Rookie of the Year

There are a number of topics in my head right now, and I am guessing that I am going to be up for quite a while tonight working on a number of them, but as I sit here listening to the soundtrack from “Across the Universe,” a movie in the true tradition of the old Beatles movies, watching Bella work on her fundamentals, I decided that I wanted to share that story with you.

You already know that Bella is my cat, and I think I already mentioned that I got the cat in this story, not the girl, but that turns out to be a very good thing, for lots of reasons, but mainly because Bella is so cool, so much fun, and such a good friend.

The coolest thing that Bella is into these days is training to be the first ever feline goaltender, and she will be great at it. When I first had Bella I had so much fun in Petco buying her every single toy in the store. I bought her big mice, little mice, fuzzy mice, squeaky mice, bungee jumping mice, bungee jumping mice that squeak, bet you didn’t know just how many different ways there were to dress up a fake mouse. There were lots of toys that made noise of some kind or another; there was a fuzzy little multi-colored, fleece tassel thing on a stick, the laser pointer with all the cat settings, mouse, stars, cheese, again, never knew you could do so much with a pointer, and then there were these little balls that were pink on one hemisphere, and green on the other, and there were little rattlers inside and tiny little cutouts of stars and quarter moons on the pink hemisphere.

What I discovered after bringing all of this home, along with the food and water bowls, the litter box, we are on the second one, she didn’t like the first, the cat “tent,” it is actually a cat carrier, but it is nicer than the two bedroom condo tent I bought for myself several years ago from Eastern Mountain Sports, thus I call it her tent. The tent has multiple doors with heavy duty zippers, tie loops and tent stakes, I kid you not, screening all the way around it with Velcro ties that allow for open or closed windows, I think you get the point.

Anyway, what I discovered with all of this stuff and much, much more, is that she did not like any of it, except the bowls and the litter box, of course the bowls had food and water so they were going to be a hit no matter what, and the litter box I am very, very thankful she took a liking to, but nothing else. If there was an empty bag of any kind she would play with that, a piece of paper that fell on the floor, boxers, anything but the toys that were intended for her.

Now that we have been together just over two years, I have continued to bring different items home for her that I thought she might like (cats, women, women, cats – see Bella 6-11-09), and eventually found a combo pedestal scratching climber that she spends most her time in, and she does actually love the tent, even though she spends more time on top of it then in it, but the one thing she now likes the most, that we have had since the beginning, is one of the little rattle balls that I had tied on the end of two boot laces and hung from the loft. I did this a long time ago, and would put it up at night and let it down during the day, but she never really played with this at all in the first year, so this became a part of my daily routine with absolutely no purpose. Eventually I caught on, she is training me well (cats, women, women, cats), and stopped putting it down.

Now that Bella is a mere eleven and a half pounds, I decided a couple of weeks ago to take this simple little contraption down for her again to see if she would play with it and instantly realized that she is in fact a natural goaltender, and that she now gets the biggest kick out of chasing this ball around and around and around. I actually play catch with her at times, she will sit on one side of the living room, which is also the bedroom, sitting room, den, office, sorry, no more tangents, and I will swing the ball over towards her and she will swing it back, she will do this for a few minutes before she realizes that it is far more fun for her to send this thing off on a cruise and then wait for it to come back and then send it off again. The most fun I have is when she is really fired up and will just run back and forth chasing the ball around regardless of what she has to run over, through, around to get this done. With about seven feet of lace that the ball swings from and the fact that it is hung from the outer most corner of the loft she can really get rolling, it is really quite a sight. It is also really cool to see her do this for a while, go to her water bowl and then lay completely flat on the floor absolutely spent, she is training hard.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.