The Big Yawnnn...

Kalia has an odd sense of humour and unfortunately, not much time for books...he is therefore neither an EduCat nor a LiteraryCat...

All this can be excused, however, as his greatest feat of derring-do remains his claim to lasting fame...at the age of 8 weeks, when I found him on the street, he was staring down a terrier 10 times his size, no exaggeration. A tiny 8-week-old black-and-white scrap of a kitten with his fur bristling, bushy tail held upright with the tip curling into a question mark, he wasn't to know that the terrier was tentatively wagging its tail and probably only wanted to sniff and check him out. For sure, Kalia wasn't having any of that.

Of course, I got out of the car as quietly as possible so as not to scare him onto the middle of the road and oncoming traffic, and silently snuck up on him from behind, swooping down and grabbing him with both hands like a falcon. He was not amused, nor reassured, and scratched me up good and proper in the car. His fur didn't stop standing on end for the entire ride home, and he didn't really settle till a good hour after being fed.

Yes, he was scared out of his wits, and that's probably what has made him one of the quietest, most placid, even soporific felines I have ever known. Nothing fazes him any longer; what could possibly be more traumatic than that early encounter with a huge furry canine? I suspect, though, that it might be a DNA-induced congenital laziness, from the sleepy slow-motion way in which he moves...when he moves.

There is one thing that does hit the spot for him, though, and that is mealtimes. Twice a day, Kalia vroomvrooms into Schumacher mode and zips around the house, describing a defined, never-changing clockwise circuit from the living room through the dining room to the kitchen door and back. He ducks past the coffee table from the left, then dashes past the dining table, stops briefly at the kitchen door, meows piteously and dashes back, from the right, mind you, to the starting point. Then off again past the coffee table...and so on.

This whole routine is repeated upto 20 times, twice a day. Without fail. The floor tiles are finally beginning to show signs of wear, and it's not like he won't be fed...but still, he seems to think a reminder is required. Twice a day. Every day. Or maybe this is part of his cleverly devised health regimen. Just enough of a workout to put an edge on the appetite. That's all the excercise he wants. And since he has a short, stocky sumo-wrestler type build and hardly any neck, his belly hangs real low, just inches off the floor. And lately even lower. Hrmm. Maybe I need to extend feeding time by a few minutes, so he gets an extra 5 laps of the Indy circuit each feed-time? Now, there's a thought...