#burmillas

Update: Rescue just climbed from my shoulder to the top of the shower rail, realised how high it was and panicked.  I think her two remaining brain cells have gone on holiday. Poor, daft little thing.

Standing on tall things and making pleased prrp noises is how my cat Rescue deals with her stunted growth. As a member of a family full of people under 5′5″, I can say that observation leads me to believe it’s a fairly common coping mechanism, but the cat’s better at balancing on top of the fridge than my mother.

Playing spoons enthusiastically in the kitchen to an Urban Voodoo Machine song. Apparently the clinking of the spoons caused tinycat’s two brain cells to collide, temporarily fascinating her. My pets are weird.

So, I don’t normally do tags here but what the heck, I recognise my own habit of blathering ad nauseum about my pets to relative strangers. SO here we are, tagged by garret-spork. Five facts about each of my pets. MUGHI - Burmilla, male, 8-ish years old. - He has a crushing addiction to shoes and leather goods. On any given day you’ll find him sprawled on his back, face shoved in a worn sneaker, toes curled in bliss. - He’s named after the possibly-feline sidekick in ancient action-girls anime Dirty Pair, on the basis that it’s the one anime both my housemate and myself unrepentantly love. -He works so hard to try to con us into giving him second breakfasts that sometimes we’re moved to make fake Oscars speeches on his behalf. -He’s got a pedigree longer than my arm, and his birth name was Mesmereyes Silver Casper, but we found him in a shelter. Go figure. -We joke about this but the truth is, his behaviour is shockingly close to that of a trained assistance animal at times. Both my housemate and myself are depressives, and I don’t talk about this much online but I’ve been hospitalised for mental illnesses twice. Mughi’s astonishingly perceptive about either of us having a bad day, and won’t budge more than a foot from our sides until our mood lifts. He’s never invasive, but the worse we are the more burr-like he becomes, until the misery-drought breaks and he gets up and saunters off. RESCUE - Burmilla, about 2 and a half? Female. -She’s got unspecified allergies to god knows what; if she ingests the wrong thing, she breaks out in a hideous crusty red rash and can’t stop scratching. Recently, her weird-arse immune system seems to have decided that the fancy straight-from-the-science-labs experimental food she was on gives her bladder disorders, and the mundane bought-at-the-vets’ everyday hyperallergenic stuff is fine, when a year previously it induced rashmageddon. I dunno.  -She’s a very small animal of very little brain. I’ve caught this cat mauling table legs, licking electrical sockets, chewing on her own feet and licking the walls. She’s really not that sharp. -She’s mostly an attractive silver speckled colour, except for the tip of her tail, which is jet black. Occasionally she forgets it belongs to her and tries to eat it. -She’s the huggiest cat I ever met, and has an odd fixation with licking chins. -She’s named after Pepper Pott’s superhero persona. It seemed fitting, given that she was a rescue cat who was initially given the moniker ‘pepper’. ATTILA THE BUN - Mini Lop, maybe 3, male. -Also known as tilla-bug, stinkbug, and you furry arsehole.  -He suffered a major head trauma when he was still a baby and almost died - after that, he seemed to decide that he was immortal and now tries to pick fights with everything up to and including labradors at the dog park. -He’s lead-trained in that he’ll suffer a leash to be put on, and wears a harness permanently, However, nothing will make him walk in the direction you want him to. Leads are so you can catch him. Control is an illusion. -His favourite place to be scritched is on the bridge of his nose, right where the indent from aforementioned head-trauma is. -If you don’t pay attention to him, he’ll try and tug your book/phone/pen/harmonica out of your hand and toss it as far away as he can. 

Fifteen minutes of harmonica practice later, one cat is standing in the corner  screaming and the other one is frantically headbutting my face in an effort to find out why I’m producing these distressed noises. Nobody understands my art.