Ferniture Warehouse

Welcome to Sunday, the melancholy weekend day. It's great, but you can't shake the feeling you gotta go to work tomorrow. I mentioned Fern in an older post on this blog, I feel like he deserves a bit more then just a mention. Fern is between 4-5 years old, he is a Black Cat, apparently "Black Cat" is a literal breed, I had no idea. I thought they were mixes of a few different things. He actually joined us before we found BoDee, a past roommate was a vet tech and had a small problem with bringing home every stray animal the vet brought in. She brought home 4 different animals in the 10 months we were living there, one of which was a skinny black cat missing two teeth and a toe.

He spent the first two or three weeks at the house hiding in the dirt area under the floor in the basement. He was filthy in ways I cannot explain BEFORE he went into the basement, so you can imagine the nightmare that was basement cat after a week digging around. That was his name for a long time, just basement cat. Eventually basement cat evolved from the basement to skittering around the upstairs and mainly hiding under beds. At the time we had a pitbull (JayDee) that loved to chase basement cat around. The feeling was not mutual as basement cat did everything in his (we're pretty sure he's a dude) power to avoid Jay. One afternoon Jonda was trying to coax basement cat out from under the bed without using the typical "grab by the scruff of the neck" method. I play drums in a band in salt lake city, normally I wouldn't mention anything like this but the band has a song called "I love fern", the name was given to the song prior to basement cat ever coming on the scene. So Jonda is laying on the floor staring at the cat under the bed and she starts humming "I love fern" to herself, not in an attempt to coax the cat out, just the human mind bouncing along. As she hums to herself, basement cat prowls out and sits down in front of her. We decide this is some kind of sign and basement cat is given the name "Fern".

Fern chose us more than we picked him. I hated basement cat, whenever I saw him it was like "oh crap...there's that crazy effin street cat...you stay away basement cat! I'm just tryin to use the bathroom, this ain't your hood!". Once he really started getting used to everything he would sleep in the bed with us and let you pet him and he even got a few nick names. When we moved away from the vet tech Fern came with us. When Jaydee passed away a few months later Fern was a huge comfort during grieving and recovering from the loss. He was really there for us when we needed him, I know it sounds silly and that he's just a cat, but he has a great personality...sometimes.

So I've purposefully not mentioned one thing about Fern because I wanted to lay some groundwork on his background. Fern is a very needy cat, he likes to be touched and he'll get in your lap if your sitting down. He expresses his needyness by meowing...loudly...A LOT. Some of the meows don't even sound like cat sounds, I've been on the phone with people when he's meowing and more than once Ive gotten "How old is your baby?" "my what?" "your baby, I can hear it talking in the background." That's how loud and strange his meows are, but the really irritating part is the frequency. If he's not acknowledged right away the meows get louder and more often, sometimes even acknowledging him doesn't stem the tide. If his food dish is empty, acknowledgment sends him tearing off to his bowl whilst screaming bloody meow murder. It's the difference of "meow....meow....meow" to "MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW" and sometimes he'll make this "mow-woooooo" meow sound. he cutest sound he makes are little grunts or hums almost. You'll walk into a room where he's laying on the sofa, "Hi Kitty" "mmmmg". You can have whole conversations with him this way.

Fern is big. He's a big big kitty. He actually weighs more than BoDee does believe it or not. When I hold him up his body is just as long as my torso! They play and have a good time, BoDee is a lot faster then Fern but Fern is bigger, so it's pretty even battle for the most part. They have a couple youtube videos you can check out if you like, click here for those. BoDee pretends to be camara shy :) The video is kinda long because I'm too lazy to cut it up. We've talked about the laziness before now, so this shouldn't be surprising at all. Thanks for reading :)