Life with Ink

It's been almost two months since we brought Ink home, and from the kinds of posts I've made here and the accompanying photos in the Flickr photoset, you'd think that life with him mostly consists of moments of unbearable cuteness, interspersed with the odd reality check of buying food and kitty litter.

In other words, something like this:


Things that I have had to do since we brought Ink home, that I never did before in our almost seven years of living in this apartment:

• Cover my hand with a plastic bag so that I could reach down the bathroom drain to recover the drain cover that Ink'd pulled off (an almost daily ritual) and casually tossed down there.
• Wedge a non-functioning desktop computer on top of that drain cover, between the sink and the shower stall, because it's the only thing heavy enough that Ink can't move it to scrabble further at the drain cover.
• Pick up his toys after he's been put to bed.
• Vacuum the living room, dining room and kitchen every other Sunday (we have someone come in to do a thorough cleaning of the entire apartment the rest of the time), not so much to clean up cat fur as to suck up the regular dust that accumulates in all the corners he loves to hide in.

Oh, all right, I love the little bugger.

Some friends have remarked that Ink is like our substitute child, to which I say that despite the above, he's a lot less work than a child because he's self-cleaning (excepting the weekly shower we subject him to), doesn't require any food preparation more sophisticated than pouring dry food out of a bag and doesn't talk back (although he occasionally sulks when he's been told off).

Having said that, we sinned grievously last week because we knew we were running low on cat food, but for one reason or another neither of us couldn't make it to the pet store --- and the next thing we knew it was 11 pm on a Wednesday, Ink was starving and the cat food bag was completely empty.

Oh, how he mewed.

Fortunately, we had a packet of wet food, some kitten formula Terz'd bought before, so that kept Ink going overnight, till Terz got new food the next day (all 20 lbs of it, so that we don't have to go to the pet store so often). But we felt very, very guilty, and when we got home the next night to find a stray cat outside our door (on the eleventh floor! How did it get up here?), it was time to atone for our sins.


He was a skittery creature, but he came forward to get the food once we backed off. So he got fed, we left some water out for him too, and our karma equilibrium was restored.

Last Sunday, I was napping on the couch and Ink pounced on the cushion I was hugging. Once I got over the shock, he settled down on the cushion and went to sleep too. It was nice.

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