“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – living in a pyramid house with two kitties. Brainspot kept after the mice, the silent stalker of oblivious rodents. Habib was the vocal one. On a couple of occasions, I even offered him some beer because, you know what they say, you should never have beer and whine at the same time. Apparently, Habib hadn’t heard.
Originally, we rented, but Habib wanted to buy. I could tell from the way he pranced about the place. However, when the large man with the booming voice brought the contract over, Habib cowered under the bed. A traitor in fur, that boy! He, on the other hand, was probably thinking something along the lines of, “Silly humans with their endless contracts when every sensible purrson knows a good stare will always suffice. There ought to be some penalty claws for that.”
So I ended up being the one to sign and to buy. That was a long time ago. Now the pyramid house has long since been re-sold.
In yesterday’s Yahoo! News read a headline: “Do pets have personalities?” Needless to say, I didn’t click to open the article any more than I would have clicked on a link that asked, “Do trees have bark?” Anybody who didn’t grow up in an environment totally devoid of animal life could possibly ask a question that inane. And why Yahoo! News honored it with a spot in their very limited selection of headlines is beyond me.
Anyway, I now have two other felines with very distinct personalities. Gandalf is the smooth operator. My wife calls him ‘King Tut.’
The other is Angel, whose defining trait may be her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). For example, it does not suffice to bury her stuff in the litter box – Oh No! It has to be scratched over eighty-one times (9×9). Never mind that after the first half dozen scratches, she’s down to the plastic bottom of the box, and the rest is merely an exercise in the cruel and unusual torture of human ears… especially at night… while trying to sleep.
A friend of mine once said, “It’s hard to have OCD!” I said, “Not really, but you have to keep working at it, repeatedly, until you get it just right.” So that’s been my approach with Angel. Never yelling at her or criticizing her, always being supportive of her in her determination to bury her crap. So far, it doesn’t seem to be working. She still keeps me up at night, scratching away.
I must say, though, that in spite of that, I still feel that “it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
