saavedra77 | Pluses, Minuses

My Friday began with a potentially serious mishap, & ended with ... shall we say, a new addition to the household:

Walking down Capitol Hill in the rain, this morning, I slipped on a wet grate, pitching forward into the pavement. I narrowly avoided hitting my head, breaking my fall with my left hand, and in the process (as an ER visit would demonstrate) fracturing my wrist and spraining my knee. So I arrived to work hours late with one hand in a cast, with a zillion voice- and emails, having to hunt & peck my way through a day's work in half the time.

But enough about that.

In happier news, I've finally chosen a successor to my late, lamented Giant Maine Coon Mutant Accident Cat, Puig. His sister Zoe's been extraordinarily bored, whiney, and clingy, ever since he passed. And then a friend introduced me to the kittens she was fostering. That pretty much did it: I decided that it was time for us to be a two-cat household, again.

The new kitten is an eight-week-old black-and-tan male medium hair (I'll post pictures, once I've had the chance to take and upload them), whom I've decided to name "Ozzy." (Think of the letters as a sort of hieroglyphic of a little, striped cat with a giant head and shorttail--the "O" representing his head, the "z"s his stripes, the "y" his tail.) Per prior agreement, I picked him up after work, today.

Ozzy's mostly just your typical kitten: hyper, awkward, wanting to get into everything. He's also clever: left alone for ten minutes in his nylon and mesh pet carrier while I ran out to the pet food store, the little bastard managed to unzip the door and get out into the apartment. So I came home to find him loose, gnawing on some of my shoelaces. This short-circuited my plan to prevent him from having direct contact with the other cat until she grows accustomed to his presence--but there was evidently no harm done.

Later, I introduced Ozzy to his food and water dishes. He was clearly hungry. But his behavior around the water dish was a little on the weird side: he slurped up his fill of H2O, and then started ... playing in the dish: jumped in, started splashing around. Not exactly typical cat behavior, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it, except that it looks like I'm going to have to wash that dish out a lot.

So, you might ask, how is Zoe taking this? She's mostly just sulking. I think she's upset about having this intruder in her territory, and may already sense that some of my attention is going to be diverted to the new arrival. But she keeps creeping up to him and switching her tail, either out of irritation or indecision, I'm not sure.

Everyone I've spoken to about this has stressed that the introduction of a new pet should be, to the extent possible, a gradual process, so that's more or less the plan. But I'm betting that Zoe's boredom and need for attention will ultimately lead her to accept the little guy: I mean, he's wayyyyyy too little to be a threat, y'know?

So, I know that there are a number of cat people on my list: any advice on introducing a new kitten into the house?