Friday night kitten

I’ve been lax in posting the kitten pictures; I know. I’ve been busy with work and also still pretty shell-shocked over losing eight months of digital photos when I dropped my WD portable hard drive and broke it. I have since (thanks, Randy) found an affordable data recovery place that partners with Western Digital. I spoke to a representative yesterday and was satisfied it isn’t some fly-by-night outfit. And I checked with the data recovery guru at my place of employment; he says since it’s hardware, he really can’t help much and I should go with the clean room recovery. I’m thinking my tax rebate is going to go for this.

Tig3 has been effectively driving me out of my office for much of the day. I simply can’t work and be a cat toy at the same time. Thankfully, I never really got rid of any of the work files from my personal laptop, so I can work upstairs or down.

He’s very lively, my Tig3.0. He’s ten weeks old today, and weighed in yesterday at 2.4 pounds—a gain of half a pound in a week. Tigger the second was losing that much during the last days of his illness. It’s so nice to have the reverse. Tig3 is also in complete crazy kitten mode. He has a little cry he makes only when he plays that sounds almost like a scream. It makes me laugh every time he utters it. When he gets going, he leaps and hops and simply sails through the air. He jumps at his reflection in the window. He jumps at the wall. He jumps at me. He really likes it when I sit cross-legged on the floor and make his elastic string toy move. He chases it, leaps, grabs it, bites, kicks, and utterly defeats it. Then, flush with victory, he turns on me. We have had words, Tig3 and I, about jumping on Mama’s back and attacking her hair. The words are generally, “Tigger! NO!” followed by my grabbing him and shoving him across the floor a foot or two. Hey, it’s gentler than what his real mother would do. She’d smack him a good one and follow that up with a bite. I think I shall not be biting my kitten, though.

Sometimes I go catfishing. That’s when I choose the rope or the string toy, dangle it, and wait for the cat to bite. He’s light enough that I can generally pull him along the floor once he’s gotten his claws or teeth sunk firmly in the toy. Then he goes for my hand. I suppose I shouldn’t be wrestling him with my hand, but y’know, he hasn’t got any brothers or sisters around, and Gracie isn’t going to play with him, so that leaves me. He rarely scratches me, but his teeth are getting sharper and his bite is getting harder. I’m working on that, but he’s only ten weeks old. A few days ago, he was sitting calmly on my shoulder while I worked, and I thought, gee, this is fine. He’ll be a shoulder cat. Then he did what kittens do. He jumped on top of my head and attacked my hair. We had words over that one, too. Very loud ones.

I will not be letting him sit on my shoulder like that again.

He has a nickname already. He got it fairly early on. It’s “Wild Thing.” I definitely want that song by the Trogs. I intend to make kitten movies of Tig3 going wild, and the soundtrack just begs for that song. It isn’t that he’s doing anything no kitten has done before. It’s just that I haven’t seen a kitten do the kitten crazy in about eleven years. I got Tig and Gracie in June of ’97, and Gracie was a little wuss even then.

She’s been visiting the kitten and swearing at him through the door. It’s going to be interesting when I finally let him out. That may not be for a while. And definitely not while I’m away at Company in Northern VA. I’ll be keeping his things in the office for a while, I think. I may keep him in this room for a solid month, depending on how whiny he gets about being stuck here at night. Or he may be out of the room by tomorrow. I can’t tell.

In the meantime, he’s finally calmed down enough that I may get out of the room and downstairs to watch my recording of Battlestar Galactica. He’s currently watching me from the shelf beneath the desk. No, now he’s in my lap. And here come the purrs. It’s his favorite thing: Chewing on me while sitting in my lap, or in my arms. That’s why I now wear long sleeve and thick jeans before coming into this room.

And it’s all worth it. The ache of losing Tig the Second is lessening.