My cat Muffin collects hairpins. She steals them from my bathroom and bats them around the floor. When she’s done with them, she stores them in her dryfood bowl. We’ve stopped removing them from the bowl for the last week. She’s got nearly a dozen collected now. It’s good to see she’s got a hobby.
My other cat Peace has a hobby too. She stares at the wall for hours on end. Then she comes to beg for food - even when her bowl is full - because apparently staring at the wall is hungry work. It’s nice to see them keeping themselves busy.
My cat whines. She will walk around the house, talking just like the old lady she is (she is 12 in human years) and she just jabbers away, meow meow meow - and she has us all trained very well. Never does she have to wait more than 5 minutes to be let out, or let in. So I guess her hobby is to rule her domain.
But when darkness falls Kittyhawk (my cat’s name) lets her hair down and forgets she is old, as she routinely defends the back porch from other felines or even a raccoon. I mean it - she wins often (we haven’t told her she is declawed in the front) - so go figure.
By day a queen of the house. By night she is queen of the ring.
What you fail to understand is that your cats are protecting you from evil influences.
Fido has the important self-appointed position of monitoring our house against the sassy squirrels in the yard. Worse, pencils lying on the floor present a threat, and must be engaged in battle, along with something we call Mr. TennisBallHeadMan, who is apparently the Devil incarnate, and, just recently, stray hair scrungies.
She will work herself up into an absolute lather swatting these things across the floor and chasing them. We just figure there’s some danger we’re not aware of, and she’s likely saving our lives.
Tornado makes sure the dog (80+lbs) gets his exercise by chasing him all through the house.
I once had a cat who liked to lick window blinds. At first I thought it was just the texture of the fabric on those particular blinds, but when we moved into a new house with vinyl miniblinds, she did the same thing. She also had a dolly that she liked to groom. It was one of those troll dolls with the big poofy hair. She would hook part of the hair with her paw and then lick the rest of his hair into a neat and slicked back do.
I had a cat named Antoine who used to help take care of my rats. He’d sit by their cage for hours watching them, and when one of the babies fell out of the cage once (tiny, pink, eyes still closed) he sat by it and hollered until I came and put it back.
Lady and Ling could open closed doors. (The latter taught the former.) I’ve seen some cats on America’s Funniest Home Videos who can do it the same way–they’d jump up and hang on to the doorknob by their front paws. Their scrambling while hanging there would twist the doorknob as it needed and open it.
Lady chewed up stuffed animals, especially if she was pissed at you.
My current cats: Mija is a spaz. She: 1) attacks the same invisible spot on the wall in the hallway, pogoing up to it time after time 2) Stares at, and pogos-up-after, the fish in the aquarium; 3) Loves ALL boxes and will try to get into any of them–even a videotape box; 4) Somehow manages to get the handle of a bag (such as a Bath and Body Works, or Starbucks) around her head when playing with it–and then runs hell-fire through the house to try to escape the Thing That’s Attacking Her; 5) Turns into Mr. Hyde when she goes outside. Normally, she’s pretty mild-mannered, affectionate, friendly–but get her outside, and she’ll growl, spit, hiss, and swipe at you when you go to pick her up.
Inigo is much less…uh…weird. He’s a mama’s boy, though, and will follow me from room to room. If I get out of his sights, he’ll howl the most pathetic meow–basically mourning, “Where are you?!” All I need to do is say, “I’m in here, Inigo,” and he’ll come galloping into the room. Also, Inigo can tell that when I’m putting on makeup, it means I’m going out. He’ll sit and mournfully meow, go up on his hindlegs to touch me with his forepaws, rub around my legs, and meow, meow, meow while I doll myself out. We joke he’s saying, “Mommy, you goin’ out? You goin’ out, Mommy?”
Pregnancy appears to be my cats main hobby. She got really tame during her first one, then vanished, now is still tame but considerably more feral, and seems to be knocked up again.
Alley Bug has after 17 wonderful years gone to kitty heaven. But… she loved it when I came back from the grocery store. I would put the brown paper sacks…sometimes 7 - 10 of them all around the living room and kitchen… empty. She would just sprint full speed into the bags and hit the back of them. Turn around, poke her head out as if she were hiding from something. She would run in and out of all of the bags having great fun. I was in the pet store and saw this jazzed up version of a grocery bag. I paid about 6 0r 7 bucks for it. Brought it home and placed it on the floor. She totally ignored my gift. Cats ain’t right, I tell ya.
My cat Heifer herds Beanie Babies.
He steals, er, I mean he rounds them up them from the kid’s bedrooms and takes them into the kitchen and leaves them by the food bowls. Sometimes we’ll find one in the food bowl, and once we found one in the water bowl.
All three of my cats protect us from the Evil Cricket Invaders in the basement. They like to bring us the legless bodies so we can see what good hunter/killers they are.
Salem likes to help me read books and the newspaper. If I settle down with a book or the paper, she is right there, helping me read. She does tend to get in the way, though. I guess she wants to censor what I read.
Jack is currently in training for the US Soccer team. He bats anything and everything even remotely round all over the place, and at all hours of the night.
Gryffin likes money. He loves finding loose change and batting the coins under the dresser in the bedroom. He manages to hoard quite a tidy sum under there. He likes to bat other things (bottle caps, paper balls, twist ties, whatever), but only money is kept under the dresser. My little baby is a miser! I’m so proud.
Gryff amazed me (Mr. Del wasn’t nearly so impressed, I feel I should mention) when one of us dropped a crumpled dollar bill and didn’t realize it. Gryffy put it with the coins! Obviously (to me) this means that the cat understands currency and realizes that dollar bills are more like coins, which go under the dresser, than crumpled up paper balls, which get left in the middle of the floor.
Cleo likes to drink her water from the bathroom sink…never the kitchen…but the water must be running at precisely the right speed or she won’t drink. I have not yet figured out what speed this is, but she works with me every time I go to the bathroom, and sometimes I get it right. She also likes to play marble, catching them on the fly as we bounce them across the floor. We used to have yardsticks on the floor in front of each kitchen appliance so that the marbles wouldn’t all get lost, and to make it easier to retrieve them from underneath. Unfortunately in this house there are large marble-seizing air return vents in all the rooms, so she doesn’t get to play much.
Chloe talks all the time, in this hoarse, croaky meow that sounds like she has laryngitis. Just complains, and complains and complains until you scoop her up and pet her.
Tweak carries around a stuffed tiger that is almost as big as she is…it drags between her front legs and under her belly as she runs. She also thinks it is possible to climb glass, and scratches at the windows trying to climb up.
The dearly-departed Muffin used to sit on the nieghbor’s front step to groom herself while the neighbor’s dog barked frantically at the door, trying to get out at her. One day I caught her standing on her hind legs, meowing into their screen door until Barkley heard her and came tearing up to the front door, barking madly. Only then did she sit down and start her bath. We buried her between two military police dogs at our pet cemetery…we thought she’d have fun tormenting them through eternity.
My cat developed an unfortunate habit of incontinence when she was around 10 years old. (She’s 12 now.) We now have her litterbox on the floor in the downstairs bathroom, with her food and a water dish on the sink. She stays in there all night, and hopefully uses the litterbox once in a while. Solved our problem, if not hers. Anyhoo-
Her latest hobby is pooping just outside the litterbox, then batting the poops around until they go underneath the door. I call it “shit pool.” (“Turd in the end pocket!”…WHAM!)
Blondie’s latest hobby is calculating the exact spot to curl up where the maximum amount of people will trip over her. She sleeps two steps in front of the front door, right in front of my bedroom door, and right in front of any number of closet doors. Right now, she’s sleeping in a dining room chair, but it’s right next to the patio door. If she could move the chair, I’m sure she would.
She’s also taken to getting on my nightstand and batting at the pictures I have hanging on the wall. It’s noisy and it’s pulling the picture off the wall. Grrr.
One of my cats eats french fries, but only if they’re broken up into small pieces. If they’re not, he sits there and licks them. (Freaking wierdo cat.)
Fido also likes to jump up on the bed, walk to my nightstand and rub her face all over the books, the lamp, the radio.
She doesn’t stop until she’s had the satisfaction of knocking something, usually the radio, off the table. Then she either settles down at the foot end of the bed, or just hops down and walks away.
Agate is an investigator: she has to get into any kind of enclosed space or container. Even if she can’t fit into it, she’ll give it the old college try.
She also loves cardboard. She’ll lay on it, curl up around it, sit on it, chew it… but she doesn’t (normally) claw it.
Then there’s her favorite hobby: playing tag with me. I’ll be walking along, then suddenly there’s this whap on my leg, and Agate running off. So, I chase after her, whap her tail, and run away. She’ll give chase, lie in wait, and whap! the game starts again.
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Pixel loves to collect small objects like screws, chapsticks, rubber bands, etc. However most of the time he’ll bring them to me to show me what he’s got so actually it’s quite handy. If I drop something and it rolls under the furniture I just wait for him to retrieve it and bring it to me.
Kendra has developed a disturbing habit of bringing home dead rodents - but only when we have guests over. Kitty version of “Bring a plate”. Completely wigged out SIL’s craft group last week
Otherwise they both seem to enjoy sitting on the windowsill outside of whatever room I am in watching me work. I did wonder at one stage if someone had replaced my cats with Nanny Cam style imposters – then I saw the movie “Cats and Dogs”. Now I know they are just planning world domination and using me as a test case.
