This morning when I woke up, Jennifur was looking out the window. Not just “out”, but “down”, so I figured she was watching someone. I crept over and saw a feral cat we call Little Kitty, who’s kind of a petite patchy calico, and who we think might be not only female, but pregnant as well.

Little Kitty also spooks easily, so as soon as she saw me she took off around the corner.

The odd thing about this is that Jennifur usually growls, hisses, spits, or otherwise attempts to convince outside cats to go away. While Jenni has been mellowing lately, this particular habit is pretty ingrained in her purrsonality, so I suspect that either (a) we’re wrong and Little Kitty is a male and Jenni likes him or (b) Jennifur actually deigned to talk to Little Kitty, because that’s exactly what it looked like she was doing.

Tags: cat behavior, cats, feral cats

Today while I was working at my computer, Steven called me over with some alarm in his voice. “I think it’s a lizard”, he said.

I walked over to the entrance to my office to find Steven and three or four cats staring intently at something wriggling on the ground. They (the cats) were trying to grab it and were huddling over it, so I whipped out my ever-present LED flashlight to take a look.

It wasn’t actually a lizard, but only a tail, bending fantastically this way and that, like a demented ballpoint pen refill on drugs. From the looks of it, it had belonged to a small alligator lizard that was now hiding somewhere amidst the cardboard boxes in the immediate area. Dropping a tail is a last-ditch survival trick of lizards that I had heard of many times, but had never seen in real life.

I thought it was pretty cool. Steven vowed not to eat anything longer than it’s wide, at least for several days.

Yang eventually carried it away proudly and presumably ate it. Yech.

Tags: cats, lizards