Remember how we were told that neutering our cat would help calm him down?
Yeah, that hasn’t been the case (well, aside from when he was drugged up and recovering right after the surgery, but that lasted a couple of days, max).
So Finn remains wired and wild at times. He loves hanging out in the basement with me and likes to pull my strings.
I could be watching a ball game or playing a video game, and he decides he needs some attention. Most cats would pop up into your lap and rub up against your chin (he does this, but only when he’s tired). Finn typically has different ideas.
He’ll go after my hand when I pull the lever on the recliner, zooming in for a nip on my knuckles. He’ll leap up and nip my elbow when I’m nodding off during between innings, or he’ll jump from the back of the love seat onto my stomach – instant wakefulness. The nips generally are just placing his teeth on my skin and don’t hurt, an improvement from his earlier days where he’d clamp down too much.
But mostly, he’ll zip from the left-most chair in the rec room to the right-most. Each chair reclines to some extent, and he’ll get up at the very top to let his weight cause the chairs to slowly recline.
Once that’s done, he’ll blast over to the other chair to set it up to his liking. And then he’ll zoom back to the previous one, hanging off the back and letting the chair rock, all while having this rather insane look on his furry face.
The chair closest to me also rotates, so he’ll get in it or on it and rock ’n’ rotate. It also shares the side table with my chair, a table I don’t let him get on anymore (Finn once walked across it and right up to a full glass of water, took one look at me and calmly flipped over the water with a swipe of his paw). He knows that table is off limits, but every evening, he’ll try to get on it. And every evening, I growl at him to not do so.
It’s a game for him, I know. And sometimes with hilarious results. He gets on that chair at some precarious angles, and when it is in partial recline, the back won’t clear the wall cleanly. Finn gets so preoccupied watching me that he at times doesn’t notice the chair is about to collide with the wall, with him caught in between.
Down goes Finn.
The other chair he rocks on has a headrest that flips back and over. He’ll get rocking on that and will overbalance, causing the headrest to flip and launch him onto the floor.
When he ramps up his effort to get my attention, he’ll get on the bar and bat around anything he can reach. Considering there are sometimes glasses up there, I really dislike that activity.
I am starting to think I need to leave the Shop Vac plugged in and nearby. He HATES that thing. Turn the vacuum on and he’s up the stairs like he’s been shot out of a cannon.
I wonder if just recording the sound on my phone would do the trick. One way to find out.
So if friends come over and wonder why there is an imprint of the cat on our side door at the top of the basement stairs, they’ll know the experiment was a success.
