and a great purr

She also has one of the strongest purrs I’ve heard from a cat in a long time, and that’s satisfying to hear, like an expensive motorcycle.

Like a dog, she also smells my lips after meals to figure out what I’ve been eating behind her back. Tonight it was minestrone, precious. Not something cats would like.

kitten language

Her paw on my lips (and she’s good now about not using claws on my lips) means a request for food 100% of the time. That makes things easier.

Another 100% correlation… When she attacks electrical wires, that’s always an attempt to annoy me into paying attention to her. She doesn’t really care about electrical wires at all, but has astutely noticed that I start to look and worry whenever she does it, and that I inevitably pick her up off the floor to get her away from the wires. I should have feigned indifference to the wires, but it’s too late now.

quirky national tastes

Cream soda and peanut butter. Two things many non-Americans find loathsome. Two things I love.

A Texas acquaintance of mine was (and still is) living in Paris. In the early days in Paris he was always pretty poor, so whenever I’d come over I’d ask him if he wanted anything. What he usually wanted was as many jars of peanut butter as I could fit in my luggage. He wanted the cheapest kind, so I always brought him the in-house store brand. Thus it happened that there were a couple of trips to Paris where I took along a number of jars of Dominick’s brand peanut butter.

tired her out

She lasted a good hour fighting my hand while lying upside down on the couch, and about 5 or 6 of those bites really hurt.

Then she stopped, and started purring for about 10 minutes. Then she feel asleep right next to where I’m sitting. This is a really playful little fighter. I’m glad I’m not a mouse.

more and more impressed by these new physical skils

Before, she was like a little kid playing hide-and-seek in feeble little kid fashion and thinking you couldn’t see her even when she was visible from two rooms away. Now, she vanishes and re-emerges like a stealth cat. She can startle me with noises behind the couch, disappear quickly enough that I can’t see her when I turn my head there to look, then she suddenly tears at me from a semi-distant room without my ever knowing she had been there, and claws her way right up the front of the couch and attacks my hand.

This is a different level of kitten now.

kitten progress

It’s really striking how much Tamanya developed during those 9 days. Along with the mere extra practice time on the planet, she also had three adult cats to learn from at the babysitter’s; reportedly she formed an especially close friendship with one of them.

The differences can’t be missed. Before I left, she was like a fragile eggshell who seemed like she might be broken by a strong wind; now, although still a small kitten, she has a discernible physical mass when you pick her up. Before, she gingerly attempted easy physical tasks, while now she has some athleticism and often makes assertive and risky jumps without fear. In the old days, she was a slow eater with that tiny mouth and often needed 3 or 4 sessions to clean her plate; tonight, by the time I got back from the kitchen she’d already devoured a good-sized meal and changed rooms and was sitting on my bed. Also, much more playful, and a lot of it is play fights with claws and teeth, and sometimes she’s too rough.

And now she’s causing problems behind this couch. I don’t like the sounds I’m hearing.

Again not a good frontal photo, but she’s moving too quickly tonight to be photographed. In fact, she’s showing early foreshadowings of the destructive teenager behavior that both Marcin and Seth forewarned me about.

coming up soon

I’ll start to write the Lovecraft book. There are a couple of small tasks that need to get done first, but Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy is next up. I probably won’t write the first words until the first days of June when our semester is truly over.

I doubt it

“Bernard Debré, a lawmaker in Mr. Sarkozy’s center-right UMP party, told French television that the arrest was ‘a humiliation and an affront to the honor of France. Everyone will now say, “Look at what the French do.”‘ Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s political career, he added, ‘must be ended — he will be condemned.'”

The part I doubt is that everyone will say “look at what the French do” (I agree with the rest of the statement). Every country has people who go completely off the grid like that without warning, but yes I can understand the national embarrassment. I’d be very embarrassed as an American if John McCain were arrested in Paris for trying to rape a hotel maid.

But the really alarming part of the story is the worry that this could strengthen the Front National. One hopes not.

more kitten differences

She’s purring up a storm now, but she really seems to have discovered me as a stranger for the second time rather than smelling and remembering me.

She still likes the baby cat milk, but has a hard time with the bottle and really wants to lick it from a saucer instead. That will make my life much easier, though I’ll miss the old days with that bottle a bit.

She has always liked walking on the roof of her nest (i.e., a cardboard box), but now she’s so much heavier that the roof creaks beneath her weight, and may even collapse beneath her in the near future.

She’s much more playful now than before, rolling over to be petted on her stomach and playing boxing games with her paws.

All right, so she’s about 43 days old and I’ve not seen her for the last 9 of those days, which is more than 20% of her lifespan so far. So I guess it’s not too surprising that she’s developed that much, but the differences are really pretty striking when you see them in person.

a different cat

The changes are really remarkable. She is definitely quite a bit longer and heavier, and has lost many of her previous habits along with adding some new ones.

She’s now approximately six weeks old. I had her for 13 days, moved her to the babysitter’s for 9, and that was apparently long enough that her memories of the set-up in this apartment (and of me personally) are not very strong. She’s not especially scared of anything, but seems to be relearning many things for the very first time. And she’s also going into dark hiding places rather than following me around like in the past.