Hohner, The Magnificent
For two years, I had this big ball of orange and white fluff with claws that I named Hohner. He was found as a stray, so he was kind of skittish and immediately ran underneath my clawfoot bathtub (his favorite hiding place) at the mere sound of almost anything outside my apartment...other than that, he was one of the sweetest cats that I've ever owned. He had a few annoying habits:

-- He loved to chew on shoelaces, no matter how dirty and skanky they were...I had to eventually put all of my shoes in my closet to keep him from chewing all my shoelaces to shreds.

-- Every morning he'd wolf down his breakfast, then proceed to throw up all over the carpet. His favorite place to puke? Underneath my bed. I have one of those retractable beds on wheels that goes into the wall, so there's this big space in the wall where the bed slides in...thankfully, Hohner never threw up all the way in the back of the crawlspace, always on the carpet directly under my bed.

-- Whenever he had to go pee in his litterbox, he always covered up his business with a couple quick swipes of his paw and walked away. When he took a poo, however, it was a whole different story--it was as if he tried to dig beyond the cat litter and his litterbox in order to cover up his crap, and in doing so covered my entire bathroom floor with litter. He'd be in there for what seemed like hours, making sure that his poo was totally covered up.

Then, there was the awesome stuff:

-- He "trained" me how to pet him--if I were in the midst of a skritching session and I stopped petting him, he'd headbutt my hand as if to say "hey, you're not done yet! gimme MORE skritches!!!"

-- During the summer, my apartment's like an Easy-Bake oven due to the fact that the place has no central air and I've no air conditioning unit...like all cats, Hohner hated getting wet, with the exception of getting rubbed with an ice cube along his back. He came to love me doing that so much, every time I went to the fridge just to get a drink of something he'd sit down beside me, look up at the freezer door and meow at me like, "Get me one of those cold things you rub on me!"

Unfortunately I had to give Hohner up for adoption because the rent was raised on my apartment recently. On one hand I miss his company...on the other hand, I do not miss cleaning copious amounts of cat puke and hairballs every 15 minutes.


As for the length? Hohner took up half the space in my bed at night, the gigantic bastard...he never apologized for that, and neither will I. *snickers*
( svnynne damn near forgot she was here on, Sat 9 Jun 2007, 1:21, Reply)