Kait's Adventures

We’re celebrating two years with our kitty Stella today. We adopted her back on July 2, 2013, shortly after we got married. I wrote about our first year together on this date last year. The vets she saw as a baby place her birth between mid March and late April, but we’ll never know her actual birthday.

Stella spends her days at my side working hard on Android development. She puts in the hours… though most of those hours she’s sleeping.

While she and I spend the majority of our time together, she is clearly very much in love with Daniele. The two of them spend many a nap together. She always knows when he’s coming up to the front door. Even when 10 other people have gone past in the past 10 minutes she knows when it’s Daniele approaching.

Speaking of napping, Stella sleeps easily 20 hours a day. She’s a very deep sleeper. It’s almost impossible to wake her. She wakes about an hour before each meal, has a burst of energy, then passes back out.

The mornings are when she’s the most normal. She spends them looking out the window at birds and what not. The video above is her calling to the family of birds that recently moved in. You can only hear her with the volume on high.

Stella, where’s your head!?

Here she is playing with Daniele:

Her big glowing eyes are probably her most distinct feature. Here is a video of them in action:

I often find myself thinking, “what’s the worse she’s gunna do?” when tempted to leave her at whatever activity she is currently doing that I know Daniele doesn’t like.

For example, she likes to jump up above the top cabinets. Which seems innocent enough. Cats like high places. But then she starts to play with the hands on the clock. It’s easier to take the clock down than to get her down, so that’s what I did one day. Something spooked her and she jostled the glass jar (like the one in the photo above) full of rice. If rocked a few times before falling over the edge, smashing into the sink where it chipped off a good sized piece, then shattered, spilling rice and glass everywhere.

If I leave her unsupervised without putting everything in my desk away, then I should expect to find my papers shredded.

Caught in the act! Most of the day I drink out of a water bottle. I use glasses only for meals and put them away right after… or else she helps herself.

We love her even though she really is such a bad cat. Maybe it’s just the terrible 2’s.

She came with us again to New Jersey for Christmas.

She had lots of fun showing off her fancy red Christmas coat. Not to mention running up and down the stairs and playing with the Christmas tree.

My dad got two dogs last year. Our NJ cats had been hiding from them for months. Stella wasn’t a big fan at first, but she didn’t know enough to be afraid. She gradually started hanging out — she doesn’t like to miss out on any action. Soon enough she was playing with their tails.

Her aggressive need for food peaked. She stopped eating her dry food (the brand changed names and slightly changed the recipe on her crunchies). She was always going nuts for anything to eat. It was quite impossible to deal with, actually. We switched her to a higher quality dry food. But then we had the opposite problem, rather than snack on the dry food throughout the day, she would immediately finish whatever we put down. So the solution we came up with was to give her two smaller portions of the dry food a day: once in the morning and once at night. She’s always gotten her wet food at lunch time. And that’s how she ended up getting fed three meals a day.

She’s a pretty slim cat and the begging has gotten much better. So I think we’re in a good place. Though for the past week or so she’s not been finishing her food immediately. We’ve even thrown out some wet food. I’m hoping she’s not sick, it’s hard to tell since she sleeps so much normally. We’ll see how it goes.

Yeah, you just keep enjoying that nap, Stella…

Starting to feed her in the morning was definitely a mistake. Daniele feeds her early when he has early shifts. So by 6 am she feels entitled to be fed (even these past days when there was still last night’s in her bowl). Her strategy is to meow and knock things over until Daniele gets up. This works really well, so I don’t see her stopping.