I'm a bit worried about Zanzibar. He doesn't seem to be maturing into the grace that most cats have, and I'm not sure why. Tim says he's just clumsy, that I'm being a worried mommy if I think he might have some brain damage from all his health problems. Let's go over the evidence, shall we?

Zanzi often misses his jumps. He has no sense of how far away something is. He'll leap from the edge of the couch to the short bookshelf and will catch the edge of the short bookshelf right in the chest before falling to the floor. The thing about this is, that's about a foot, foot-and-a-half leap; he should be able to make it. I think he just didn't judge the distance correctly.

The best one was the other night when he ran from the couch, over the coffee table and took a flying leap into the TV. We think he thought it was an open window or something. He went sprawling to the floor, and we couldn't help but laugh because it was so funny. He climbed back up, sat in front of the TV and pretended nothing had happened, of course. That was fairly reassuring, as that's a very typical cat way to behave.

Zanzi also likes to cover his canned food with the dry food if we leave both out during dinner. It's rather disturbing, as the wet food doesn't look that dissimilar from cat poo, and I wonder if he's got something wired wrong where he feels the need to cover anything that looks brown and mushy.

That's about all I can remember right now about Zanzi. Oh, yeah, he likes to try and bite Marzi's throat out, but we're pretty sure he's just playing.

Marzipan is a lovely cat. Zanzi is cute, but Marzi is gorgeous. She knows it, of course. She also is trying very hard to talk to us. If she wants attention, she'll walk into the room with a series of trilling miaows that sound as if she's trying to imitate human speech. Sometimes I answer her, and if I end a sentence with an up inflection (that is, ask a question) she'll usually reply with a one or two word trilling miaow. It's pretty funny. Gryffyn used to talk to me in a similar way, and I'm delighted to have another cat that chats with me. Zanzi sometimes does this, but he's usually eerily silent -- I thought he was mute for weeks after we brought him home.

They both still follow me around. They sleep on the blue pillow in the office when we work on our computers. They sit on us or in their cat cups in the living room. They rub under our legs in the bathroom or sit on the rug; sometimes Zanzi will walk the edge of the tub during the bath, and I've caught him just before he fell in more than once. If the tub is empty, they'll sometimes climb in and peer at us from under the curtain.

When we go to bed they sit outside the door and wait for us to come out; if we're awake and talking they'll hear us and cry their protest -- if we're awake, we should be petting them! In the mornings Tim usually gets up first and lets them in, and they climb in bed with me to get their snuggles in before I get out of bed; it's a lovely way to procrastinate getting up in the mornings.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some cute thing or another that they do, but I'll just save them up for the next time I feel like doing a cat entry.

Miaow.