Tristana is Ceiling-Adjacent (in the Middle of the Night)

[cimorene]

Tristana instantly made it her goal to get inside and on top of the bookcase we recently put up in the bedroom. Of course, Cornish Rexes always want to be inside this open style of bookcase, which is why we habitually always block the open ends of each shelf with a larger book or box - otherwise they'll use them like a series of play tunnels and periodically throw books on the floor (even Snookums. Even though he's an old man now). She has nonetheless managed to get inside the shelf a couple of times through Methods Unknown.

She also took about a week of calculating trajectories from on top of the cabinet like in this picture, and finally accomplished her goal of landing on top of the shelf. She can now hang out there at will, and the main reason she doesn't much is, I think, that there aren't any toys up there, just some storage bins and a couple of plastic bags of fabric interfacing. So she'll pat the bins (clack! clack! clack!) and attack the bags (rustle RUSTLE rustle! RUSTLERUSTLE!!!) until she gets bored and then she'll come down. It takes about 10-15 minutes.



Her new innovation as of two nights ago is going up there in the middle of the night. It was literally 00:30, Wax was asleep and I was trying to fall asleep, when I was alerted to her activities by the thunk noises of her jumping to and from the cabinet. A bunch of little bonks. "Kitty! Sh! What are you doing?" I hissed. They continued and I turned on the flashlight to see this bad little face. She stared at me motionless as long as the light was on, and as soon as I turned it off the noise resumed. After 4 rounds I gave up and listened the the audio drama for a further 5-10 minutes before she got bored and came down (only to ricochet off the bed and zoom out of the room, presumably on her way downstairs to pull used teabags out of the trash).

Further contributing to insomnia last night was the fact that as mentioned yesterday, our tenant gave a month's notice. We sent pictures of the flat - bad ones, and lacking a picture of the kitchen and bathroom entirely! - to our SIL and she put them on FB last night and there have already been 6 responses. Apparently there's a housing issue in Pargas right now which we were unaware of. One less financial worry, only now we have to like... respond to all of them and like... compare. Entirely new reasons for insomnia for today!

Comments

[pensnest]

A library is a wonderful place for a cat. Ours don't have to be quite as intrepid, as there was a table adjacent to the filing cabinet next to one of the shelves, so they had a handy route up. My terrified little Sable soon found that she could get up there and hide in the darkest corner to escape these dreadful new humans who were now in her world; happily she has now mellowed and only sometimes goes up there to sit on the cat cushion. My husband fixed the bookshelves together with 2" wide planks, so the cat has a highway across the tops of the shelves.

[cimorene]

The cats used to sit on some cushions on top of our bookshelves when they were in the livingroom in our flats, but we arranged the shelves to make it easy for them to go up there. They were there all the time, because they could be around us but higher than everybody else and that was the best.

But there aren't any bookshelves offering similar vantage in our current house; the ones in the library are also under the eaves and too hard to jump onto. We would prefer she not get comfortable and hang out on top of the ones in the bedroom, as getting up there is such a production. We do have vague future plans of installing some custom cat climbing shelves, but we don't know exactly where yet.

[torachan]

Is she jumping all the way on top of those plastic bins? That's an impressive jump!

[cimorene]

Yes!! Fearless, light as a feather and made of rubber apparently.