Miko: down another two of his nine lives…
Kasia February 27th, 2009
Canuck and I have two cats. Dodge is the brown tabby pictured above. Miko is a tuxedo. I may have posted a picture of him at some point.
Anyway, Miko has a knack for getting into trouble. At first he liked to chew things. Then he started chewing on me (attacking my arms and legs). He hardly ever does that now, which is probably a big part of why he still gets to live with me.
Miko is a cat of many interests. He loves to beat up his brother, even though Dodge has at least five pounds on him. (Miko is definitely the alpha cat.) He loves to beg potato chips, tortilla chips, and pretty much any other food that the people have. He loves a good nap, or to sit in the window and watch for me to come home (and I know that’s what he’s doing because when I come up the walk and wave to him, he jumps down and runs to the door), or to be the first to use the freshly-cleaned litter box.
But most of all, he loves, loves, LOVES to go places he isn’t supposed to. That’s his very favorite thing. Yes, Miko is an explorer.
A few weeks after I got him, lo these…seven? years ago, the person I was sharing quarters with saw fit to let Miko sit out on the ledge of the first-floor apartment windows. “He won’t jump down.” Ri-i-ight. It took him a week or so, but he did eventually “take the plunge.” Which prompted a call to me at work asking if I knew where he was…which in turn prompted me to leave work early and spend a couple of hours canvassing the immediate neighborhood, getting laughed at as I called frantically for my cat. (He turned up at the end of the search…RIGHT OUTSIDE the window, but hiding up in a car engine. He was very, very glad to see me!)
In my first apartment, I had a low bookshelf right next to the door. Miko used to sit on it and paw at the doorknob. He totally got that that was how the door opened; he just couldn’t make it work himself. If that cat ever got thumbs, the world would be a very scary place…
Lately Miko has taken to bolting out the front door as I walk in from work. Which is pretty innocuous, all things considered, because Canuck and I live in a condominium four-plex. So even if he gets out the door, he’s only made it to the common hallway. Now, with the back door, he could get access to the basement, which has the potential to be dangerous, either to him or to the belongings of my neighbors (it’s a common basement), but the front door, all he might do is drop some dander into the carpet. And I know for a fact that my former neighbor used to let his cats hang out in the front hallway from time to time, so it’s not like it’s the first cat dander that carpet has seen. I don’t encourage it – in fact, he gets hauled back inside and spritzed with a water bottle every time he does it – but I’m not overly concerned.
But yesterday…yesterday Miko burned through easily two or three of those nine lives he’s supposed to have: the first because of what he did, and the second and third because both Canuck and I refrained from killing him.
Last night we go grocery shopping. Poor Canuck has been fighting a cold for two weeks or so, and as we arrive at the interior front door, he’s holding on to his load of groceries and just counting down ’til he can get inside and take another Sudafed.
I, however, hear a loud “click-click-click-click” sound coming from inside the apartment. I look at Canuck, confused and a little panicked, because whatever it is, it can’t be good. He looks back at me, totally confused.
I push inside and drop the groceries. Sure enough, one of our burners is going full blast…and there is a pot on it!
I race into the kitchen to turn it off and to start ventilating. There’s really no question as to who did it; Dodge never jumps that high without an intermediate point, and there’s not an appropriate one available there.
I do not know how that cat managed to kick on the burner without singeing himself.
I do not know what possessed him to jump on the stove. In all the time I have had him, a few rules have changed, but he has NEVER been allowed on the stove, the kitchen counter, or the dining table. Yet he is fascinated by all three.
If you so much as walk toward the kitchen, he is hot on your heels. Even if you’re just going to check the thermostat (which is on the dining room wall).
My next house, the kitchen will have a door. In the meantime, we have taken the knobs off of the stove and put them on the shelf, ready to be popped on whenever we want to use the stove. The jury is still out on whether the pot is salvageable (there was water in it – soapy water, but water – but there seems to be some residue on the inner sides of the pot from the lid…and it’s a nice Le Creuset dutch oven…).
Preparation for kids…right?
