Category Archives: cats

Scaredy Cat vs. Curious Cat

“Curiosity killed the cat!”

“Oh you’re just a scaredy cat!”

I’ve heard those two sayings all my life, never really pondering how they contradict each other… until I’ve found myself living with one of each:

Scaredy Cat

007: Silly kittyOh my sweet, sweet Bailey. Never have I known a more gentle and loving cat. I don’t know if he even knows how to use his claws to scratch in defense or malice. He just want to love and be loved.

And he also just wants to hide at the drop of a hat. He is my Scaredy Cat. Sometimes, despite his want to be loved, he’ll run and hide even when you just try to reach down to pet him!

When we have company, it’ll take hours before he’ll venture out to even peek around the corner at these strangers who have invaded his space. When we go out of town and ask a friend to “check the cats for us” we often hear that they just hope Bailey is okay, because, “I didn’t see him at any time I was there.”

His favorite place to be is under our bed. For hours and hours and hours at a time. If he happens to be curled up in his cat bed in our bedroom, and I go in to just get something off my dresser, he’ll BOLT under the bed before I can even say, “Oh, Hi Bai–.”

He is my sweet little scaredy cat.

Curious Cat

SmokeyOh. My. Goodness. Rascally Smokey is curious cat to the -nth degree. He IS a mischievous child.

His newest curiosity is my closet. It’s up high, with a seperate cubby for my shoes on the bottom. I open my closet to get a shirt, and he leaps up inside… we spend ten minutes of me pulling him out, going back for a shirt, only for him to leap back in again. It usually results in my having to kick him completely out of the room to get dressed.

He wants to climb inside of dresser drawers, and he’s already once been locked in the bathroom for hours on end because I didn’t know he’d gone to lay behind the toilet while I showered.

The freezer is of particular interest as well. I go for ice and he wants to climb in and investigate (the freezer is on the bottom of our refrigerator). I go to close the door, and instead of getting out of the way, he tries to just climb up on a shelf. Frozen curious cat, anyone?

He climbs. He jumps. He pushes his boundaries. When guests come over, he is ready to climb in their lap and get to know them. I think he thinks his name is, “No!!” or “Stop it!!”

My crazy, crazy curious cat.

Cat sitting

260: Smokey is having a bad dayMy husband and I have a new kitten. I’ve mentioned him before in here. Like a child, he can get into things and be a hand full at times. As such, I end up locking him and our older cat out of the bedroom sometimes just to get some sleep.

This was the case this morning. I wanted an extra hour of sleep, and he wanted to play. So I booted the cats from the bedroom and closed the door.

I got up later, blurry eyed, and came out of the bedroom to find the older cat watching me from my desk chair. I pet him, and then I shoo’d him off the chair so I could sit down and check my email. I noticed my dark blue hoodie was still piled on the seat. The cats love to sleep on blankets, clothes, whatever, so I wasn’t surprised he’d been curled up on the chair.

I plopped down on the chair and… it moved. I don’t mean it rolled. The whole seat moved under me.

I HAD SAT ON THE OTHER CAT!

I never saw him sleeping on the hoodie. He blended in with it, especially with my only being half-awake. Why he didn’t scurry off with the other cat is beyond me. But boy did he squirm! He got out from under me and BOLTED.

I felt bad. I worried about having hurt him. In the end, I laughed. For about ten minutes. He got a rude awakening and, really, so did I!

Poor guy hasn’t had a good day since then, as he decided later to pass me in the hallway by going THROUGH my feet (didn’t go well for him) and his brother has been in play mode. So any time he emerges from a nap, he gets playfully tackled. That could be why, when I went to take the photo of him for this post, he got up and turned his back on me.

Oh he’s fine. No injuries except maybe some bruised pride. And I suspect he’ll not be napping in my desk chair again any time soon.