ThingsThatRock Thursday... kinda

Well, I've been feeling kind of left out because I don't have any kind of a regular blog feature. Othe people have haikus, regular photo days and all kinds of other cool stuff, and I've been vaguely musing about doing something like this for a while. What tipped me right over the blog-envy edge was Filoli's new Wino Wednesday - why didn't I think of that!!??!! (Oh, yeah, cos I know nothing about wine. Nevermind). I think the rules of a regular feature are:

1) one of the words has to be a day of the week
2) it has to be alliterative
3) there are no other rules.

I decided thursday was going to be my day, and that it was going to be something positive because I already do more than enough whining. I'm probably retrospectively crediting this thought process with more logic than it really had, since it falls into my huge group of 'things I decided while on the bus'. But after briefly considering (and VERY quickly rejecting) 'thankful thursday' - that would have got pretty ugly pretty fast - I decided on ThingsThatRock Thursday. (Like I said, I was on the bus. This was as good as it was going to get).

Of course, I've hit the small snag that it is not actually thursday today. And while there is such a thing as a time difference between here and most other parts of the world, I don't think anybody is going to believe it is still thursday here. Reason is - I did plan to post this yesterday, and got halfway through writing stuff on Wedndesday, but was then out cold with the lurgy yesterday and unable to raise my poor head from my pillow of suffering, so... here it is today instead. I'm sure my legions of fans will cope.

No prizes for guessing what the first thing that rocks is. I could never start a series like this with anything other than my cat. [Just had a thought - should it maybe be my husband? Or my church? Nah, gotta be honest - it's the cat]. I had wanted a cat for ages, but resigned myself to never having one as J wasn't all that keen. But this year, for my birthday, he said 'it's time to get a cat - I'm doing this for your mental health because I think it will be cheaper than therapy'. Yay! We agreed we wanted to get a cat rather than a kitten, to avoid the 'cute kitten becomes totally mental cat' pitfall, and after a few twists and turns (which would be a post all in themselves) we met this beauty. Here is his referral picture:

Because we got him at EXACTLY the same time as we were formally initiating the adoption process (the night before our first 'counselling' interview) , we keep seeing parallels between bringing him home and the journey we hope to make with hypothetical future baby. (A few times I've had to remind J not to refer to the cat's former home as 'the orphanage' in public). He was nearly three when we brought him home. I've only ever had kittens before this and it made such a difference that he was older. I think, as we prepare to adopt, it was genuinely useful to see how scared he was, and how much time he took to trust us (this doesn't seem to apply to kittens as they are only interested in playing and don't really mind who does that). My heart was full to bursting with love for him but that just didn't matter - he couldn't communicate with me and didn't know he could trust me and why should he want to sit on my lap straight away? (He's still only done that once). Occasionally, when he does something particularly unfathomable, J and I look at each other with worried faces and ask 'do you think he would have done that if he was our birth cat?' but mostly, it's been great watching him settle in and go from 'fraidy cat to king of the house.

Fraidy Cat, too scared to leave the box he was brought home in (he stayed in here for DAYS. Do. Not. Ask. about the toileting situation).

King of the House, not moving off the comfy rug for anyone

His proper name is Kevin, but I nearly always call him Kitten. This is pretty stupid because a) it's about as specific as calling me 'human' and b) he's a great chunky beastie, and definitely NOT a kitten.He a cream colourpoint British Shorthair, so as well as fabulously fluffy cheeks, he has blue eyes and really unusual pale apricot colours coming through his fur. He looks like the kind of cat I imagine would be purchased by a Russian oligarch.

He's unbelieveably vain. He loves to stare at himself in the mirror and languidly lick himself. I honestly cannot blame him for this - if I was that good looking I'd probably do the same.

He is a retired stud cat. Sometimes we tease him about this. He pretends not to care.

He's astonishingly intelligent:

Most of the time.....

He has a range of special songs, made up just for him, ranging from the jaunty 'you've already had your breakfast, kitten' to the mellower 'bedtime for kittens' and 'kitten so fine'.

There are no pictures of me singing to him.

His tail makes an awesome bookmark:

As well as 'kitten', his other nickname is 'ferenje cat' (for obvious reasons).

Sometimes I worry that I won't love our baby as much as I love this furball. Then I realise that if that is my biggest worry at the moment, I'm pretty lucky.