theme week 2

A black brown and white tiger cat hiding underneath the Christmas tree. A pine branch is blocking the lower part of his face and one eye but you can still see the whiskers and white splotch on the left side of his face. The only part of the tree that is visible in the photo are a few small branches at the top of the picture and at the bottom you can see the bright red and blue tree skirt covered with pictures of horns, pine, and drums. The cat is lying on the skirt staring at something out of view with eyes that if you look closely enough at you can see cataracts in. he is an old cat, I got him in 1998 when I was 8 or 9 and even then he was several months old when we got him. I remember not being able to name him for the longest time, so my dad called him Snot and called his brother, my sister’s cat, Booger. After a while my sister named her cat Ferret, because she wanted a pet ferret but was denied one. At 8 I copied everything my sister did so I called my cat, the one in this photo, Weasel. Ferret and Weasel, our tiger cat twins. The first Christmas we had these cats Weasel tried to run up the Christmas tree, he never tried it again. I remember him escaping outside before he had all of his shots and attempting to outrun us and enjoy the outside air. When I got my other cat, Lily, on my thirteenth birthday Ferret and Weasel would chase her around the house and terrorize her. Now that Ferret is gone Weasel dose this less then he used to and Lily has started to fight back.

 Weasel would bring us presents to show his love, such as dead mice, birds that were still alive enough to fly around the house, and on one occasion, a half live mole that my sister and I found on the kitchen floor when we got home from school, that one we had to have a neighbor come over and get rid of. After a while once he realized that we did not appreciate these gifts as much as he thought we would, he began to mostly leave them outside.

 He only drinks water directly from the faucet if he can get his way, and sits at the sink for minutes, waiting for one of us to turn on the water. He is beginning to slow down now because of age, but he still runs around the house full of energy at times. He is getting skinner and less inclined to go outside in cold weather. Thirteen or fourteen years old now, I’ve had him more than half my life. My dad did the math and found out that in cat years he is over eighty years old, an old man, but he still acts like the child he was when we got him and he attemted to climb the christmas tree.