Pootie “Bama” takes after his namesake

Pootie: n. small adorable animal, most often a cat. Pootie pix (photos of pooties) are used to enliven otherwise dreary political blogs.

Gobama, the sleek black kitty I got at the Humane Society three weeks ago, is turning into the Cool Cat of the Century, just like his namesake President-Elect Obama.

Like Obama, little Bama is interested in everything, ruffled by nothing. Here he is in the hood of my son’s sweatshirt.

I know you’re supposed to go sloooow introducing a new cat to the home and to other pets.  Keep him in one room for a few days until he acclimates to that. Then maybe a brief supervised meeting of the other pet (both pets restrained so nobody gets hurt).

Not Bama – he wanted to explore the whole house right away and he definitely wanted to meet Molly nose to nose, even though she’s ten times bigger than him. Like Obama being willing to “meet with enemy heads of state without preconditions”…

Most pets hate the vacuum cleaner, especially the sudden loud noise it makes. Not Bama. He tips his head as if to say, what’s THAT? and then charges after the electrical cord.

Other sudden noises like toilet flushing don’t faze him either. The first time he heard it, he jumped up to watch the water swirl away and almost fell in.

Water intrigues him. He hopped in the shower last week with my son and when the water hit him he just moved to the side and continued watching. Wylie let more and more of the spray hit him, and he stayed put, getting fairly well soaked.

This is good, because I’m actually allergic to cats and am going to be washing him off a couple of times a week to reduce the dander. The first couple of sponge baths in the sink went very well. He seems to like the rubdown.

Now I need to convince him not to sleep on my head at night.

Pootie pix: better than politics!

Pootie: n. an adorable animal, most often a cat or kitten, but sometimes a cute dog.

Pix: n: abbreviation for pictures

My son tells me I shouldn’t have taken on a new kitty – adopting on the rebound, so to speak – so soon after Fritz’s death a couple of weeks ago. But Fritz was always more his cat than mine, and most of the time Fritz was nobody’s cat at all. He allowed you to be his best buddy only at night, and only on his own terms.

So last Thursday I swung by the Humane Society, ostensibly to see if they’d like the remainder of my bag of Expensive Mature Cat Food. And, heheh, just to take a peek at what they had in stock.

I confess here to being a sucker for sleek slender black cats. My first cat was an SSBC. My daughter’s cat was an SSBC. They both were part Siamese. I’ve been a sucker for Siamese cats since Twerple, the BEST CAT EVER. For 17 years she blessed us with her dog-like trainability, loyalty, patience, and character. She even let my pre-schoolers dress her in doll clothes and wheel her in a baby carriage.  I don’t know what the breeders have done to the Siamese cat in recent years – turning them into sinister rabbit-eared collie-nosed anorexics.

Anyway, the Humane Society refused my bag of Expensive Food (it had been opened), but they did just so happen to have THREE CAGES of black kitties. Evidently folks around here are so superstitious that black cats are hard to place.

All the kitties were eager to go home with me, and reached out with their paws in hopes of snagging my undivided attention and my heart.

I chose the sleekest most elegant of them all, a small male with a calm friendly demeanor. Because he just turned 6 months old, he was “on sale” – $30 off, and because it was Thursday (?), he was $35 more off. So he cost $26.50 which included neutering, micro-chipping, his first shots, and a license. Such a deal!

He has been home with us since Friday noon and has already made total peace with my standard poodle Molly, explored the house from top to bottom, allowed my son to give him a bath and cut his nails without any fuss, turned over several wastebaskets seeking playthings, fallen in the toilet, and generally won us over. He’s a happy lap cat.

And what is his name??? Gobama!   “Bama” for short.

I still haven’t gotten a decent picture of him but I found one online that looks very much like him, though of course he’s more beautiful…  And of course his collar is blue, not red.