” is a strange name for a cat, but that was his handle when we adopted him. According to his former owners he had two male siblings and they were named, collectively, Sir, Isaac and Newton. You had to know his former owners. We adopted another cat from the same people, a three-legged female named Ilsa. We tried to change her moniker to Tripod, but she never quite accepted that.

Our oldest feline is named “Socks” because she’s black and white with white stockings. Her daughters are Zieda, Not Zieda and Thor. Thor is the one who deserted us. Both of the Ziedas are pure black and barely distinguishable from each other, but Zieda is by far the friendlier of the two. My wife had named her but not her twin sister. When we’d see one run across the living room, the question was always, “Was that Zieda?” Of course the answer half the time was, “No, that was not Zieda.” The name stuck and, believe it or not, the cats can differentiate between the two.

And, of course, we have the baby who’s now about 1 ½ years old. Named LC because she reminds me of a little Elsie the cow, she’s the darling of the bunch. Unlike the rest of the herd, she seems to be very well adjusted and she’s cute as a little stuffed animal.

But back to Sir. He’s started something new in that past few weeks – he’s begun serenading us at 5:30 AM. He walks into the bedroom every morning, scratches at the dust ruffle on our mattress, then starts singing. If it was done at any other time of the day it would actually be kind of pretty. But the only time he sings is when he’s trying to wake us up so that he can have breakfast. If the singing doesn’t get us up he jumps on the bed and harasses the female cats that sleep with Barbara. Once they start spitting and growling, he runs across my head and goes to wait for breakfast in the kitchen.

I’m normally the one who stumbles out of the sack, finds him waiting patiently for food, and throws him outside. I can tolerate them, but I’m really not a “cat person.”

Later,

obi