Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
The sides of the Boo Box are starting to bow out and I don’t know how much longer it will last but I’m astonished that it has held together this long. Boo is frequently in it and some of his sleeping positions put a lot of strain on the sides of the box. It makes me laugh to walk past the living room and see his head poking up out of the box in the middle of an otherwise empty room.
At the end of 2015, Sam and Trixie snuggling and sleeping on the top shelf of the cat tree in my office. Sam looks large next to Trixie but he’s a small cat, it’s just that Trixie is tiny.
I had to laugh when I saw a young Trixie watching me with her head sticking up out of the cat bed. Scout at times would watch me like this, all the more amusing since she insisted on having her bed right beside me, her face inches away.
It’s been a lovely 4th of July weekend. The weather has been perfect, warming to the 70’s during the day and cooling off into the 50’s at night. There haven’t been many neighborhood fireworks so far so we’ve been able to keep the windows open except during the hottest part of the day. To minimize the stress on the pets we’ll keep the windows closed when it gets noisy tonight and retreat to the bedroom where we have an air conditioner.
Despite having the day off for the 4th I got up at the normal time I get up for work, and by mid-day decided to take a little nap on the love seat in my office. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as my wife came in and took this picture of me with our three cats all sleeping on me. Boo is the black-and-white cat curled up in the crook of my arm, Trixie is the tortoiseshell beside him, and Sam is the orange tabby in my lap, his favorite spot. Trixie’s beloved pink mouse even made it into the bottom of the frame. Our dog Ellie is not in frame but she was in her bed just below us.
Wonderful.
When we adopted Trixie early last year and were keeping her in isolation for the first couple of weeks, I let our dog Ellie come in and join us since she and Trixie hit it off pretty quickly. I brought in one of Ellie’s dog beds so she’d have a comfortable place to sleep when she wasn’t on the bed with us, but it was used as much as an arena of play by the kitten as a place of sleep by the dog. Pink mouse became an early Trixie favorite and remains so to this day. I’m sometimes awakened in the middle of the night when Trixie brings pink mouse to bed and one of them isn’t quite ready to settle down for the night.
Boo demonstrates excellent form in the closed pike position as he tucks and dives into a deep sleep on Ellie’s dog bed.
Even though I’ve seen Boo in this pose many times, sometimes I’m still caught off guard and have a brief moment of panic because I think he’s had a medical problem and collapsed. But it’s just his chicken-wing pose, which he’ll do at random places around the house when he wants to relax for a bit. And then it makes me laugh, just one of the many goofball poses of our Boo.
I like to think he’s pondering the great mysteries of the universe.
“This is The Box Store, how may I help you?”
“I’m looking for a box.”
“You’ve come to the right place, sir!”
“Do you have anything Boo sized?”
“Boo sized … Boo sized … ah! Here we are! Boo sized!”
“I’ll take it!”
There’s a long-running trend in photography of people photographing models in fancy dress in dilapidated buildings, a style I’ve never liked although it is quite popular. But even I couldn’t resist a shot of my lovely model in a run-down location, Boo in the old cat tree that we moved in front of the larger picture window. This part of the cat tree is showing signs of wear but it’s the bottom that has suffered from the love of five different cats, the carpet now in tatters. It’s a shame because we’ve never found another design that we (or the cats) like quite as much, although the newer one in my office does the job.
Boo keeps cool in the darkened living room on the morning of the 4th of July. There’s a dichotomy between his waking and sleeping selves, as he’s a shy and nervous cat in general but he can sleep in any position and often appears chilled out when relaxed or asleep.
Boolie 