Meowmy is letting me type this one cuz I kept correcting her version of the story when she tried to do it. Silly Humans. Maybe their brains leak out without enough fur to hold em in!! Anyway, when we came home from the shelter, that evil scary place where we had to be in cages, me 'n' Jasper wanted to play and explore our new home. Well Meowmy had other ideas. She read somewhere how you should keep cats (specially boy ones) apart for the first while and introduce em slowly. So she put me in the office and Jasper got to play around the whole house. Then she switched us. We both stayed there and played bapping paws under the door. We wanted to meet! I wanted to know the fluffbrain I was gonna have to live with so I could decide whether to stick around or find an escape route. So Meowmy went and got a squirt bottle (the nerve!) and a towel, and slowly opened the door. Me 'n' Jasper hissed and spat and puffed ourselves up as big as we could (we were starving so not very big!) and it was established that we were both too overwhelmed and hungry to duke it out. We had a couple of standoffs, and I even got locked in the bathroom for a timeout once when I didn't want to stop kickin' Jasper's butt. I was good after that. I am a social cuddleboy and I do NOT like being by myself in the bathroom!! I also got my eye scratched a bit and it still sometimes cries a lot if I get some dust or something in it. Meowmy always worries when that happens, but I don't let her mess with it too much. I'd rather cuddle or play. Me 'n' Jasper get along fine now. We like to groom each other, and we wrestle for who gets to do the grooming and who has to be pinned down and get a bath. I hate it when he washes my face and ears!!! Anyway, Meowmy wanted to take us to TED for a checkup, specially cuz Jasper was so scared and nervous he kept lickin' his sides and had huge bloody messes on 'em. TED office told her she needed to have names for us by the time we went in, so she stayed up all night on the computer looking up kitty names and people names. She had figured out I was a Norwegian Forest boy, so she was looking for cool Norse names for me, and I was sleeping at her feet. I was snoring, she says. I don't believe her, I don't snore! So she was saying names out loud when she found ones she liked, and she found one she thought was good for my brother. She said "SAM" out loud, and I woke up out of a dead sleep and said "brrr?" I knew it was my name so I answered her. She looked surprised and she laughed and said "oh, is that your name? Are you SAM?" and I told her in my very most human voice so she would understand, "mmmyah?" And she got tears in her eyes and couldn't believe I understood her, and she said "Are you sure?" So I said "mrow-row-row-row-REH!!!" to convey to her just how stupid I thought she was for continuing to bother me with this question when I had already answered twice. "SAM it is, then," she said, and I went back to sleep and back to ignoring the rest of the names. Jasper's name was the one that came up on every single search she did, and it was the only name that was on ALL of them, so Meowmy decided that was a sign and named my brother too. He didn't choose his own name. He was busy hiding under the bed or something when she was looking for names. We never really have established a pecking order. Jasper and I are pretty equal, some days he is the boss and some days I am, just depends on who wakes up feeling like a bully and who is feeling like being snuggly with Meowmy instead. Sam

Copyright © Aim
July 23, 2001