Minutiae.

As I type, Jane is entertaining herself here and there around the room. She has been experimenting with standing unsupported, and this morning took an actual step. However, her favorite mode of locomotion is a very purposeful striding about on her knees, like an exceptionally short-legged matron in tweeds marching across the countryside. This is very practical of her (like a tweedy matron), as it provides all of walking's freedom to carry things, with at least twice the stability. 

Steve has pointed out that she is also like a Roomba: Earlier she picked up a DVD box and carried it briskly across the room, where she fetched up in a corner. There she stayed, happily clutching the box, facing the corner and wiggling a little.

Just now, she seems to be on a mission to take everything rectangular and move it one quadrant of the room counter-clockwise. Then she goes back to the first one and begins again, with an occasional pause to menace the cat.

Though, really, to be fair, the cat is at least as responsible as she is for any menace he may feel. Her modus is to approach the cat with expressions of glee and outstretched hands, while he stands perfectly still and complains. Then she stops with her fingertips a foot or so away from his person. "Yeeee!" she says. He looks more and more affronted and objects vocally with increasing volume, but will NOT by god leave. It reminds me of the video of the cat being terrorized by a turtle, which made the rounds a year or two ago, this one:

 

It is not that Jane is behaving like the turtle, what with her gracious respect for Nemo's personal space, but that that both cats show an incredible failure to use their actual advantage in the case and just go away. 

Eventually Jane knee-thumps off to other things and the cat goes on complaining until we point out to him that she is now as far away from him as it is possible to be while remaining in the same room, and then he pretends that he was asking to be let outdoors, all along. Then, I'm sure, he goes and thinks about how he wishes that Jane were a Roomba, so that instead of being grumpy and beleagured here in the present, he could be the happiest cat of 2008.

  

Maybe he will learn to ride her next year.

Comments

[redfox]

Query: Does a cat have a person, in that sense? Or does he have a... something else?