I am a very poor excuse for a pet-owner :-(
OK, as many of you know, I have a new kitten, who is the world's cutest creature - two and a half months old, a brown tabby with some white parts. And she is also in the extremely frisky stage of life - the "terrible twos" as some have been known to call it, since it kicks in around two months, kind of like two years for human toddlers.
She is insatiably curious about everything And one of the many peculiar little ways that curiosity manifests is that she finds the refrigerator endlessly fascinating. Every time I open it, she will come bounding towards it from wherever she may be in the apartment and take a flying leap into the vegetable drawer, unless I manage to stop her in time. I usually have to extract her from the back of the veggie drawer and hold her in one hand to keep her from jumping back in while I'm trying to close the door. I don't know what she thinks is so interesting in there...
But anyway, at a certain point last night I realized I hadn't seen or heard from the kitten in some time. I got a bit worried and thought that maybe she might have slipped out when cailin was taking out the garbage. So we looked in all her favourite sleeping places - no sign of her! Then we went around the apartment calling her - and suddenly, in the kitchen, heard the sound of frantic, but slightly muffled mewing. It took a few seconds before it dawned on me where it was coming from. You can probably guess!
I lunged for the refrigerator and opened the door, and there she was, crouched in the vegetable drawer, looking cold and decidedly freaked out, though I still had to pick her up - she didn't jump out by herself. Now, no harm was done - she was a bit chilly, but recovered quickly and was soon purring and happy.
But when I turned to cailin to scold her for not watching out for the kitten's refrigerator trick after I'd warned her about it, she meekly pointed out to me that she hadn't opened the refrigerator at all since she'd been there that night! And I realized she was right - so apparently, I was the guilty party who inadvertently locked my poor kitten in the refrigerator! How I failed to notice her in there, I'll never know, but apparently she jumped in without me seeing her, and I shut the door without realizing she was in there! A fine kitten-mom I am! She could have frozen or suffocated!
In related news, I have decided that despite her Digital-Eve-related origins, the name Eve really does not suit her. Over the time I've had her, I've kept trying to think of her as Eve, and it just doesn't fit. So I decided a couple of nights ago to revert to my original plan of Shakespearian names for kitties - my eldest is Desdemona, and Amber's name was originally supposed to be Miranda, until my ex vetoed it because that was the name of her bicycle, and rechristened her with the new name.
I looked up a list of female Shakespeare character names, and read out loud the ones that seemed most appealling, and when I got to "Claribel", the kitten looked up at me with big wide eyes as if to say "Yes? You called?" I waited until she was distracted with something else, and then said the name again, and she looked up again! So apparently she likes that name, and it sounds good to me. It even occurs, with two L's at the end, in Spencer's Faerie Queen, so it's doubly literary. I haven't decided if the kitten's form of it should be with one L or two - must work out the numerology and see. :-)
She is insatiably curious about everything And one of the many peculiar little ways that curiosity manifests is that she finds the refrigerator endlessly fascinating. Every time I open it, she will come bounding towards it from wherever she may be in the apartment and take a flying leap into the vegetable drawer, unless I manage to stop her in time. I usually have to extract her from the back of the veggie drawer and hold her in one hand to keep her from jumping back in while I'm trying to close the door. I don't know what she thinks is so interesting in there...
But anyway, at a certain point last night I realized I hadn't seen or heard from the kitten in some time. I got a bit worried and thought that maybe she might have slipped out when cailin was taking out the garbage. So we looked in all her favourite sleeping places - no sign of her! Then we went around the apartment calling her - and suddenly, in the kitchen, heard the sound of frantic, but slightly muffled mewing. It took a few seconds before it dawned on me where it was coming from. You can probably guess!
I lunged for the refrigerator and opened the door, and there she was, crouched in the vegetable drawer, looking cold and decidedly freaked out, though I still had to pick her up - she didn't jump out by herself. Now, no harm was done - she was a bit chilly, but recovered quickly and was soon purring and happy.
But when I turned to cailin to scold her for not watching out for the kitten's refrigerator trick after I'd warned her about it, she meekly pointed out to me that she hadn't opened the refrigerator at all since she'd been there that night! And I realized she was right - so apparently, I was the guilty party who inadvertently locked my poor kitten in the refrigerator! How I failed to notice her in there, I'll never know, but apparently she jumped in without me seeing her, and I shut the door without realizing she was in there! A fine kitten-mom I am! She could have frozen or suffocated!
In related news, I have decided that despite her Digital-Eve-related origins, the name Eve really does not suit her. Over the time I've had her, I've kept trying to think of her as Eve, and it just doesn't fit. So I decided a couple of nights ago to revert to my original plan of Shakespearian names for kitties - my eldest is Desdemona, and Amber's name was originally supposed to be Miranda, until my ex vetoed it because that was the name of her bicycle, and rechristened her with the new name.
I looked up a list of female Shakespeare character names, and read out loud the ones that seemed most appealling, and when I got to "Claribel", the kitten looked up at me with big wide eyes as if to say "Yes? You called?" I waited until she was distracted with something else, and then said the name again, and she looked up again! So apparently she likes that name, and it sounds good to me. It even occurs, with two L's at the end, in Spencer's Faerie Queen, so it's doubly literary. I haven't decided if the kitten's form of it should be with one L or two - must work out the numerology and see. :-)