Sunday, November 15, 2020
So my waifu, Onion and I adopted a cat. Lol, yeah, the waifu and I had been considering it for quite some time now, thinking it'd be nice to have a companion, especially since Onion's at home all the time and Pinhead had died recently.
We weren't aware that almost a decade ago Toronto passed a law forbidding the sale of cats and dogs in pet stores. We had always wondered why we only saw adoptions, and the very noticeable lack of dogs and cats for actual sale. Anyway, we observed the adoption section of the PetSmart at Empress Walk, and every time we dropped by to see the cute cats, we noticed they were getting adopted like hot cakes. Seriously. Within a day or two at most, they'd be gone. So we knew that if we wanted to adopt one, we'd need to just go ahead and just make the decision. Of course, we thought carefully over the months, researching and learning more, but eventually one day when we were free we went down and saw two kittens, Licorice and Charlie, sleeping peacefully with Licorice seeming to guard Charlie. Their descriptions said that Licorice loved being cuddled while Charlie didn't like being picked up but liked being petted. Obviously the full black female, Licorice seemed better but the (designated) male Charlie was ABSOLUTELY adorable. When Charlie opened his eyes and looked at us, we were conned and we made the decision right there and then to adopt him and buy all the cat stuff necessary. Included was a vet check, and that's when we found out Charlie was a female, lol. Apparently the Toronto Cat Rescue misgendered the cat.
Although we introduced the kitten to our home, we still hadn't named her, 'cause we weren't sure. And at the time we still thought Toshi was a male. After we let her explore our room naturally and slowly, she tried to hide in various and dusty nooks and crannies. When she was hiding in these places we tried to call her out by saying "Come on, Toshi!" from the One Point English parody videos as a joke. Later on I tried googling some clever cat names and Whisky was one of them, which I thought was really suitable 'cause Toshi was brown, it was a pun on whiskers and I like my alcohol. We asked several people to vote and Toshi and Whisky came out on top. So we wrote down the two names on pieces of paper and let our kitten jump on them. All three times she jumped on Toshi, so the name stuck, lol. When we found out she was a female later on, we didn't bother to change the name because we didn't want to go through the trouble of finding names all over again, and we thought Toshi was pretty cute and suitable anyway.
The first night, there was buyer's regret and I felt like we wanted to return her. Lol, she was constantly meowing until 3am and kept crawling under the bed, after we stopped her from jumping on the bed to sleep with us because Onion wanted to set boundaries. Beneath the bed is full of luggage bags and dust. So great. On the second night, it was a bit better, and we watched more videos on how to get your cat to not jump on the bed, and setting up a routine with play, cuddles, food and rest for them to follow and get comfortable with. Almost a month in, she's so much better now. It was really only the first night that was a nightmare, but Toshi's been really well behaved most of the time. She absolutely loves cuddles, and she has this really cute way of getting comfortable and just dropping her head on your lap to sleep. She also bugs me at 7:30am every day to feed her by meowing on the side of the bed and putting her paws at the edge of the bedframe. So I'll need to get up and feed her, and prepare to head for work, and on weekends, I'll snooze a bit more after feeding her. As a kitten, she gets aggressive zoomies here and there throughout the day, but luckily she'll sleep through the night and not disturb us, especially after we tucker her out by playing with the fish on a string kinda toy and the springs we toss around the room.
The waifu and I have discussed having kids, and I can understand why they say pets are good training for them. You gotta make sure they're clean (thank God cats lick themselves clean), handle their piss and poop, entertain them, play with them, teach them, feed them and make sure they don't accidentally find a new way to kill themselves. Hell, it's a lot of effort, more than Hammy the hamster and Pinhead the hedgehog ever put on me. Even the 3 dogs I used to own in Malaysia were way less maintenance. But here's hoping that Toshi will be a loving companion to us for the next 10-15 years. They live damn long, lol.
Oh, we bought her a toy from Ikea, called Bjorn, and she took him as a hostage. I should be scared, lol.
Chronicled
12:44 AM