So the new main blog is called rotzcake and I really hope some of you will follow me there....
I am so sad… I’ve lost 5 years worth blogging, making friends and followers here…I honestly feel like I’ve lost something really important in my life now… Please reblogg this as much as you can so everybody who still wants to join me on here can follow me to the new blog. I will follow you back of course ;_; this sucks so much.
New accounts: @rotzcake @rotzcakedraws @protomonster2
Every cat is perfect, and I'm not here to dispute that, but Strawberry is, and was, and will forevermore be the perfect cat. I feel so ineffective for not being able to force the world to sit down and listen to tales of her grandeur. I feel obligated to hand out tracts to strangers about how incredible a being she was. Even now, I feel led to justify my existence by spreading her legacy. Do you have time to talk about our celestial mother, Strawberry?
Strawberry was born somewhere in Fresno, and immediately decided she wanted out of there. The story goes, after meeting my sister once, she trotted into the apartment while Mom was taking in groceries, flopped down in the middle of the living room, and looked around as if to say, “It's not much, but I suppose it's acceptable.” She proceeded to gain control of the apartment and terrorize the current reining cat, Old Man Appendages, out of the best food and sleeping areas. Attempts to find her owner found that she owned several other families in the apartment complex, but was not anyone's cat. This would set the tone for the rest of her dealing with humans. Her name was chosen arbitrarily (“She's not red” was the only explanation ever given) as a protest to our stepfather trying to call her Miss Kitty. As the name stuck, I can only assume it was the name she accepted.
She came to our house (Mom and my younger sister were temporarily stationed in Fresno, while my brother and I stayed at our house in Central California) and sparked a bitter custody fight over which house she would live in. Meanwhile, she disproved our belief that she was a young kitten by suddenly deciding to get pregnant. One of the fathers, Domino Domino Sr., was last seen speeding across the street, followed closely by a very irate Strawberry who had decided that she had had enough of that. In any case, Strawberry settled down at our house and had two kittens at the top of our stairs. Then she had two more sometime in the middle of the night at least eight hours later. No one saw it happen, but it was assumed Strawberry decided it should be so, and so it was. She was a decent mother, friendly enough, although she had to be restrained to keep her from their food when they were weaning. She moved them all of one time when she decided we'd been bothering them enough, and promptly decided it was a lost cause when we found them three feet away and put them back in the cupboard. She proved impossible to keep inside, and after three months of nursing we realized she was too lazy or small to force them to stop and got her neutered anyway. She continued to nurse them for another three months, particularly Jessie who soon realized she was larger than her mother and could knock her down at any time. I've never heard of a cat nursing for that long, but... Strawberry always did things her own way.
Sometime around then we were playing Chrono Cross, and would whistle the Final Fantasy victory music at the end of each battle because we missed it. We soon found that Strawberry actually came to whistling, and although she was also prone to certain songs from Legend of Zelda, favored the victory music forever. Our nieces recognized it as Strawberry's song when they saw Advent Children. You could see it in her face that she realized she was being summoned, and she would decide whether you were worth the effort of responding. It didn't always work. Strawberry was Strawberry.
I could go on for days talking about everything Strawberry did to and for this family. She provided me with Jessie, my beloved cat for her entire life and the reason I still use the name Jessie online. She provided my brother with Domino, who is currently being an angry lump of sleeping kitten resentment as she tends to do. She learned to climb ladders and proved that even second story windows needed proper screens. She outlived my Mother's ill-advised third marriage to my less-advised stepfather, and was a better parent and teacher than either him or our birth father, even to those of us who were (at least legally defined as) adults when we met her. She was sweet, caring, sometimes eloquently cruel, narcissistic in ways even most cats can't comprehend. She tolerated baby clothes when it suited her and refused to abide the most heartfelt praise when it didn't. She at one time evidently decided she wanted to play with a soccer ball, because we found her knocking it around in the kitchen. No one ever found out where she got it. We didn't know anyone who played soccer.
But Strawberry remained Strawberry. The pictures I posted were at least eight years old, but she looked the same save a small tear in one ear. She was violently territorial, fighting off even dogs that passed into her yard (or to be fair, a good portion of the neighbor's yard, much to the distress of the neighbor's cats) but that was the only lasting evidence. She continued to be mistaken for a kitten her entire life. She was largely considered to be at least part unicorn, and possibly something even grander and beyond our understanding. Relatives and friends who had only seen pictures accepted that she was something more than what we mortals call feline and listened to the latest stories of her bending reality for fun with interest but without surprise. Even my hyper-religious mother only chuckled when I told her I was formalizing a cult around around The Best Cat Ever and God could sort out the details with Strawberry later. Time will tell whether I was joking.
She had the most exquisite, meticulously cultivated skills especially molded to infuriate humans. She could get in and out of almost anything, often without being seen. The “Strawberry phase” technique was finally just accepted as inevitable. One time I opened the door and felt her brush by my shoulder on the way in. I have no idea where she jumped from to get that high, but she only landed like nothing had happened. She hated the neighbor's cat June Bug, and literally peed in every box in the garage on the wall facing their house in a territorial display that verged on environmental art. We were dismayed, but again, not surprised. She was the kind of cat that would knock things off of shelves and look directly at you just to make sure you knew it was intentional. She hunted receipts with a vengeance. She could always tell whether or not she was actually going for something important or just annoying you, and chose her targets based on how much she wanted you to suffer. She dragged socks, clothes, and occasionally plush toys larger than herself around the house when she was in the mood. She took stealing food to a new level, stealing entire packs of sliced meat, most types of bread, and huge prey like entire chicken breasts which would later be found when some other cat was discovered scavenging her leftovers. All the other cats recognized her specific “Give me that” meow, and all of them came to it, even more reliably than food cans opening, because they knew that if Strawberry was demanding food there would surely be food on the floor. She was particularly known for stealing food out of people's mouths. Nothing was safe.
Strawberry always made her own rules. Mom eventually had to come to terms with her sleeping on the table, because knowing it was forbidden only made it more exciting. We tried a motion-operated condensed air can to scare her off, and she glared at it while it ruffled her fur and continued what she was doing. If you piled things on her spot, she would sleep on top, like some sort of acrobatic version of the Princess and the Pea. We did admittedly spoil her, but when it came to getting what she wanted, whether we approved or not was never part of the equation. She could eat a piece of meat carefully wrapped around a pill and spit out the pill untouched. She could eat a pile of wet food and leave fragments of pill hidden in it. If you tried to crush it and mix it in, she would simply reject it and steal something better. When two people held her down and made her swallow a pill, she waited until they had left and then gagged it up. It wasn't about the pill, it was about her rules, and she stuck to them.
As I said, I could talk forever about her, and no doubt I'll continue to make posts earnestly as I remember other facts that have to be recorded, but I need to get to the sad part now. It all happened so fast. It wasn't until the last day when the vets finally confirmed what we had feared, and even then I refused to believe it. Not Strawberry. We all knew how old she was, and that cats were not supposed to be immortal, but surely Strawberry was exempt from those rules too. I can only assume that Strawberry herself decided it should be this way and acted accordingly. I am a fairly reasonable adult, but I honestly can't imagine it happening this way without her acceptance. I know that Death had to take Theodore Roosevelt in his sleep, but it could only approach Strawberry bending and scraping on its knees. What happened was terrible, and it will remain in our hearts for the rest of our lives, but no matter what happened Strawberry remained Strawberry. She lived by her own way and nothing could deprive her of that. No one will convince me otherwise. Strawberry was, and is, and will always be, the best cat. I only hope she'll forgive me for using such a mundane term to describe her.
Thank you, Strawberry. Thank you so much. You were more wonderful and terrible and beautiful than we could ever understand, but we knew that we were blessed beyond what we ever deserved. I hope you realize how much you did for us silly little humans. Be happy. Be Strawberry.
catch me @ petco park tomorrow at SECTION A2 ROW 3 SEAT 11 taylorswift TAYLOR SWIFT I WOULD LOVE TO MEET YOU!! I HAVE BEEN A FAN SINCE 3RD GRADE (now I'm a freshman GOHS WOLFPACK 🐾🐾) AND IT WOULD BE AN HONOR TO FINALLY MEET YOU
spent at least 3 hours on this. I loved doing it, and think the finished result was worth the effort ♥ definitely gonna draw more of Eep and the other Croods in the future.
