surprise! I'm not your cat! (animal video)

Overdose of cuteness and surprise.

forgetting?

I feel like I am forgetting my cats who are dead and it has me in a panic. I tried to list a bunch of things about them and I know I didn't get everything that made them special. But here are my lists; badly written but set in stone now.

• Zen was afraid of the dark, or of being smothered, because if you put him under the covers he would freak out.
• He didn't happy paw, but sometimes his paws would flex, very slightly.
• If something was on a table, he would knock it off with his paw and then sit where it had been. If Nutter was in a bed/basket, Zen would lay on top of him and Nutter would have to move or get out.
• If there was a piece of paper on the floor, he would sit on it.
• Zen slept on people, on pillows, anywhere in the bed, always purring really loudly.
• Zen would get out of bed in the middle of the night and go downstairs for whatever reason. Once down there he would start to howl because he couldn't find us. If we called him, he would run up the stairs and jump into bed, purring madly and cuddling, even though we had never moved, as if we'd left him alone for days.
• Zen loved milk so much that we couldn't even say the word. He would come running as if we had called his name. We had to call it "m".
• I would drape Zen across my shoulders, lion-tamer style, and walk around the house like that, and he would purr and be perfectly happy. When I sat at my computer desk, he would get between me and the chair back, wedge himself right in there, and go to sleep, forcing me to sit very still, leaned slightly forward, until he chose to move or until my husband came along to pick him up and move him.

I seem to remember more about Nutter, but he's only been gone 2 months (as of tomorrow). It always seemed to me that Zen was the more interesting cat of the two...so what I have forgotten about my black kitty?

• Nutter liked to be spanked.
• He liked to jump on people's shoulders and head butt them and butt-bump them, and if you held your arms out straight he would walk from one to the other.
• If he was happy to see you, or hungry, he would attack your feet and scratch at them madly. He did this to shoes with no feet in them sometimes too.
• He hated being picked up or held but loved to sprawl on a human. He would go completely boneless and sleep. Or he would suck on cloth and happy paw and purr. He would dig his claws into my shoulder, put his front feet on my cleavage and purr and go to sleep.
• When he was a kitten, first at the house, one night Willy rolled over onto him in his sleep. After that, Nutter was scared whenever anyone moved in the bed. He liked to sleep hugging feet, or on top of a person. He would also crawl under the covers sometimes.
• Nutter did a complicated food trick. First he would lead you to the corner where the food was kept. Then when you showed him two cans of food, he would sit on his hind legs and head butt the can he wanted. Then he would push the empty food bowl with his head to show you where the food went.
• He liked boxes and would squeeze himself into the smallest ones, even shoeboxes.
• We could not leave any loose threads anywhere. If we used a ragged quilt, Nutter would find the loose threads and chew on them obsessively. He also would eat curling ribbon, just gnawing at it and we'd pull a foot or more from his mouth, dripping with stomach fluids. Somehow he never ended up getting his intestines bound up from that bad habit.
• He would sometimes sit on top of the bird cages. The birds did not bother him, and vice-versa.

Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of my dad's death so I'm feeling very melancholy.

Happy Birthday Sputz

My skinny little kitten is a big boy now, a whole year old! He weighed 4 pounds when I got him at 4 months old and now he's around 18 lbs (pictures show him at 3 months and 11 months). But he's not fat. He's got a completely different body structure than Nutter. For instance, the space between Nutter's hipbones (how wide his back is) is about 2 of my fingers. Sputz's (and Ursi's) are the width of my hand. They have very wide bodies and their legs are kind of short for their size. They are what you would call "sturdy" in build. My best friend said that if my ragdolls were little boys, they would wear "husky" sized clothes.
Nutter has a bad cold. I know I should take him to the vet, but he'll get that awful pink stuff, and I'll have to catch him twice a day and jam it down his throat. He hates being picked up or held (always has) and forcing medicine into him doesn't make that any better.
When I came home yesterday he had a huge plug of dried mucus in one nostril. He was frantically licking his nose over and over trying to dislodge his, breath wheezing. I had to catch him and pry the chunk out. Did he appreciate that? No. He refused to eat supper. He sat there and yelled at me. I put down the food. He looked at it and yelled for food again. Will got him to eat some when he came home.
Nutter's so very thin. He probably doesn't weigh 8 lbs. But he is in good spirits, very lovable, loves the ragdolls (as you can see in the picture), loves us. He tries to play with the other cats, running around with them, and then he can't breathe, and he gets kind of bug-eyed trying to get air, and I feel terrible because I can't help him. I tell him he's 14 1/2 years old and he's got 1 lung and cancer and he can't run around like a kitten anymore.
I downloaded all the pictures and words from my old pets blog. Yahoo keeps promising a tool that will let us move our blog contents, including comments, in one step, to any blogging platform. I'm waiting. Not that I have many comments that I care about, but it will be a pain to rebuild something like 75 posts.
BTW, the picture of Nutter and Sputz is on the PetPlace website. It is slide 12 under "friendly cats."