The New Feline

Our new cat, Koi, is a yowler. He's getting a little pot-bellied already, at about 4 months, because we tend to feed him just to shut him up. That of course will have to change--at some point, anyway. He's also a wanderer of beds at 1:00, 3:00 or 5:00 in the morning. I've been somewhat sleep-deprived for at least two months now, both because of the heat and because of Koi's nocturnal nomadic ways. For a time he was generally sleeping shut in with Andrea, but at 5:00 or earlier starting his yowling at the door, whereon my somnambulistic daughter would stumble out of bed and let him out for me and her mother to deal with.

Anyway, at last he's slowly getting used to spending time in the garage, where the other cats have been spending their nights for years now. Pino, the male going on seven years, and Jolie, the female of 3-4 years, both hiss and slap at him, but that's mainly because Koi makes a valiant little pest of himself and thinks he can take them both on--size and age no issue.

Koi is white with sandy-gray patches. The fascinating thing about his markings is that some of the patches have stripes running through them, as if it were one of those mock-up building facades where a fake crack is painted--usually on stucco--with brick showing through. I've never seen the like of this, and in fact it was those unique markings that drew me to Koi in the first place. So, we have our third cat. He'll never replace Niza (whom I eulogized in an earlier entry here), but he fills his own niche, I guess.