Telling my five-year-old that if they can beat Ecco the Dolphin in front of me I will take them out for ice cream, but I’m not sitting down to watch more often than once a week.

Never thought about this before but the amount of extra exercise a heavy snow adds to a cat’s normal walk is loosely proportional to its weight.

RIP. Gone, but not forgotten.

He also had a Christmas-themed RV at one point, but he totaled it in a horrific accident.

This is a good story.

It was target store brand, I’m not sure it even had a name beyond a generic label like “cat taco truck”.

This was like five years ago but I bought this same taco truck for our boy too!!

And PassTheHeadphones is Redacted. I’m actually surprised to see someone drop that name without any mention of Redacted, since they’ve been around almost nine years and I’m pretty sure the name change happened less than one month in.

RED was better than APL by almost every metric but after the APL ownership neglected the site and let it die, a bunch of the old staff rebirthed the site as OPS after maybe a year offline and they’ve done a shockly good job improving it. The difference is night and day. I still prefer RED because the userbase active on their forums got entreched much earlier on and they’re fantastic. RED also has a larger library available, but that’s not as meaningful as it sounds since in either case if you make a request for an album already on the sister site you can expect it to be filled pronto.

I had a fluffy black cat who was also a metal kitty! His name was Buddy, but he would get into a lot of mischief so we would often refer to him as “the monster”. Once you’ve started calling your cat Buddy Monster you’re now a very short distance from “monster of buddies I’m pulling your strings”.

The welcoming greetings I would receive whenever I would arrive back home were literally the most reliably happy part of every day.

Yeah, I think over ten years we only had ours actually pose for us twice.

We had a tiny basement and a small single room upstaira, both were mostly used as storage (and laundry for the basement). Our boy would spend most of his time hanging out with us, but sometimes he would go upstairs or downstairs just to yell his lungs out. Even though he was typically very affectionate, if I came to check on him he’d act kind of aggravated and run off, like you’re not supposed to be here, gimme my space. Okay little man. I really don’t know what that was about.

One night I was drifting off and my wife woke me saying “Did you hear that?” I said “No, what was it?” and she said “it souded like he screamed upstairs” and being a loving husband and cat dad I said “he always screams” and fell right back asleep. The next morning he had a mild limp so yeah, he fell off the rail edge partway down the stairs. I’m glad he healed up quick because this story would be a lot less funny to me.

I felt like I had to double up because she was already late on vaccines and it was very unlikely I’d have another opportunity soon to get her to the vet.

Knew we were moving months in advance so about six months before the move I was trying to get her comfortable going in the cage by giving her wet food in there. I thought after a couple months I would try shutting the door quietly and opening it right back up and then gradually get her used to the door being closed for longer durations, but the very first time she was very unhappy and the next couple months she basically said fuck you I’m eating the dry food in protest right in front of you when you’re doing this. When she finally started going back in I felt like I can’t play with getting her accustomed again, I’ve got to just do it on the day, and I was pretty confident that if I didn’t get her vaccines then it would be a very long time.

Our little lady had some trauma in her youth and was extremely resistant to being picked up and would absolutly not take direction to go into a crate. After a few years of her getting more comfortable I knew I could probably get her in again one time by tricking her, but I should save that for an emergency and nothing else. Eventually that was needed when we had to move. Of course, knowing I had to make the most of that I scheduled a vet appointment for that day.

It was somehow much worse than I had anticipated, starting as soon as I shut her in. She was so scared, throwing her full body with as much force as she could against the walls of the crate over and over and over, keeping that up while I was carrying her to the car and the first few minutes of the drive before she finally started to calm down. Watching that shook me, emotionally painful and just building anxiety about the appointment.

She actually was very submissive for the vet, who seemed to think I was crazy because at that point I was visibly a lot more terrified and upset than the cat.

Awful day in general, I have never seen an animal more depressed than she was after finishing that appointment and getting to the new place, it was horrific. She was normally extremely skittish about potentially being touched, but would invite pets sometimes. In that first day though, she was just do whatever you want I don’t care. I had to pick her up body basically limp out of the crate, she had never let me pick her up. She didn’t move from where I had placed her for hours, zero reaction to any action from me. She got back to her old self after a few weeks, but that day is still very painful to think back to I feel like I’m about to cry just from writing this.

I too was naïve enough to think that since my girl was shy around people I needed to solve that by getting her a companion. I wasn’t aware growling was something cats did until making that mistake. It’s especially weird because I don’t think I ever heard her hiss. Her growl was very intimidating to me, but not to the kitten. Okay little man, I’m not sure she wants to play today.

I think she was mad about that decision for a long time.

A couple people here have suggested wet food to lure the cat down, but when mine found a spot abouve the cabinets that was much easier to get up than down that solution crossed my mind for only an instant before I realized it would probably only take one more go for him to realize there’s a huge incentive to risking injury.

He would do this thing when he was angry where he would howl like a dog to make sure everyone within earshot understood the severity of whatever great injustice had taken place, and not taking him down when he wanted to be was definitely one of those cases. I’d give him maybe an hour to get his screaming in before getting around to helping him.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

The last one got me. The ones before were just mildly amusing.

I know orange cats have a reputation for being dumb but mine was by far the smartest cat I’ve had. He especially had an intuition for communication that none of my others did.

I was generally on top of keeping the water dish full and the one time it’s getting low he does a loud meow to get me to look at him and plops down and does exaggerated head turns. He looks at the water dish for a couple seconds, looks at me, turns his head back to the water dish. Just zero ambiguity whatsoever. Hey jackass, do you see what I’m looking at?

I feel very confident my black cat would have handled this by rubbing his head against me in the exact same way he did when wanting attention or literally anything else.

Oh my god that is another level of heartwarming.