My Wild Colleen

This is my cat I adopted from the SPCA about 10 days ago. Her name is Wild Colleen. She’s not wild by any means; I took the name from a song. Her collar has a few tags on it that jingle when she walks. During the day it’s a mild mannered sound, one that is almost soothing when you watch her running happily around the home. At 3 a.m. however, those tags are REALLY DAMN LOUD!

Little Colleen has not learned yet that if I wake up in the middle of the night I’m going to shift positions in bed. Don’t know why I do, just do. Every movement I make Colleen jumps off the bed and runs down the hallway like it’s time to get up. If I don’t fall back to sleep right away a few minutes later I hear her jingling her way up the hall and back into the room. This is what I hear for the next what seems like an hour:

JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE    JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE    JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE        JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE   JINGLE JINGLE JINGLE

Until I turn over and plead: “Will you please lay down. Here, in the living room or on the moon, just stop moving!” Oddly enough for a cat, she actually comes when I call her name in the middle of the night. She jumps on my pillow and kneads it for awhile. Then she walks all over my body like she’s climbing the Matterhorn before finally laying down.

If she’s not jingling her tags at the volume of a brass band at 3 a.m. she finds the plastic end of the curtain drawstring and bats it around like a tether ball:

FWAP    FWAP    FWAP   FWAP     FWAP     FWAP     FWAP    FWAP

Colleen! Knead, knead, knead. Climb, climb, climb. Ok, I’ll lay down now.

I’m sure eventually she’ll get used to my nocturnal habits. For now she’s a bit skittish. The fact that she came out of the shelter with 2 infections that I’ve been giving her medicine for hasn’t helped. I want her to trust me so I pin her down and squeeze ointment into her eyes or force her into my sister’s arms so I can shoot pink goop down her throat.

All in all it’s going pretty well. It hasn’t been two full weeks yet and she’s walking around the trailer like she owns the place.

In case you were wondering the song I got her name from is “The Worst Day Since Yesterday” by Flogging Molly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YYfn32yRlM