NOT a Chicago fan

Last night when I got back from dinner (I'd met Tom & the guys he'd been riding with at a local restaurant for dinner) Charlotte felt a bit neglected, of course.  She scooted right out into the garage.  I'd been longer getting back than the guys because I'd seen the groomer working in town and stopped for some photos and video.

I thought since the guys were in the second garage (Tom's working garage) I'd take her in to introduce her.  As soon as I opened the door she fled for the kitchen door.  The same door she so often want OUT of, she wanted IN.  (We have a double garage, but it started as a single garage, then had another added on to the side of it, leaving the wall between them, with a door allowing access from one to the other.)

Not being sure if it was the strangers or something about the garage, I got her again, calmed her a bit and opened the door to the second garage again.  This time she wasn't as frantic to get away, but she still wanted nothing to do with Tom's garage.

We'll never know for sure if it was the strangers (I doubt it based on a past encounter), the smell of the chemicals stored & used out there (she does seem to have a keen sense of smell, often following her nose) or the Chicago music playing (loudly) on the stereo.  Regardless, she wanted nothing to do with anything in that garage.  We'll always think it was Chicago.

Cats are carnivores?

Everybody knows cats are carnivores.  But Charlotte is the second kitten I've had that seems determined to disprove that common knowledge.  If she follows the same kind of development as my first cat (Sarah, a strikingly colored calico), she'll settle into "proper" carnivorous eating as she approaches adulthood.

Sarah tasted a lot of starchy foods during her first year; Charlotte eats starchy foods.  As you can see in this video, she treats many starchy foods the same as her kitten chow.  These are multi-grain Cheerios - I gave her a few at a time to keep her out of mine.  (I eat most cereals dry, so no milk here.)

Don't get me wrong, she loves meat.  Last night she had a bit of our London broil instead of wet cat food.  She comes to the kitchen whenever she can tell I'm cooking in the hope I'll provide handouts.  Sometimes she gets lucky, depending on what I'm doing.

Charlotte is a smart kitty

I keep seeing many signs of how smart Charlotte is.  I know everyone knows their cat, dog, bird, kid, etc. is the smartest one.  But, having had a few cats before, I'm seeing something different with her.

When I had Sarah (my first cat) and second cat (Booboo), laser pointers were not in every check-out line.  Lasers were still the size of a shoe box.  I think either of them would have been unable to resist.  Charlie, the last cat we had, would look straight at the source - right at the pointer - and that was that.  He would not follow the dot.  No way, no how.

Charlotte is a different story.  She loves to chase the dot.  She knows the red dot on the floor comes from the pointer.  How do I know she knows?  When I get the pointer out (any of the 3 we have) she looks right at the pointer, then looks to the floor for the red dot.  Then she chases it.  If she hears me pick it up or turn it on (there is a faint click) she looks for the dot.

She learned to sit on command very quickly.  It only took a couple of days.  She has a "thing" about going out into the garage.  It started with escapes at every opportunity.  Now it's part of the morning routine.  I started enticing her into the house by asking her if she wanted some "crunchies".  Then I started asking her to sit to receive them.  As long as I give her some head scratches first, she's happy to sit for her crunchies.  She will even (sometimes) sit for the crunchies without me saying a word.  And with little coaxing, she'll remain sitting to eat the crunchies.  After I find a way to edit out the TV in the background I'll post a video of "sit".  (Update - I didn't figure out how to filter out the TV, but posted the video anyway).

Next step, building on her existing actions, is telling her to "stretch" at the garage door before we open it for her.  Now, on to more challenging training.  Last night I started with a training clicker and chicken liver.  I'm trying to get her to "shake".  It's going to take a while since it's not something she's already doing.  I'll keep you posted.

Sit - update

I recently reported that Charlotte has learned "sit".  It didn't take her long at all to learn it.  Yesterday she took it a step further.  She loves her "crunchies".  That word is enough to help bring her in from the garage.  Yesterday, as I was getting ready to tell her to sit for her crunchies ... she sat on her own.  She has connected the dozen or so crunchies (Temptations Treats) in the flat of my fingers with "sit" to the point that she just sat to receive them.

Having mastered sit, we're ready to move on to the next behavior.  I think it will be "stretch" or something similar.  She already stands and stretches at door frames, and especially at the garage door when she wants out - I just need to decide what to call it . . .

Then I think we'll need to try "shake" and "high 5". 

The big challenge is going to be getting her used to a harness, then the leash, so we can take her for walks outside.

Sympathy? And sit.

The day after we had to put down our old timer dog, Charlotte showed some empathy.  We'll never know if it was because of Max being gone or because Tom was ill enough to go to bed really early.  He's been fighting a bad cold.  Friday, he went to bed about 7:30.  Charlotte followed him up to bed within a few minutes and between then and when I went to bed around 10 she spent almost the whole time tucked up against his leg.

Normally, she would have spent much of that time sleeping, but somewhere in the living room, most likely on the top level of the cat tree, followed by a spell of frantic activity just before we went to bed.

In the past, I've experienced a cat coming and spending time with me when I was under the weather.  In this case, the house has been full of sadness and illness, so we'll never know which it is.


A lot of people say cats can't be trained.  As I mentioned a few days back, Charlotte has been trying to train us and now we're aware of it, we're making sure we only cooperate with her training efforts when it is acceptable to us.  It can be hard to ignore some of her scratching at a plastic bag ... that is one of her requests for us to play with her.  "Distract me!"  So, we'll do the laser or the thing-on-a-string-on-a-stick toy when she stops scratching at the bag, not distract her in the middle of it.

A couple of days ago I started working on "sit".  She loves her "crunchies" (Temptations treats).  This morning, after her second tour of the garage, I offered her crunchies, but told her to sit.  She stood up to reach for them & I pulled them out of reach.  She sat.  After a few bites I moved my hand so we could repeat it.  She stood up; I told her to sit.  She sat.  When there is something she wants badly enough and the behavior I want is easy enough, she learns very quickly.  There is no longer any doubt about it.  Sitting to eat from my hand is not something she would be doing on her own.  I look forward to teaching her lots of things, both useful and for show.

Charlotte's Training Program

Charlotte is a very smart kitten.  Over the last few days I've come to realize that Charlotte has begun a training program.  There are certain behaviors we've repeatedly discouraged.  She has started doing them to get one of us to distract her by offering the toy-on-string-on-a-stick or the laser pointer. 

Her training program we going well until I started seeing the pattern and stopped responding as she wanted me to.  Now, we're watching for those behaviors (or similar patterns) so we can reward her when she is NOT doing them, or when she stops them.  The idea is for us to train her, not for her to train us.

In her case it means taking a few seconds to analyze what she's doing & what she wants to accomplish to make sure we only cooperate with training efforts we can live with.

One of her favorites has been to pluck at a plastic bag.  She loves the crinkly noise almost as much as the jingle bell noise.  The first time or two I would grab the laser toy to get her to stop.  Then she realized she could use it as a request.  Then it went a bit further.  Once I had the "ah ha moment", I decided to get it back on our terms, not hers. 

Living with a really smart kitten presents a different kind of challenge than living with a really smart dog.  The dog wants to please you, but needs stimulation.  The kitten (and eventually the cat) wants to please itself more than you, so the rewards and behaviors have to be much different.

So, we're training each other - it's an ever changing landscape ... stay tuned!

Free Mouse!

Charlotte has been working at the second (of two) jingle mouse hanging from the cat tree.  The first one went into one of her stashes ... somewhere in the house ... and hasn't come back out.  She's been working at liberating the second one and this afternoon she finally got it free.  I was lucky enough to be in the room and notice what she was doing and caught her ... on cell phone video.

She has been persistent, and it has paid off. 

Box of Rocks

Today is a hang around the house day.  Tom's got a cold and has gone back to bed for a while.  Max is at my feet.  He's going downhill fast and won't be with us much longer.  Charlotte has been making a personal project of knocking things off the table for a couple of weeks. 

Sometimes they just fall off as she steps next to them or plays with something else.  But, sometimes she stops and purposely pushes them off and watches them fall.  So, I'm kicked back, watching Pioneer Woman on the Food channel and playing Solitaire on the laptop when I start hearing a strange metallic sound ... it repeats.  It changes in intensity and a little bit in pitch.  What the ... ?

Charlotte had knocked a box of rocks (small pieces of rock and petrified wood, souvenirs from some of my work travels (nothing collected in any park) off the table.  With so much having been knocked off and her thirst for new experiences, she finally had realized that a dozen or more of these small rocks had fallen inside the baseboard heater unit.  (Our baseboards are hydronic, not electric, so no fire danger.)

She loves jingly things.  While the rock on heater fins isn't exactly jingly, it's close enough for her.  She clearly was going to spend a lot of time fishing one rock or another out of the unit and dropping it before it was quite out ... oh, what lovely sounds to her ear.  No so lovely to my ear.

So, I cleared off a chair, laid down on it on my belly (one of my least favorite positions) to pull out those rocks, one at a time.  The opening is almost wide enough for me to reach in.  Almost means that once I had a rock in my fingers it was hard to get my hand back out.  Again and again and . . . so now I have a sore hand, with scrapes and red spots.  But I think I got all the rocks out of the baseboard.

What's the next things she'll focus on?  Only time (and not much of it) will tell. 

Crunchies!

While Charlotte is still fascinated with the garage, it is getting easier to get her back in the house.  Some mornings she'll go to the garage door, reach up high and cry, yet when I open the door she stays in the house.  She seems to prefer to "get away" to get out there.   One time yesterday I made room to my right (the knob side of the door) but she just had to scoot out to my left.  Sometimes when we head toward that side of the kitchen she'll race ahead and will be out the door before we even know she's there.

On the other hand, it's getting easier to get her to come in the house.  This morning she let Tom walk up to her and pick her up.  I have been having pretty good success bribing her with the offer of "crunchies".  We have a couple of Costco tubs of Temptations treats and a small handful of those, offered on a flat hand are deemed a suitable reward for coming back into the house.

She also loves "her" window.  She watches it snow.  She watches Max when he's on his trolley.  She sleeps on the sill.  She sunbathes on the table in front of it.  She plays with & eats her patch of grass in front of it.

Door Opener & Max is checking out

Well, I can't say for sure whether it was Max leaning against it or if Charlotte finally has figured out how to open the door to my office.  This morning it was open just enough she could get in.  It's a bi-fold door, so it just takes enough of a push in the right place to get it started. I'll keep an eye on it and see if I catch her opening it ... if she does there won't be any point in keeping it closed any more.

At this point, she's about as big as my first cat was at a year old (7 pounds).  She's 5 months old today.  Her paws look a bit big for the rest of her.  We'll keep an eye on how she grows.  Sarah caught me by surprise when, at a year and a half, I realized she'd grown to 12 pounds.  I've never had an itty bitty kitty.  And it doesn't look like we're starting now.

The picture's perspective makes makes her look a little bigger than she is, but not a whole lot.


On the other hand, things aren't going so well for Max.  His "things" that are growing on him are continuing to pop up.  Some of them, he has licked open and we are having to constantly remind him to stop licking them.  We've also had to "diaper" him.  Last night it was with a triangle bandage (the kind you'd use for a sling) with the short side split to tie around his tail.  Today it's an old T-shirt, with the excess waist material safety pinned over his back to keep him from just walking out of it.  We have an appointment with the vet next week - he's headed out of town and it was the earliest we could get him in - to see what we can do about the worst of his lesions. 

His hind legs continue to weaken.  He can still make it up the stairs, but sometimes it's barely.  He needs help getting into the car more and more often.  But, he still wants his rides and he still stands up while the car is moving.  We'll see how this week goes for him.  On the plus side, last night he ate more than he has in quite a while.  I gave him a very small crumbled hamburger patty and he ate it like he was starving.  He then acted like he wanted his dinner so I opened a can for him and he ate most of it right away.  Later I fed him a big hamburger patty, crumbled up.  Even though it was on a big platter and Charlotte stuck her head in to get some, she got little or none of it.  He ate it all.  That's the most he's eaten in an evening in a long time.  Most nights he takes a few slurps of the gravy, eats a quarter to half overnight, and might or might not eat the rest of the can the following morning.

With the lesions, weakening hind legs, diminishing appetite, along with "the stare", we feel like he's fading, sort of "checking out".  "The stare" - he'll stop and just look into the distance.  He doesn't seem to really be there.  He doesn't always know which side of a door to pass - the "people door" in the garage that goes outside opens in and if he's not on top of his game he might head into the wedge on the wrong side of the door.  Part of it may be the fading vision, but some seems to be more like he just isn't there behind those eyes. 

Each day is one more gift ... every day since last October has been a gift.

New Wake-Up Stategy

It is amazing to watch Charlotte's plotting mind work. 

One evening she kept going into an area she knows we don't want her in order to maneuver me into pulling out the laser pointer.  Every time I pull it out she looks at it, then looks at the floor, waiting for the red dot.  Once I realized what she was doing, I put it away.  It's not that I mind her training us as we train her, but there must be limits to what we let her maneuver us into doing.

This morning her "get up" attempts took on a new technique.  Instead of pouncing on our feet, bottoms & pillows, she kept crawling under the covers with me.  Normally, she'll crawl under the covers in the "wee wee hours" of the morning after I come back from a bathroom break.  She might stay the rest of the night or go back to sleeping by/between Tom's legs. This morning she came and went almost a half dozen times.  I finally got up.  We'll see if she does it again tomorrow morning.

She definitely loves her "jingle mouse".  Again last night I had to take it away from her and stick it in a drawer so we could go to sleep.  This morning I got it back out for her when she was trying to pull the second one off the cat tree.  She loves it when I toss it to the other end of the room.  Every now & then she brings it and drops it almost at my feet.  Perhaps some day we'll be playing fetch.

Give me MOUSE!

Now that Charlotte has taken the first jingle mouse to one of her hidey holes, she's on a quest to get the second one freed from the cat tree.  She loves the jingly things.  I've called her back into the house (from the garage) by jingling my keys. 

Each day she responds better to "no" and "get out of there".  It's fun to watch her grow and learn . . . most of the time.  It can also be very frustrating.

Not long after writing the above, she brought out the original "liberated" jingle mouse.  I think she keeps an inventory of where she stashes her treasures.

The mouse has been freed!

Once Charlotte knew we were almost awake, he began playing with her newest treasure.  We had gotten her a kitty condo/tree/tower that included 2 hanging mice with jingly bells.  They hung from the top and second tiers of the tower.  Time and again we saw her try to take one away.  This was nothing new to us.  Her toy-on-a-string-on-a-stick toys have been known to disappear as she dragged the toy on the end to one of her lairs.  When playing with her with them she often would pull hard, trying to drag the toy to her lair.  Even large items, like a fox tail, would disappear for days.

What makes these hanging mouse toys so much better ... they have jingly bells.  She finally managed to "liberate" the one from the second level.  So for about an hour she tossed, batted, flipped the mouse, even turning somersaults with it.  An hour of near constant jingling.  Once again we're so glad her sleep pattern is so close to ours.

Charlotte's new routine

I've started indulging Charlotte's "need" to go out in the garage in the morning. 

Within the first couple of weeks with us it became an obsession for her.  I can't say how many times she slipped past us as we closed the door.  It became a new SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for one of us to pick her up, wait as the other takes Max out or brings him in (or any other errand that takes us out, or in that door).  If we were leaving, the kitty holder would "toss" her back in the door and try to get it closed before she turns and dashes out.

So, in the interest of getting it out of her system, getting predator smell in the garage to repel rodents and being able to get in & out the kitchen/garage door, I've started letting her out.  For weeks she has gone to the garage door and cried to go out.  Once she was allowed out, it got worse.  Then I noticed she cries loudest first thing in the morning.  If I let her out, she is less frantic to get out through the middle of the day.  She might get a bit crazy again toward evening, but that early morning garage patrol seems to really calm her down. 

Over the years we've had rodents (mice, voles, squirrels) in the garage from time, but not nearly so much as a lot of people.  I think that's because of the predator smell in the garage.  Max goes almost all the way around the car to get to the door he can get in, leaving a bit of smell as he goes.  Una (our first dog) did the same thing.  Our cats have patrolled the garage at some or another.  Now Charlotte is our rodent repellent.  To show the predator's effectiveness, our very worst rodent invasion happened this summer while we were gone. 

By waiting for her to come to the top step and call to be let in, we have no problem getting her to come back in.  But, we have to be sure we won't need her back inside too quickly before we allow her to go out there.  Luckily, so far, she's not gotten crazy to go outside.