I have a rather extensive history with cats, as I've lived with them ever since I was born. One of the two cats I have now is a faithful grey and white female that I've had for six years, the only one remaining from her litter of three. She may seem lazy, as she spends much of the daytime indoors, but she possesses an ability to run quite rapidly upon necessity and even to scurry up trees in order to obtain a position on top of our roof. Just the other day I was in the kitchen when I witnessed a great burst of motion in the tree outside the window followed by the cat scrambling up its thin trunk between all the offshoots of evergreen leaves, only to make her way down more slowly ten minutes later.
The biggest reason this seems a little surprising for my cat is because she's put on some weight in the last couple years and is not exactly the thinnest cat in the world anymore. We tried to ration her food a bit more sparingly but it was to no use. Nevertheless, she's happy and that's all we really care about.
This cat has several places she likes to lie down to take her 7-hour-long "catnaps", interrupted by an occasional trip to the food bowl (or sometimes the younger cat's food bowl, in which case I have to discipline her), and she often rotates from one place to the other, choosing one for a few weeks and then moving on without warning. There is no transitional phase, just one day she decides to claim a different spot and that's that. She may not go back to the other spot for the better part of a year.
Right now I'm privileged enough to say that the cat (aka. the household queen) has chosen my bed for her current resting spot. Today she was sprawled across my blanket, trying to drown out the sounds of my mom and I repeating Spanish phrases back to my computer, which was just to the left of her. At the beginning she ignored us and continued on with her nap, but as time went on she couldn't seem to keep her eyes closed and finally she turned and gave us a quite annoyed look, which I know all too well to mean "You're disrupting my beauty sleep". My mom wasn't paying attention although the look was directed at her; nonetheless, the cat held her position and didn't say a word.
After a while, the cat had no choice but to be fully awake. I occasionally put my head at her level and told her she was such a pretty cat, and she stared back at me with her curious green eyes with pupils the width of a needle due to the brightness of the sun. She was already getting slightly unnerved by my stroking her tail, which for some reason I was suddenly enthralled with. I kept protesting that she had a pretty tail but she would have none of it.
But all this was nothing compared to when I reached in and briefly stroked the pocket of fat she has sticking out just below her belly, covered with white fur. She reached forward and resolutely slammed her paw down, claws extended, right where my hand had been before. I began apologizing profusely but this was not enough to satisfy her. In her little mind, she had just gotten mad, and therefore she had to look for anything and everything in her path to take that anger out on. I saw the fury in her eyes and immediately saw the necessity to back away so she wouldn't pursue me as her victim. Being in a curled position meant that the first thing in her path was her own tail. She apparently saw the tail and was so mad that it dared to twitch in her presence that she reached even farther and clamped her unrelenting claw down right on top of it.
Whether she realized her mistake or not I don't know. But she was still not content and soon fell to unleashing her rage on the thin extensions around the edge of my blanket. Gripping the fabric in both her claws, she attacked it and bit into it as if it were a living creature which had just dared to insult her status as queen.
She continued to do this for a minute, but before long she was sitting up and bathing, then, seeming to have had enough of the situation (or perhaps wanting more food), she got up and left.
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