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I mentioned previously in my About Me page that I own a cat named Max (or rather, I’m owned by a cat). Max is a chubby, sedentary, male Heinz 57 indoor furball whose favourite activities are lying down, followed by getting up when it’s time to eat, and then lying down again. He is very adept at sitting on humans and warming their feet. He is also deceptively smart and practices selective hearing. Attempts to encourage the beast to move (i.e. playtime) are tolerated for about 5 minutes, however, the beast is fond of going out into the garden to frolick, roll on the ground, and eat flowers and grass. Occasionally, Max will look longingly outside the glass sliding doors that open out to our lovely garden. He will not cease caterwauling and pawing the glass door until he’s let out.

Only 3 occasions seem to trigger this desire to go outside:

• When the man-things are outside in the garden. Despite being a lazy furry ass, he’s very social with the man-things who live with him and wants to be wherever the man-things are.
• Warm, sunny days
• When our next-door neighbour’s male, black outdoor cat Lucky is outside. Lucky is our unofficial cat because he seems to be on our property all the time, sometimess begging for food, treating our garden as his territory, purring, and stroking his entire fuzzy wuzzy body on any legs within his vicinity. When they first cat-eyed each other last year, Max and Lucky were totally hiss-hiss kill kill and now, they’re ok together (from a comfortable distance). I think, Max the scaredy-cat (big wuss that he is) has somewhat conceded the garden territory to Lucky.

So, it was strange that Max was in that mood a few days ago because neither Lucky nor the man-things were outside and it was pretty chilly (for Max, who likes it on the warm side). As soon as he was out, he proceeded to do his usual which is to sniff the ground, plants and flowers. I’m guessing it’s that feline instinctual behaviour to eat stuff that will help with digestion or easing out those nasty hairballs.

Since he was a little pussycat, Max would eat some veggies which is sort of… strange for a cat (i.e. mad crazy for corn). So that he wouldn’t eat poisonous flowers and plants, we try not to plant anything that might kill him. We always watch him very closely when he’s outside. He likes to munch on catnip, mint and parsley… so we usually have some of that stuff in the garden during the summer.

It turned out that on this particular day, all he wanted to do was to eat some flowers… then lay flat on his back on our wooden porch… belly side up and all 4 legs stretched out and sticking up in the air. Words cannot convey how very strange that looks to me… I’ve never understood how he can sleep like that for over an hour!

While he was dreaming whatever cats dream of (food, probably), I decided to take a break from work and the notebook computer. The beast-thing is sometimes a muse for art doodle sessions.

You know… you can learn a lot from a cat… and it’s that sometimes, you really do have to stop and smell eat the flowers.

Adieu,

fruity

P.S. Em & Evilgenius, happy now? See, I wrote something. Yawn.