Gods, I love her. My little tiger striped leopard spotted kitten. When I get up in the morning, the yowling starts. Let me out, let me out, let me out! She stays in the laundry overnight…so I can vaguely curb her destructive tendencies and thus find the house standing in the morning. I let her out. Before the coffee, before the cereal…as soon as my bedroom door opens she starts calling. She yells pretty loud - leaving her there is a fairly deafening option. So I let her out.
Then this crazy little fur person walks between my feet. If I am so heartless as to not pick her up, she’ll cruise under my feet for the next ten minutes, always between my ankles, purring loudly, looking up at me when I stop as if to say “What? Oh, don’t mind me…” So I pick her up. She climbs up my chest (she still hasn’t learned about not using claws) and puts her front paws on my collarbone, or higher, and shoves her head up against my chin. Purring reaches ecstatic heights. Shove, shove. Paws kneading furiously (thank god for padded dressing gowns). If I reach up to move her claws to some slightly less tender spot, she’ll leave off shoving for a moment to lick my fingers.
I’m still allergic to her saliva, so after about five minutes of crazy cat worship, my chin and neck feel like they’re burning, and the hayfever’s starting. Occasionally, suicidally, I reach for a tissue. Nothing the furball loves more than killing tissues. She pulls them out of the tissue boxes and shreds them, leaving them all over the house. So using a tissue within reach of her claws is interesting. Got to grab the front paws, first, or those claws will be slashing around in front of your face. I put her down.
She cruises around my feet for a while, hindering my efforts to get to the bathroom and wash my now-welted skin. She sits and watches, then as I let the water out she gets distracted by the drain hole monster, and shouts abuse at it through the grating, trying to get her paws through so she can kill it. This usually concludes her ten minutes of adoration…the thought of all the things she can kill today takes over.
Her name, technically, is Mooroobar Golden Night Wing. Damn silly name for a cat – since the day we met she’s been Saskia. Sass, sassy, sasky-cat, and occasionally Sassinak, when my boyfriend forgets precisely which sci-fi/fantasy chick I named her after. She’s got large webbed paws with chunky toes, beautiful tiger stripes on her face and legs, and leopard spots all over, even on her soft white tummy. Her whiskers are deepest chocolate at their base, and white from about one centimetre out, and she's got these long black eyelashes. She’s got the softest fur – cat fur already, though she’s only 3.5 months old. I can’t tell if it’s the leopard pelt that some of the breed have, or not. It doesn’t matter. She’s got the glitter effect – when she basks in the sun her fur looks like it’s been dusted with gold…like she’s been rolling in the dust left over from my gilding.
Ye gods, she’s wonderful. She spends a lot of the day trying to kill things…my pet rats, her fluffy toys, her tail, my tissues, the newspaper. Towels are especially dangerous enemies, as is her scratching post. Socks are designed to be thoroughly killed and then hidden. She gets into the weirdest spots, without regard to dignity or ease of exit. She gets stuck behind the books in my bookshelf, so I have to pull them out to give her an exit point. If I leave the dishwasher open she’ll be found at the back, looking out ready to dodge the water pistol jet that is slowly teaching her what “no” means. She sits in the bathtub and is systematically destroying my loofah. When I leave water in the bath she sits on the edge and tries to get to anything left in the tub…trying not to fall in.
All that killing stuff requires a lot of snoozing time. She’ll sleep on my lap when I’m at the computer, a stretched out totally relaxed downtime. Inevitably she stretches out too much and starts to fall – if I don’t catch her she’ll wake up just in time to dig all her claws in and stop the fall. Ouch. She purrs in her sleep if I stroke her chin…then forgets to turn the purr off and keeps going for five minutes after I’ve stopped. When she wakes up she’ll watch my fingers on the keyboard and try to walk on it, or attempt to disembowel the mouse.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I go back to work tomorrow. She’s so wonderful, I miss her when I’m away from her. I could go on for pages more – how she comes racing up when I call her; how she and I go for walks with her on the leash and harness, madly investigating things; how my boyfriend is so besotted with her it’s funny; how she comes with us on car trips and does a meerkat impression sitting on the passenger’s lap, front paws up on the window sill, looking at all the things there are to kill out there.
I don’t daylog often. I have my diary, and my journal, and anything important that I need to remember goes in those. Anything I have a burning need to write about is usually not something that should be on E2 for everyone to see – a few too many people know who I am here. But this…I woke up this morning, and after a few cat-shoves…I had to write about her. My Saskia.