Sofa, So Good

Disgustingly cute, isn’t he?

Here he is again.

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Does that suggest that Bob’s fed up of sitting on the futon? Because I bloody well am.

Over the eight weeks or so that we’ve been in our house, we’ve had a saga with the sofa. We ordered one that we loved from a shop, but it wouldn’t come through the door. So we ordered another, and were guaranteed it would arrive before Christmas. It arrived less than three weeks after we ordered it, last Friday. So I spent the morning videoing Bob while I waited for it (I was told it would arrive between 8am and 5pm – it arrived at 4pm).

And now Bob’s trying to make our livingroom look like a sofa shop advert.

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He still likes sleeping on the futon, though. He likes sleeping everywhere.

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Did I mention videos? I did. I videoed Bob because you asked me to video Bob. Here are his greatest hits.

Under the iMac.



Attacking the camera strap.



Sunday morning.



Attacking me.



Oh, Bob.

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OMG!!!!!!1

Look! Evidence of face-pushing with someone other than myself!

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I’d feel a little betrayed if Bob hadn’t turned me into Father Christmas.

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He was also busy guarding my bourbon and coke.

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We listened to Quicksand / Cradlesnakes by Califone last night, and the weird, hyper-real percussion sounds freaked him out; I think he thought someone was playing with a ping-pong ball between the speakers.

More fighting.

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Reach for the sky!

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Bob also had his first trip to the vet’s for vaccinations and worming last night, and he dealt with it like a trooper; we took him in an A3 Votocopy box, and took the lid off so he could see the outside world as we drove across town. Some indie kids spotted him and were reduced to pointing and squealing “omg!!!!!1”, such is his immense cuteness; even hipster teens in sperm-limiting trews cannot resist Bob.

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Oh Shit!

See how cute Bob is in a morning when he’s been playing on the stairs and is a bit pooped out?

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Disgusting, isn’t it?

Almost as disgusting as when he trotted into the living room last night while Emma, myself, her parents and her youngest brother were having a meal, and revealed that he was covered in his own shit. Well, not quite covered, but the poor lad had had the runs and got some poop on his haunches – we changed his kitten food from chicken to fish, and the combination of this and nerves at us having guests made him poop runny. So we showered him, and cut out the poop from his hair.

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Bob most definitely didn’t look like Bob when he was wet; quite spooked me. He looked a bit like the creature from the black lagoon. But he was soon back to his best!

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One of Bob’s favourite things is pushing your face. Or, rather, my face; he doesn’t really do it to Emma.

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(That first one was taken with the MacBook’s iSight while I was trying to play Scrabulous in bed, the swine.)

Oh, Bob.

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Mabel? (Bob’s first two weeks with us.)

Bob was meant to be called Mabel, because when we first saw Bob, a week and a half before we collected him, we didn’t think he had any balls, and because a friend had just acquired a kitten named Doris, which Emma liked as a kitten name but which we obviously couldn’t pilfer.

“How about Mabel?” I said, blurting of whatever old lady name came to mind first.

And Mabel it was. Until we went back and fetched him, when the breeder suggested that he might actually be male. Holding him in my arms, he peered up at me, and it struck me as he looked into my eyes that we ought to call him Bob if he was really a boy. An extensive bellyrub after the car journey home confirmed that he was indeed a Bob and not a Mabel. Bob slept the whole car journey home, by the way, which was cool. He then shat on the livingroom carpet, which was not. No accidents since though!

Bob is a ragdoll, as mentioned previously. Ragdolls are some kind of messed-up version of a Burmese that got hit by a car or something; lapcats that have confused laps with necks. They don’t like going outside but they do like curling up around your neck.

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Bob seems particularly fond of this, and has been since that first night. (Please excuse my bad hair here; I have a kitten on my shoulder.)

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Bob is also jealous of our MacBook. Technically you’re not allowed to call a MacBook a laptop anymore, because it will encourage you to give yourself cancer in your balls by sitting a redhot Apple battery on your nuts; Bob obviously has no time for this semantic claptrap, and neither do we. If we sit with the laptop in our lap, Bob leaps to action in order to obscure it from your attention.

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Bob also likes a drink.

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And a fight.

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These are Bob’s first two weeks. He shits and wees in the right place. He decides to go schiz at 6.30am and 10.30pm every day without fail. He goes promentalbatshit if you open a can of tuna or cook salmon. (As Emma is a vegetarian [sort of] this happens a lot in our house.) He likes cuddles and Yo La Tengo. He misses us when we’re at work. He is disgustingly cute.

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We love Bob very much. Except when he claws my eyeball at 6.30am in order to wake me up to play. Then I want to flush his fluffy little bastard body down the toilet.

I Am The Defiler Of Worlds

Bob is a kitten. Bob is a Ragdoll. Bob was born on Thursday 2nd of August 2007 in the wilds of countryside beneath the A30 somewhere out west of Okehampton. Bob moved to St. Leonards in Exeter on Thursday 25th October 2007, when he was exactly twelve weeks old. Bob lives with Emma and Nick. Bob is the defiler of worlds.