Category Archives: Mia

Mia update

Miss Mia Milk StoutMy rule for this year is to post every day. We’re not through the first month of the year and I’ve burned all my backup posts and am not staying a day ahead as I had. All of this is to be expected. My rule is one thing a day, there’s no topic or length requirement, and I can write about the cats once a week. Today is Monday. I’m talking about Mia today. Then I’m going to write something for tomorrow.  Consider this me spiking the ball to stop the clock late in a football game.

I still don’t have a better picture than this one. Carla shot some video, but Videopress is giving me some trouble and I can’t get it to do anything but display it at a stupidly large size. It’s backlit, so it’s a little dark anyway. I love the glowing eyes, anyway.

She’s still spending most of her time hiding, but we’re seeing her more and more. She’ll generally announce herself with a pathetic little mewl that has to make Porter pretty jealous.  I’m pretty sure he thought he’d perfected the “Oh, woe is me” meow, but Mia makes him look like an amateur. She’s watching us and, at night, she’s exploring.

The boys are doing great with her. Early yesterday evening we noticed Mia was watching us.  Porter noticed her and did the puff-up-the-tail thing as he went over to her.  But he didn’t hiss and he didn’t do anything but watch her. Dunkel, being Dunkel, seems to be all “Do you want to play? No? OKThanksBye” when he sees her. She has not integrated herself with them yet, but she’s only been here a couple of days. We keep reminding ourselves that we’re ready for her, but she may not be ready for us yet.

Carla has spent time with her down on the floor, petting her and giving her treats. She purrs and enjoys the attention. I think my size scares her when I’m standing or moving, but she liked it when was petting her when she was hiding behind the bed.

Last night I was just dropping to sleep and I heard what for all the world sounded like wind chimes. Which would be really cool, but we don’t have any. I realized the sound was wine glasses in our wine tower clinking together. It happens when cats are up there. I got up, and sure enough I see a small Mia-sized sillohuette zip across the floor.

It’s just a matter of time.

Waiting for Mia

Miss Mia Milk Stout

Not amused by flash photography

The danger of writing a blog post a day is that you start to see everything as a metaphor for everything else. So it is with the arrival of our newest member of the family. Miss Mia Milk Stout came home late Thursday morning. That’s our perspective, anyway.  From her perspective she was taken from the warm comfortable home where she was very happy, thank you very much, and taken out into the cold and taken to a completely strange place. A strange place where there are two other cats and very, very few familiar things.  There were cats and dogs where she was before, but she knew them.  These are different cats. There have been many disruptions in her short life, and now there’s another one. We know this is the last one. We don’t know how to tell her that.

We are in a time of waiting. That picture over there is the only one we’ve managed to get since she came home. She’s in the space between the head of the bed and the wall in our guest room. It’s pretty much where she spent Thursday. We had the room prepped before she came home. Food. Water. Litter pan. She explored some when Carla was in the room. She hid when I was in the room. We kept the door closed to keep Porter and Dunkel out, but they were remarkably blasé. Normally shutting the guest room door is a crisis. Not this time.

Yesterday we pulled the mattress back to we could see her down in the gap. We could tell she’d used the litter pan and there was plenty of reason to think she’d explored in the night. Throughout the day Carla and I would go in and talk to her and pet her.  Carla picked her up and took her on a tour of the condo. She seemed to enjoy herself. While being very shy, she sure didn’t mind the attention. When I’d stop reaching down to pet her on my visits, she’d reach a paw up to attract my attention. Early in the afternoon we decided it was time to open the door and see what happened.

Porter and Dunkel have both seen her. They’ve seen us interacting with her, so they seem to know at some level that she’s OK.  Porter is a little skittish.  His tail will get all puffed up, but it really seems to be more an effort to figure out what’s going on. “Are we going to have problems here?” Her response is, well, nothing. So he eventually walks away looking not just a little confused.

If there’s any awareness on Dunkel’s part that Mia is his littermate, we’re not seeing it.  Then again, Dunkel isn’t exactly a complicated cat.

“Play with me!”

Um. Not right now.

“No, play with me!”

Can’t, dude.

“OK, then just pet me. A lot. I demand nothing of you other than your complete attention.”

Do I have another choice?

“No.”

What has been interesting is that Porter seems to be a bit protective of Mia, skittish as he is. Dunkel can play rough. When Dunkel got his first clear view of her, he didn’t charge at her, but he started approaching her cautiously. Porter hissed.  At Dunkel. And Dunkel backed off.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. This is the part where the metaphor comes in.  A couple of times I heard Mia crying, just a little. Her vocalizations are completely different from Porter and Dunkel.  There’s not a chance this wasn’t her.  She was exploring. At one point I’m pretty sure she came into our room. But I have no idea where she went.

I’m finishing this post about half an hour before it goes up.  As I write this I have no idea where Mia is.  We haven’t left the house since the last time we saw her, so we know she’s here somewhere. We haven’t heard a peep. She’s small and clearly likes tight places to hide.  None of our cats have been hiders.  

We clearly have one now.

I’ve done a bit of a search with no luck. Porter and Dunkel are showing no curiosity whatsoever. We’ve had cats long enough to assume there’s no place she can get into that will be much of a danger to her. Carla keeps telling me that she’ll come out when she’s ready.

So we wait. There’s a lot of waiting going on in my life right now. I can’t really talk about that. It’ll come out when it’s ready. But I can talk about the cats. I’m OK with that.

(I’ll update this post when there’s a sighting.)

UPDATED: Under our bed. Her camouflage is very good. 

Home is where the cats are

We’re finally both home.  Our one week of vacation turned into two weeks of dealing with stuff as it came up. The good news is that Carla’s dad is doing great and we were able to come home. Last night Carla slept in our bed for the first time since New Year’s Eve.

Miss Mia Milk Stout

Miss Mia Milk Stout

The cats were, of course, waiting for us to scold us for abandoning them. That is their job, after all. We are their staff and they don’t like it when we leave them to fend for themselves against the cruel world stocked with large amounts of fresh water, food and multiple litter pans all inside a house that’s kept warmer than it would be if there weren’t cats in residence. But that is the nature of cats. I admire them for how quickly they deign to forgive us. In all seriousness, we miss the boys terribly when we travel. It’s always good to come home. We tend to come in and get some cuddle time in before we go out and unload the car.  Priorities.

Something the extra travel meant was that a family reunion has been delayed. Another cat is joining our family. Mia is Dunkel’s sister. She was part of the litter born in the attic of a doctor’s office that also included Dunkel.  She’d been adopted, but it didn’t work out. The wonderful family who fostered her when she was a kitten had arranged to take her back if something like that happened.  When we heard about it we pretty much knew we were going to take her. Porter has really come out of his shell in the last six months or so and has become much more affectionate and a bit more outgoing. Dunkel is still a hirsute ball of energy. He can get a little rough sometimes. We had begun playing with the idea of a third cat merely to split Dunkel’s attention.

She has been Mia from when she was adopted. Given that she’s 2.5 years old, it seems to be a little late in the game to give her a new name. We have, however, a pretty strict rule about beer names for cats. Her markings are remarkably like a Holstein cow. That is reason enough to name her Miss Mia Milk Stout.

She will be joining the family on Thursday. We can’t wait.