I've noticed that on sunny afternoons Ruby starts getting restless. She wanders around the apartment, chirping and murmuring. She doesn't want to be picked up, she doesn't want to be pet, and she seems uninterested in the store-bought cat toys that litter the apartment. In short, she just seems entirely dissatisfied with her surroundings. I figured that she was succumbing to the malaise of being an inside cat. A malaise, incidentally, that Pepe is immune to given the fact that he is (1) much stupider than Ruby and (2) extremely lazy. Pepe is the kind of cat who lies down while he's eating. He doesn't crouch on all fours. He actually flops onto his side and leans his head into the food dish, unwilling to burn a single unnecessary calorie.
Anyway, Meli and I just flipped on some Animal Planet show about cheetahs hunting various herbivores, and Ruby is absolutely enthralled. She had been lounging in the middle of the floor, and when she noticed what was on TV she immediately trotted over and perched herself in front of it, her gaze fixed on her larger African relatives chasing their prey across the wide plains of the Serengeti. Every now and then Ruby has tried to attack the TV screen but I've never seen her devote her attention to the action for such a prolonged period of time.
So it's pretty cute. I mean, you know, sad, but cute.
What's funny is that my sister's cat, Lucy, does the same thing. Animal Planet is her favorite channel.
A guy who used to work for me said his dog would scratch at you until you changed the channel to animal planet. He wouldn't stop until you changed.
You may not have known this, Paul, but during the cocktail party the three cats were all upstairs in my mom's room watching the A.P.