dolorosa_12 | Friday open thread: not your cat

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Today's open thread is sparked by the return of this cat, which has been roaming all over our garden (and all the gardens in this row, and along the roof of our house) these past few days. On Tuesday, a delivery driver knocked on our front door, and the cat, which had evidently been lying in the sun on the front garden's paving stones, dashed into the house, alternating between snuggling around my legs and refusing to leave.

In honour of this incorrigible cat, talk to me about neighbourhood animals who have adopted you as their own.

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From:

rmc28

Our immediate neighbour tamed a semi-feral kitten and named him Mitika (he says it's a Hungarian? diminutive of Dimitrios, and also a comedian back home). Mitika is small, brown, stripey, and quite nervous, but my older child spent long hours being very patient with him in the driveway, and a few winters ago Mitika discovered our catflap. So Mitika comes in and hangs out a fair bit. As of a couple of years ago, Mitika's buddy Biscuit started hanging out too. Biscuit is a big fluffy ginger boy, very friendly. The two of them hang around our driveway a lot in the summer, and in our house a lot in the winter. Biscuit's owners are in the next street down an alleyway.

Mitika and Biscuit have about three braincells between them, and a very sweet, surfbro kind of vibe. In the summer, I often get up at dawn to open up all the downstairs doors and windows and cool the house down while I nap on the sofa and hopefully deter burglars. One memorable summer morning, both cats came in the patio doors and surprised me into sitting up and making a noise. This freaked them both out, and Mitika immediately leapt up on the windowsill at the other end of the living room and out of the window. Biscuit ran out of the living room door, down the corridor back through the house to the catflap, through the catflap into the garden, back into the living room through the patio doors, and then followed Mitika's leap through the window. I had an unstoppable fit of the giggles. Neither of them came back for hours.

I turn out to be mildly sensitive to Biscuit's fur in particular - perhaps because he is just so fluffy - not enough to mind having him in the house, but letting him sleep on my bed is a recipe for gently streaming eyes and sneezes. Naturally, this means he gets into my room whenever possible, and I evict him whenever I find him there. He also likes to curl up on my hockey pads if I leave them on the floor, or leave the kitbag open to air out. (I sent a photo of him in the kitbag to the mixed rec team, and one of the guys immediately replied "not a kitbag, a catbag", which also gave me a fit of the giggles). So my kitbag now stays closed or behind a closed door, or under my supervision, so I don't have a lot of sneeze-inducing ginger fur on my pads at practice.

Both cats like to curl up on the third stair down from the top, and then act mightily miffed when you kick them and complain at them for being furry trip hazards.