A man is sitting on a railroad track.
Another man approaches him and says:
“Scooch over! I’ll sit next to you.”
A joke from my childhood*

Over the years, Rusty has learned that my vSO and I have al the things that are better than what he has: pates, meet, cheese, etc. that we eat are almost like Rusty’s wet food but better. The comforter we hide from him in our bedroom is better than the old one (a King size!) that we gave to him. And whatever we use to decorate our living space is a much better toy than anything we bring Rusty from a pet store.

But while he can’t get as much of our food as he’d like to, and our bedroom stays off-limits for him during the work week, there are some other areas of life where Rusty insists on being treated as equal (kind of).

On the sofa where my vSO spends evenings reading, surfing or watching, we have two pillows. During the day Rusty has access to both of them, but usually he prefers other parts of the house. While sitting on the sofa in the evening, my vSO usually uses one pillow to support his back and lays flat the other one for Rusty to sleep there. And every time when Rusty decides to join him on the sofa, he completely ignores the pillow conveniently laying flat, comes to my vSO and starts touching or even clawing the pillow behind his back – until he gives up and relinquishes the pillow. First we thought that Rusty considered one of these two as his and tried to reclaim it. But no: it’s whatever pillow is currently “in use.”

In the home office where we both work, if Rusty decides to join us during the work day, we have multiple places where he might sleep, including a special blanket on the desk to the left from my computer (as shown on the picture to one of the previous episodes of this series – Rusty the Cat: On Comfort Temperatures). I even tolerate for a while if he decides to plop himself down on my lap, even though it’s not particularly convenient if I need to write a document or do something else not related to reading or sitting on a meeting. But as soon as I get up from my chair, Rusty immediately occupies it and falls asleep. Knowing this his habit, I tried not to leave it unattended unless I would go to the kitchen (then Rusty would join me there) or plan to work standing for the next couple of hours. But recently Rusty decided that he shouldn’t be waiting for me to leave of my own accord. Instead, he would get on that blanket I mentioned and try to get between me and the seat back or keep touching my arm prodding me to vacate the chair. A coupe of days ago he did it while my vSO’s chair (which is almost identical to mine but without an additional pillow) was unoccupied and completely accessible! I gave in and worked standing for the next couple of hours (I have a sit/stand desk).

Rusty is so artless and straightforward in his pursuit of comfort, that it’s almost impossible to resist him. So, usually we don’t.

* For those of my readers who speak Russian, the characters in the epigraph joke were Pet’ka and Chapayev

Images: my own

Every household has its own rules for the members, such as “Turn off the lights when leaving the room,” “Do not put an empty milk carton back in the fridge” or “No elbows or all four paws on the table.”

And same as humans find creative ways of “not breaking the rule” (e.g., leaving a tablespoon of milk in the carton or claiming that they left the room just for a second), Rusty invents his own ways to assert his innocence or do what he wants.

Rusty is not allowed on the dining table. He knows that. But from time to time he still jumps on the table and “hides” behind a laptop or even an iPad: “If I don’t see you, you definitely cannot see me, right?” He looks so innocent and cute, that it’s almost impossible to get angry with him. Besides, I use this his desire to claim that table when I try to take pictures of him and perfumes: if I were to put anything new or unusual there, he’d immediately jump on the table to investigate.

Rusty also isn’t allowed on (almost all) kitchen counters. There is a breakfast counter that we do not use. It hosts one of Rusty’s blankets where he sleeps, so this is his territory, and he’s in his right being there.

Also, historically, Rusty is allowed to be on the refrigerator, which stands in the opposite side from the breakfast/blanket area. Formally, the counters between these two areas are “off limits.” But since Rusty cannot jump on the fridge without jumping first on the counter next to it, he is granted right of way and is not reprimanded for jumping there before the next jump on the fridge (look who’s talking about the cat’s logic). Rusty learned this part. So, when he wants to check something out on the forbidden part of the counter, he either jumps on it close to the refrigerator or runs through the whole length from his blanket to the fridge, then… stops and starts looking and sniffing around. If yelled at, he makes a move towards the fridge that says “I’m going, I’m going…” but stays on the counter until one of us makes a move to take him down. And then he retires to the top of the refrigerator.

Several years ago, a friend of mine brought us a present from her trip to Thailand – a woven bowl. I wasn’t sure how to use it, but one day, I don’t even remember why, I put it on the counter – and Rusty declared it to be his territory. While being chased off the countertop, in addition to getting either on the blanket counter or a fridge, Rusty also might jump into that bowl, and as long as all four paws are inside, he knows that “he’s safe.”

Being a cat, Rusty is a hunter. He chases, catches and eats flies, moths and even spiders. First, when he saw a prey somewhere high on the wall or the ceiling, he would keep watching it and jumping trying to catch it. Then we taught him that if he were to attract our attention to it, we would kill it and reward him with a treat. So, he would sit with his head up and meow insistently until one of us comes and acknowledges the find. From time to time, he sees “invisible insects,” as we call it. Then one of us has to raise him up so that he can see that there’s nothing there. Sometimes it takes a couple of times, because in seconds after being put down, he starts doubting: “Are you sure? Maybe something is there?”

And the most recent development of the cat’s logic is that when he sleeps, and my vSO finds and kills a spider, Rusty wakes up and runs towards the kitchen where his treats are stored: clearly, he has built his own cause and effect operation: Has the spider been found and neutralized?  – Treat!

As you can see, Rusty is quite a logical thinker.

Images: New Yorker cartoon (can be bought here); all others – my own.

As someone whose watch lists on different streaming services mostly consist of police procedural shows, I have to concede that this post, being the third after Rusty the Cat: On Food and Treats and Rusty the Cat: On Comfort Temperatures, moved the topic over the threshold when it definitely qualifies as serial… I mean, series.

* * *

Do you know that cats love cardboard boxes?

Even though my grandparents had cats with whom I spent my summer breaks in the same house, and despite of the fact that my vSO and I had a cat once (I told this story many years ago – Orange Cats in My Life – Part I: Found and Lost), somehow I had never been privy to that cats’ trait.

I’m not sure why that was: either those particular cats that I observed were not adventurous; or maybe breeds of cats in my native country had different inclinations; or can it be that back then we didn’t have that many boxes in general, and those that we were rarely getting weren’t left out for pets to play?

Whatever it was, the first time I realized that it was “a thing” with cats was when many years ago a friend told me about the famous Japanese cat Maru and shared a couple of YouTube videos of him packing into different boxes, including the tiniest ones (it was years before he was certified by Guinness World Records as the most viewed single animal on YouTube).

And then we got Rusty, who over the years demonstrated to us how much cats love boxes.

Whenever a new box only gets in our house (which these days happens even more frequent than before), Rusty immediately plops himself on top of them. He notably likes wine boxes – probably because they are very steady and safe to jump on and off.

All other boxes are also fair game, especially once they are emptied. Rusty would pack himself into almost any box – be it large, small, tall or shallow.

Usually he stays in a new box for a while, probably until he impregnates it with his scent. After that he loses interest. But there are two boxes that we keep (replacing them from time to time on the same spot), and he uses them for years: one is a box to where he runs and hides when I yell at him for doing something he isn’t supposed to do (like trying to steal meat from a hot frying pan); and the second one is a “Greeting box,” as we call it: it stands facing an entrance door from the garage, and Rusty sits in it when we’re returning home from somewhere (on a picture below it’s a shallower box to the right from the temporary Rusty’s toy).

Four months ago, when I posted Rusty the Cat: On Food and Treats, I didn’t know whether it would become a series, mostly because I wasn’t sure I would be able to get good cat pictures due to the combination of my work hours and lighting conditions. Little did I know that two weeks later our entire organization of work would change completely because of the shelter-in-place and everything that came with it. So, now I constantly get opportunities to capture my cat doing… whatever cats do to amuse themselves, annoy their humans or just pass time.

* * *

I knew for a while that a normal body temperature for cats was higher than for people. So, it was logical for me that in colder season Rusty favored my or my vSO’s lap to just laying on a chair or one of his mats. What was rather unexpected, even in summer, in the middle of a very warm day, while I would be working in my second-floor office – one of the warmest places in our house, instead of staying on the cool first floor, Rusty would come up and plop himself on my lap, clearly enjoying it (and I would be dripping with sweat).

Sometimes, Rusty would place himself on a blanket next to my work laptop in such a way that one of his paws would touch or be really close to the laptop’s vent. The air that comes out of it is so hot that it is hard for me to keep my hand next to it. But Rusty doesn’t seem to mind (the highlighted text on the picture below is what actually was shown on the monitor: I was going through the security training course and had to stop to take a picture because I thought that it was a hilarious illustration).

But recently Rusty overdid himself: during one of the hottest days of the week (it was ~27C/81F in the house) he discovered wonders of my vSO’s laptop: being connected through the docking station to the external monitor and keyboard, it works with the closed lid, which is warm to touch. So, Rusty figured out that it was a perfect spot, from where he could hypnotize one of us while waiting to be fed after the end of the work-from-home day. Now he’s doing it almost daily.

We discussed with my vSO that, as Rusty gets older, at some point we’ll probably have to get him a bed with a built-in heating pad. But we’re worried a little that he’ll dump us and spend all time in bed.

Images: my own

I’m not sure if this post will become the first in the series. It may, since I like series, Rusty is a tireless provider of amusement in my life, and, in general, Internet runs on cats. But I won’t promise any regularity since these posts require pictures, which, in their turn, require good lighting, which is not easy to catch with my crazy work hours that do not promise to be much better this year, despite all my attempts. But we’ll see.

* * *

I’ve heard of the cats who can leave half-full bowl and come back to it later or refuse to eat something. Rusty isn’t one of those cats: any food stays in his bowl for two minutes or less. He inhales* whatever we put there and wants more. All his life he gets cat food, but I’m not sure he understands the difference. For him all food is food, but for some strange reason we refuse to share with him as much of our food as he’d like us to. So, he resorts to begging or … I can’t even say “stealing” since he doesn’t try to do it covertly – prying it from us.

Since we feed him canned food, mostly pâtés, I was worrying that he didn’t get to chew anything, and his teeth weren’t being cleaned. The only things that he normally chews on are tiny treats I give him as a bribe or a reward for taking pictures for my blog or as incentive to do a trick (he does those for treats). But those tiny things take him a second or two. I hear: “crunch-crunch” – and he’s done.

Friends recommended special dental treats that were supposed to be good for cats. I must say that those are quite expensive treats (approx. 50 c per treat). But what won’t we do for our feline friends, right? These treats are much larger than usual “one bite” cat treats: they are about a size of a wine bottle cork (see the picture below). But they are relatively soft and easy “bitable,” so one would expect a cat to spend some time biting smaller pieces off of it allowing enzymes in it to work on plaques to improve cat’s oral hygiene.

Rrright… When I gave it to Rusty for the first time, he was extremely excited: he got it from me, spent a couple of seconds re-arranging it in his mouth, after which, with a visible effort, he… just swallowed it whole. I was watching him in terror thinking what to do if he starts choking. Even though he was fine, I didn’t have the courage to repeat the experiment. But since I still wanted to get some health benefits for Rusty from the treats I bought, I started feeding them to him while holding them in my fist and allowing Rusty to take a smaller bites of it, preferably with his molars.

You should have seen the expression on my cat’s face when I started doing that! He couldn’t understand what I wanted from him, and why he couldn’t just gulp the thing, but “food is food,” so in a while he learned what I wanted him to do – even though he still clearly thought his human had some issues. The disadvantage of this method, though, was that in his enthusiasm Rusty could not always distinguish the treat from my fingers…

You can understand my excitement when last Christmas Lucas (Chemist in the Bottle), in addition to wonderful gifts for me (and not only of the perfumed kind), sent some treats for Rusty (picture above). Being much longer and denser, those looked like something that Rusty would definitely have to chew on. (sigh) Nope. I’ll give him that: he didn’t swallow it in one piece. But he quickly bit it in half – and then swallowed. I was petrified: the way he was swallowing it, I was sure it wouldn’t go through, and I’d have to rescue my cat from suffocating. To my relief and amazement, he was fine. But that was the last time I experimented with making him to bite something off: I cut or tear smaller pieces before giving it to him. He doesn’t mind.

* As I was writing this post, I got curious about different synonyms for “eating quickly” and in my search came across a discussion in the WordReference forum in 2007 where a number of people, especially from the U.K., claimed they’d never heard the verb “to inhale” to be used in that meaning, even jokingly. I was surprised because for me it was something given. I asked my vSO, and he reminded me from where it came into our lexicon:

Ross: I’m just saying, if you can’t eat by yourself, how do you expect to have a baby by yourself?
Rachel: I can too eat by myself!
Ross: When have you ever?
Rachel: When certain people leave the table and I am not finished!
Ross: Well, certain other people take 2 hours to eat a bowl of soup!
Rachel: Oh, please, you inhale your food!
Ross: I grew up with Monica. If you didn’t eat fast, you didn’t eat!

Friends, Episode 8.03, 2001

Out of many synonyms suggested on that forum, I really liked the idiom “to wolf down” and thought that in our household it could be transformed into “to cat down,” as in “He catted down his lunch and hurried back to the office.”

What phrases or idioms do you use for “eat fast”?

Images: treats – my own; all pictures of Rusty – from our wonderful cat sitters

In replies to comments on my previous post I promised to tell this story. Disclaimer: it’s a cat story, and no perfumes were harmed involved.

* * *

Last year we found ourselves in between couches: the old couch was re-homed while the new one was delayed. Even before that you couldn’t say we had an abundance of furniture or places to hide, especially in areas to which Rusty has access. So with the approaching 4^th of July’s fireworks, which always terrify our cat, I felt a little guilty for disrupting Rusty’s environment. And to compensate that, I came up with the idea to make an artificial hiding spot for him.

I put a decorative pillow, on which Rusty used to sleep on the old couch, under one of the dining chairs and covered the chair with his blanket. I don’t remember if Rusty used it to hide from fireworks but surprisingly he took to periodically spending time inside that contrivance, so we decided to keep it even after the new couch had arrived. My vSO said that it was a “Pet Cave.”

Being extremely food-motivated, Rusty loves treats and would do a lot to get them. A cruel owner I am, I taught him to do tricks: “Sit,” “Paw. Another one,” “Down,” “Up” and sometimes even “Jump.” Also we have some variation on the “Fetch” – I call it “Catch.”

It goes like this: I would take a treat in my hand, say “Catch!”, and Rusty would start moving away while still looking at me (he reminds me a player in American football who “goes long” keeping an eye on a quarterback), then I would throw a treat, and Rusty, after “spinning” in place for a couple of milliseconds while his paws get traction with wooden floor, would sprint after the treat. It would be naïve to expect a cat to bring it back – hence “Catch.” Once he’s done eating, I call him back: “Come-come-come!” (in an unusual for me high-pitched tone) and when he comes, I give him the second treat. Unlike other tricks that I make him do for my or our guests’ amusement, this one is done to make him exercise a little for the first treat and to teach him to auto-respond to that unusual call – for those unpredictable cases when I might need to find him quickly or make him come to me.

While Rusty is busy catching and eating the first treat, from time to time I would put the third one into his pet cave. The first couple of times I did it, he found them quickly. My vSO suggested that he either saw or heard me doing it. So the next time I made sure that I stood close to the pet cave – so that I could put a treat in without moving while being sure that Rusty wasn’t looking. As you can imagine, the result was the same.

Since then every time when we give him a treat, Rusty goes and checks his pet cave, sometimes more than once (he would walk around and look in again regardless of whether he got the third treat that time or not). And since he does it even when clearly nobody was anywhere close to it, I’m positive that he doesn’t understand the physics of the process and in all likelihood does not discount the possibility of autogenesis – even though my vSO tried explaining to Rusty once (on his third attempt within a minute): “Rusty, treats are not mushrooms: they do not grow on their own!”

Images: my own