Tigerlily's Unfortunate Adventure

This morning, around 7 AM, I awoke to the sounds of Sammy meowing, and Ed starting his shower. It's not unusual that Sammy wakes me up before my alarm goes off at 7:30 (which happens 7 days a week so that he is fed at more or less the same time every day), so I promptly went back to sleep.

But Sammy kept meowing, wandering around, and I realized that (a) it is unusual for him to meow in the morning - he usually wakes me up by purring or touching me, and (b) hey, wait a minute, that's not his feed-me meow, that's his Tigerlily meow!

And I remembered wondering about why Tigerlily hadn't come to bed yet, when I went to bed.

And I remembered closing the open balcony door right before bedtime.

And I got up and rushed over to the balcony and opened the door.

And Tigerlily was pressed into the opposite wall-hugging corner of the balcony, looking terrified. She meowed piteously several times after I opened the door, but wouldn't come in right away, so I went to tell Ed what had happened, and she came in shortly afterward, still looking all scared and moving around in the tail-down, low-running way of scared cats.

Poor Tigerlily! She seems fine now (all rubbing on everything in the house), and I'm just really grateful that it wasn't a super cold night. (We've had snow and freezing temps lately, so this isn't a silly consideration, but I don't think it got much lower than 40 last night. She felt cool when she came in but didn't seem to be shivering or trembling.)

I am such a bad cat mommy.

The Adventure of the Large Cat

There is a very large tortoiseshell cat that I often see around my apartment complex. He (I think it is a he, though I could be mistaken) isn't fat at all - just tall and lanky, almost the size of a fox. I admire him often.

Well, yesterday as I was coming up the stairs to my apartment, he was coming down the stairs, which was mysterious - I'm fairly certain he doesn't live in any of the apartments on that stairway. So, naturally, I spoke to him, and he turned out to be quite friendly, and followed me up.

I intended to give him some food outside of the door, but when I opened my front door, he went right in! And showed no signs of wanting to do anything other than explore my entire apartment.

Sammy immediately backed away near the hall, but Tigerlily (!) went over to investigate this strange, large cat. Soon her tail puffed out to a gigantic size, and she and the other cat talked at each other a little bit as she cornered him behind the two armchairs. I was standing nearby and keeping them separated by walking towards Tigerlily when she got too close.

When Ed came out, he asked, "Are you sure that cat is safe?" I feel, honestly, that most cats are "safe" and I wasn't particularly worried about this big friendly fellow. He wasn't showing any signs of wanting to attack Tigerlily or anything, but I decided to go ahead and herd my two cats down the hall into my bedroom so that we wouldn't have too much ruckus.

Tigerlily hissed at Sammy the whole way down the hall! Every time she saw him she was freaked out! And Sammy was sidling sideways, scrunched low to the ground, clearly worried. I did pretty easily herd them both into my room, and then shut my door.

A couple of minutes later I shut Ed's door, because the big cat was exploring everywhere and I really didn't want him to stay too too long. He checked out the cat box and returned to the living room, where he was quite comfortable jumping up on tables and furniture for some pets.

It's always hard to know if a cat will tolerate being picked up, but after a few nice strokes I decided to try it. I let him know that I was going to pick him up, but not to worry, that if he didn't like it he should just let me know and I would stop right away. I gingerly picked him up, and he seemed slightly nervous but not too distressed. I set him down outside the door (where I had already put some food, hoping to lure him out; he never did eat the food), said, "Thanks for visiting. Stop by any time!" and closed the door behind him.

The cats came back out once I opened my bedroom door. Tigerlily went looking all over for signs of the big cat, but Sammy was crouchy and nervous for a while and hoped that the big cat would NOT reappear.

I think I am going to call him "Lopez" in honor of his interloper status.