I called her Kitty in protest against pretentious cat names, but I don’t care about that any more. In fact I prefer them.

Here’s Clint Eastwood now. Isn’t he pretty? I think he has a grave expression and beautiful eyes.

I think Clint Eastwood has quite a strange life, just being in this house all the time and me away at work quite a bit. There aren’t any kids here or anything, and he’s alone a lot. So I’m trying to get him to look out the window. I think he’d find it diverting.

Why do I have to try and get him to look out the window? Won’t he look out the window if he wants to? Well, I don’t know much about Clint Eastwood’s background, him being a shelter cat and all, but he seems to respond well to being shown things.

For example, he used to spend most of his time in a dark corner of my storage room. But when I showed him the chair near mine and told him he was welcome to sleep there instead, he started doing it right away. Now he spends most of his time there.

Here’s Clint Eastwood chillin’ in his chair.

Clint Eastwood likes the window since I showed him where it is and told him it was ok to look out of it, but I think it scares him a bit. He only looks out for a little while at a time, and his tail twitches all the time he’s looking out.

Windows also figure in an unfortunate incident that happened one night when Clint Eastwood was roaming around the house by himself. He unaccountably tried to jump up on the bathroom windowsill and look out. That was a bad idea because the bathroom windowsill is too narrow for a cat. As he was falling down he grabbed my lucky bamboo plant and heaved it into the bathtub, breaking the vase.

Here is a picture of my quite unlucky bamboo. If you look closely you can see that the vase is broken, although (luckily) it still works.

Actually it works better now, because before it was too tall and I had to fill up the bottom with marbles. What a smart cat! He repaired my vase.

Clint Eastwood’s worst problem is that he sucks and kneads. If you’re a cat owner, you probably know what I mean. It’s hard for him to sit on your lap for very long without going into kind of a trance where his eyes glaze over and his claws come out and he starts kneading your chest and sucking on your shirt. I think it’s because of being taken away from his mother too young.

I can’t stand it when he does that, so the second he starts doing it the visit is over and he’s back in his chair again before he even knows what hit him.

But he’s learning. He’s really trying not to do it. It’s in his interest not to do it, because then he’d get to sit on my lap more, which we both like.

Tonight he sat on my lap for quite awhile and didn’t do any sucking and kneading at all. Then he went back to his chair when he felt like it, instead of getting the bum’s rush. (What a good cat! And smart too.)

It hasn’t even been a week since Clint Eastwood came to live here, and I think he’s learned a lot already. So have I. So I think we’re going to be ok.