Many of you enjoy my photos of Olivia, the tiny calico we adopted from a local shelter when she was three months old. Well, she turned ten months this week. What an interesting and fun adventure it’s been—delightful and frustrating all at the same time. We adore her. She has brought us a great deal of laughter and joy, but we’ve had few kinks to work out.
Turns out this kitten is true to her colors—she’s a calico and as you’ve read here and as some of you have 
experienced—calicos can be obstinate, stubborn, quirky—maybe a little crazy at times—and some of the most affectionate and fun cats around. What’s an example of her quirky behavior? She attacks the walls in the hallway emitting a shrill chirp that 
makes you think she’s being attacked by a swarm of bees or an army of fire ants. She sounds like some exotic monkey swinging from the trees in the jungle. I still leap up from my office chair to make sure she’s okay when I hear that going on. Yeah, she’s fine—just playing, I guess.
She lives on the edge. She doesn’t fall as often as she did at first, but she’s still a little clumsy and reckless. She sleeps with some part of her hanging over the edge of the desk, a table, a chair, her cat tree. I guess she has learned her balance points, but she almost always sleeps or rests with her feet and tail and/or her head dangling over the edge.
She’s sturdy and has a sort of cobby body, but she’s tall—oh my is she tall. She has tried for weeks to reach the valance on the large window in the living room. I don’t have curtains in there because we have cats—most of our windows have blinds and valances. But last night for the first time, she managed to stretch tall enough to reach the valance and she got her claws stuck—there she was dangling from the 
valance until I rushed to free her. How can we even leave this cat alone at home with only 16-year-old Sophie—I mean once the isolation orders relax more???
There are days when Olivia refuses to eat, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting her growth. She now weighs over ten pounds. The cats do have kibbles to nibble on—we free-feed kibbles. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are days when Olivia prefers kitten kibbles to her canned kitten food.
Olivia is super affectionate, but only when it suits her.
She can be as flighty and aloof as any formerly feral cat—and she will even hide from us. She has hiding places in this house that we can’t even imagine. We joke that she levitates. Seriously, there are times when we call and call for her—we look everywhere for her—suddenly she just appears—as if from thin air. It’s sometimes so eerie, it borders on a 
supernatural occurrence.
Olivia is a comedienne. She’s quite entertaining. She makes up games and sometimes involves us. Occasionally she plays fetch. No kidding. She’ll go find a toy—usually a stuffed mouse and play hard with it. She tosses it, attacks it, tears around the house with it, then jumps up on the sofa with me and drops it in my lap. I toss it and off she goes for another wild play session, then she’ll bring it back to me.
She’s so unique and interesting that I’m including her as a character in my next Klepto Cat Mystery. In fact, she may have a permanent role in a series of her own. Stay tuned.
