Stokely and the Noisy Night

On Wednesday I spent my first full day on campus, soon to be a biweekly occurrence. When I came home, Stokely was beside himself with joy to see me, and was his usual I'm-happy-to-see-you, snuggly self. I, on the other hand, was exhausted and didn't take long to to get ready and crawl into bed.

Not long after the lights went out, it started. The paper bag he likes to hide in rustled. The scratching post that arrived in box from home the day earlier was knocked over, it's rattle ball jingling on the way down. The light thump of a cat jumping onto a forbidden counter top came from the kitchen. Sharp little teeth nibbled on my fingertips. Padded paws ran across my back.

The poor kitten had been home alone all day, napping and dozing and eating and napping some more. He wanted to play! I wanted to sleep. Despite my fatigue, it took about an hour for me to fall into a sleep deep enough to ignore my neglected cat.

Thursday morning, since I didn't have class, I made sure to spend some quality play time with Stokely. I can tell Mondays and Wednesdays are going to be rough for him though! :(

Stokely and the Toilet Paper

This summer on the Cape, my roommate Paige and I quickly developed a list of reasons to keep the door to the bathroom door closed at all times. Left to his own devices, Stokely could frequently be found drenched from jumping into a yet-to-have-drained bathtub or from falling haphazardly into the toilet. Paige once even caught him peeing in the sink.

The last straw, however, was when I caught him running around with what I thought was a dirty tissue from the bathroom garbage. It turned out to be (clean) toilet paper, which I realized once I noticed that the entire roll had been unwound and dragged out of the bathroom, out of the house, and onto the porch. Not having an unlimited budget to spend on toilet paper at the whim of a kitten, we had a new house rule: keep the bathroom door CLOSED!

I had to spend my first night in Denver in a hotel, since I couldn’t move into the apartment until September 1st. It was a nice room, but it had a weird bathroom door that slid into the wall, so I didn’t think to close it right away. Sure enough, Stokely soon gave me reason to, as evidenced by this photo:

I can only imagine what the hotel’s housekeeping staff thought when they saw half of the toilet paper unrolled on the floor.