He went to the land of pineapples, volcanoes and Stitch with Cindy for his honeymoon, and would be gone two weeks. They just got a kitten, and don't want to raise a latch key cat. So they needed to get people to stop by and check in.
They have satellite TV, so it wasn't like asking people to go to Fallujah. I ended up only getting assigned four days out of the two weeks. Note to kidnappers: people love to visit houses when kittens and HBO are involved. Cookies help, too.
I like playing with small critters, be they kittens or puppies or kindergartners. It's usually a favor to the primary caretaker of the critter, and the small cute thing generally enjoys it unless someone turns on a vacuum. The best part comes when I go home, and someone else cleans up the not-so-cute poop and vomit.
The responsibility to have a pet generally scales with the size of the pet. Goldfish have about the same care level as house plants. Hamsters are a slightly larger responsibility. Cats are a bigger time investment, and dogs even more so (despite Chihuahuas being the size of hamsters). Elephants are only for people who know how to clone themselves and provide 48-hour-a-day care.
I used to have pets in my apartment. But they were just gerbils. They're even less responsibility than hamsters, because when a gerbil died, the others would help out with burial costs and instantly start eating the corpse. The only caveat to going away for a week was dumping a big pile of food in the dish. The satisfaction and companionship you get out of the pet also scales with its size. After several years of gerbil caretaking, all I have are memories of getting bit whenever I tried to touch them - plus several rectal spelunking jokes. It's easier to be pet-free, so I've avoided picking up any pets since the last of the gerbils died (and sadly had no one to carry on the tradition of gnawing at his corpse). My life was complicated enough when I was trying to get home by 7:00 every night to watch West Wing reruns. What if I had to walk and clean up and give attention to an animal every day for the rest of its life? That'd be like watching at least three West Wings a day.
The first time I saw the kitten was my first day of stopping by. I opened the door to Jeff and Cindy's place, and saw Minerva (nickname: Minnie), a skinny gray fuzzball with gold eyes. Minnie enjoys gnawing on things, swatting things, and jumping from furniture to furniture like a feline Super Mario.
Minnie's not alone in the house. She has an adult cat to play nanny to her.
Mrs. Whatsit (nickname: Mrs. Whatsit) is a large, slow-moving cat the size of a groundhog. She's the color of peanut butter fudge ripple: white with irregular brown and orange streaks. I think she looks like Mr. Stitch, but no one else has seen this Sci-Fi channel movie so no one understands that reference. You pet her and she purrs, then rolls on her back while you rub her belly, then bites you and hisses while continuing to purr. She'll run away in disgust, but go all of eight feet before plopping down again.
Jeff and Cindy have had Mrs. Whatsit for a year and a half. She used to own the apartment. Now she has a roommate. She's not happy about the arrangement. She deals with it by trying not to be in the same room as the kitten (something human roommates have perfected).
I'm not just a kitten-sitter, I'm also a cat-sitter, so part of my job was to check in with Mrs. Whatsit. But Minnie has a habit of following you around from room to room. Any attempt to pet Mrs. Whatsit was the same exchange: Mrs. Whatsit goes into a one-sided staring contest, while Minnie has her own unrelated one-sided sniffing and poking content. This turns into a hissing and eight-foot-dash contest for Mrs. Whatsit, and a shocked silence contest for the kitten (which sometimes segues into another sniffing and poking contest, in which case this all repeats itself).
While I was at Jeff and Cindy's, I went into hotel room mode. I'm in a building where I know no one, have no social obligations, and HBO is full of movies I want to see but not so much that I'd pay money. So on goes the TV to catch Scooby Doo, Biker Boyz, Cradle 2 the Grave, and Sinbad. Mr. Stitch was better than these movies.
My intent was to absentmindedly play with the kitten while I'm watching this craptastic cinematic cornucopia. Minnie had other ideas. After two minutes of Attack of the Venetian Blind Cord, she started going after the eminence grise behind the cord. I.e.: she bit my hand.
Maybe other kittens don't feel the claws sink into them like us humans. Most kittens are cute, until you realize they have about 47 sharp points, and are learning how to get all 47 sunk into your flesh at once. Cats are predators, even little fluffballs that bat string around. It's not so cute when you're the string.
She's single-minded, too. Once Minnie had a taste of hand, there's no going back to inanimate objects. She wants blood. She wants to eat more hand.
When Chinese Water Torture fails, the world's rogue states go to plan B: the Unexpected Kitten Meat Grinder. It hurts, but never so much that you never want to touch the kitten again. You just try to scratch the back of her head, or rub her belly, or something that she wouldn't associate with the UKMG position. But she never learns, and neither do you, and after three days your fingers are falling off and you'll spill nuclear secrets to whatever Bond villain abducted you in the first place.
This is how cats once were. We domesticated them, clipped their nails, spayed them - changing their hormonal balance in the process - so our furniture wouldn't be shredded and reeking of ammonia. But they kill birds and mice not just for food, but also for fun. We can keep our chairs urine-free, but we can't flip off the little Freddy Kruegers in them without kitten lobotomies. (Punk bands looking for a name: Kitten Lobotomy.)
Before he left, Jeff told me that he received several 5:30 A.M. toe-biting wake up calls. At least Minnie is following the ancient feline tradition of ceaselessly assaulting the lumps at the end of the bed. One day those lumps will die, and then cats will rule the beds of the world.
My revenge is simply to think that Minnie is not a smart creature, even by kitten standards. Minnie hasn't learned that her back legs are part of her. This goes beyond chasing the tail. When she sits on a couch or a bed, she places her front paws toward the lip of her platform, and just lets the rest dangle over the side. When gravity pulls the back legs off, there's desperate clawing by her back half to stay in place.
Once she gets stabilized, she then goes in the exact same position, and repeats this every ten minutes.
The Roman Gods are registering a name change, so Minerva doesn't share her name with the goddess of wisdom any more. They want her to be named 1. Ernest, 2. Homer, or 3. any of the wisdom goddesses outside the Roman pantheon.
I only had four nights to play with the cats, so I didn't see much long term growth. Minnie didn't grow perceptibly between one Tuesday and the following Tuesday (although Mrs. Whatsit might have eaten enough to up her weight class from Heathcliff division to Garfield division.)
It was nice to have purring things rub against my leg when I got in, though. The subsequent half hour with the lint brush isn't anything to sing a song about, but the overall effect of the cats were a big positive for me. Seeing the cats has reminded me that me getting real pets isn't an if for me, it's a when.
It's a constant responsibility, though, and right now I don't even like the responsibility of returning movie rentals on time.
I've earmarked some time in the future for pet ownership. For dogs, when I have a big backyard and kids to spoil him. For cats, when there's someone else in the house to clean up the box of tur - ah, I mean help out with the affection and scratching behind the ears.
Neither of these times is right now, so I'll be petless for today.
My hands are healing nicely, thanks for asking.