Jacques

Good Morning -
This is Jacques. Although this is not how mornings start around here. A normal morning starts about 5am with a shrieking meow to awake the dead, pounce on the sleeping mommy, bring at least one or two toys to bed to play with, race around on the bed "catching" said toy, repeat every ten minutes until the snooze alarm goes off. Then as if to say, "my work here is done," he will sit on the corner of the bed and look at me disdainfully as I while away the day at 6:30am - still in bed. The above image is the mid-morning snooze now taken in the new favorite basket.
Jacques is a Craig's List Kitty. A few months before I got him, my bicycle had a flat tire on Kelly Dr. out by Falls Bridge - a three/four mile walk back home. So I started walking. I hadn't gone very far when two nice cyclists stopped and asked if I needed help. I did - I can't remember now what I was missing, tube, wrench, air - something, anyway. . . they had it. One of them very kindly fixed the tire (oh, right it was a tube) and I asked if I could get him a new tube, how could I repay him? He said, "just don't get your pets in a pet store." Okay. Jacques got his name because he is a foodie. Favorites include, green onion stalks, dal makani, Naan bread, dill stalks, boiled ham, and any fish. Because he was forever crawling into the fridge and sitting on the ledge overlooking the stove at my old apartment, he became Jacques in honor of Jacques Pepin (chef with Julia Child) and Jacques Torres, chef on Dessert Circus - a really fun cooking show.
Jacques has turned into quite a character. He seems to be very bright. We play fetch and he has favorite toys. A few weeks before I moved out the old apartment, I decided to get a jump on cleaning. Since several of his toys had been missing for months, I thought I should take a look at what might have landed under the stove. Sure enough, four of his favorite little mousies were under there. As I tried to maneuver the cook spoon into a position to be able to whack them out from under the stove, Jacques came and crouched next to me, investigating what I was doing. As the first toy came out I threw it behind me and he ran off to catch it. Three more toys followed, all dutifully chased down by the kitty. I thought he would be thrilled to have some of his toys back, but I still hadn't found all of them. I continued to clean for the rest of the afternoon, and started to notice that about every hour, another missing toy would appear on the living room carpet. Jacques had gone into the closet and behind my bed to pull out three other toys and brought them to me. It's nice to have someone help you out with the housework.
He is a good sport too. After spending time on www.stuffonmycat.com, I had to. . . put stuff on Jacques. So here he is with a cowboy hat that is attached with an elastic. I had already put the Harry Potter glasses and scarf on him, and tried to put the cowboy hat on him without elastic. But he would just lean his head to the side and the hat would fall off. That explains why he's leaning here, looking confused as to why he still has the hat on his head. Oh, and he was purring the entire photo shoot.
Jacques is adjusting slowly to his new house. The first week we were here he kept looking at me with this funny look as if to say, "Can we go home now?" The house is so big compared with what he was used to, and because he has three flights of stairs to run up and down he has actually lost a few lbs. There are three big German Shepard's next door that scare the heck out of him. I think he has decided that if he ignores them, they don't exist. He has many wonderful window sills to leave dirty little footprints on and because the back meadow is so overgrown there are birds to watch. It's still really scary when people come over. He has lots of places to hide and is more reluctant to come out when they are here. All in all I think he is getting used to the place. He did a good job last week and caught a mouse, brought me the mouse and I didn't get to it in time, so the mouse got away and ran under the fridge. He'll have to be better about rounding the mouse up so that I can catch it.