No really. That's probably the best picture I have of her. I want to you really get a feel for her personality. We got Ginger in the fall of 2006, about 3-4 months after we got Lola. Lola was so wonderful, who wouldn't love a second cat? Enter the Geeg. Miss Ginger Gene (Ginger for the orange tabby coat and maybe a South Park reference by Rlowe that I didn't catch until much later; Gene is my grandma's middle name and it kind of flowed) was rescued from Death Row at the Fayetteville Animal Shelter just a week before her number was up. Maybe it would have been more humane to let them go through with it.
You've never met a more distrubed cat in your life. Her sweet side is really great - she's snuggly, she lets you hold her all the time, she actually meows and wags her tail at you when she sees you, she stands up on her back legs to get your attention, her purr sounds like a freight train.
But then there's the other side. To help me explain the crazy side, let me attempt to list the things that upset Ginger:
- towels
- sponges
- pillows
- cardboard boxes
- blankets
- things out of place or that have changed position
- sudden movements
- the cat crate
- Lola (every once in a while)
- Landry (all the time)
- new people (not just new people she's never met, new people who haven't been to the house in the past hour)
Any one of these things triggers Ginger's fight-or-flight reflex. She prefers flight, which involves hissing, scratching, and spitting as she darts across the floor to the nearest bed or thing she can hide under. We have all had deep wounds from holding Ginger when a trigger of her fear was around. Not pretty.
The fight reflex is more fun to witness. Basically, she approaches the object, slaps it with her paws until she has beaten it into submission, hisses and spits at it, and then lays on it.
These nicely folded towels waiting to be put up incurred the wrath of the Geeg before they gave in to her.
Ginger also gets lost a lot. Not lost outside (yet) thank goodness. [Neither of our cats is allowed outside, and yours shouldn't be either. Read more about that here.] But she does tend to dart out the back door, so we have to watch her. More frequently, however, Ginger gets lost in the house itself. Like shut in closets or the laundry room. When I haven't seen her in a while, I usually tear the house up calling her name, only to find her sleeping in the floor of my closet and looking up at me like "What the heck is your problem?" This triggers a small wave of rage from the husband, who frequently wonders why we spend 10 minutes tearing the house apart looking for a little dumb 7 pound cat who won't even come when we call her...but then he starts getting worried too until we find her.
And sometimes, we don't find her. Sometimes we give up, resign ourselves to the fact that she must've slipped outside, and begin to make plans for having pillows and blankets around again. But then she walks out, looks at us like we're the crazy ones, and hops up on the bed to go to sleep. Only to hiss and spit for a little until the pillows give in. Again.
I had an orange tabby just like this!!! She was sooo stupid. She got herself locked in the hot tub once, tried to climb into the lit fireplace, and even disappeared for two months at one point. She ended up being the best cat I ever had though!
ReplyDeleteGinger is the same way - I've learned to appreciate her quirks! I keep waiting on us to lose her forever, but she always comes walking into the living room out of nowhere. I'm convinced she has a secret passageway.
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