Like a lot of people during the pandemic, we decided to adopt a lockdown cat. Both of us had owned and loved cats during our childhood, but with our nomadic expat life, we had decided it wouldn’t be fair on a furball to move it around the world.
Now we are moderately settled in the US we decided to take the plunge. In March 2021, we browsed the available cats at the Pasadena Humane Society and chose a female 10-year-old grey (blue) cat with green eyes called Peppa. The shelter said she was a bit overweight and had been given up by her previous owners because of litter box issues.
The day before we picked her up, we went on a huge shopping spree at the pet shop and bought a bed, food bowls, food, toys, litter box, litter, scratching posts… We blocked off our dining room with cardboard walls to provide the cat with the apparently necessary “enclosed space” for her to feel safe as she got used to her new home.
We picked up Peppa from the shelter and they presented her to us in a cat carrier covered with a towel, with her favorite toy tucked into the handle. They also gave us a huge bag of food, litter and toys.
We brought her home and opened the cat door, and there she sat for four hours.
Things we then learned over the past year (photos and video below!):
- She’s almost certainly a Russian Blue
- She prefers to eat dried food which is not good for her digestion: she struggles to eat canned wet food, prefering to only lick the gravy. However, she’s very happy to eat chicken or tuna from our dinner…
- She leans so far into her water bowl that her front gets wet
- She is a fan of cat grass
- She loves to be brushed, especially on her face and whiskers
- She can’t jump very high
- When she is looking for us she picks up her favorite toy and brings it around the house, yowling.
- She started out wanting to hang out on the bed, but now only jumps up to wake us up in the morning.
- She wakes us up at 5am and we resist getting up until 5:30am
- She wants us all to be in the same room at the same time, preferably the study. When she’s in the same room she ideally wants to be touching the chair you are sitting on
- She snores, wheezes and huffs
- She’s quite talkative and communicates via a humming “murt” sound: but when she’s a bit impatient she whines like a toddler, then when she’s really annoyed she pronounces the word “me-ow”
- She loves to chase a sparkly ball up and down the hallway at full speed.
- Her latest game is to chase a sparkly piece of string (a Christmas decoration) amongst tissue paper, and she hurls herself on the paper and surfs across the room
- She’s totally fine with the litter box
- LOVES: feathers, catnip, feathers, lying on her back, treats, watching the squirrels from the window, sitting in the sink, making biscuits on plush blankets
- HATES: water, other people, going to the vet, loud noises, the chlorine smell of my swimming bag, being touched without permission
Perpetually Expat 
I now have 2 cats of my own that we adopted a year ago tomorrow. I love it that you not only adopted (instead of bought) but that you adopted a cat many others would have avoided because of an alleged litterbox issue. It was fun to read about your cat and see in what ways she’s different from and like our cats.
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Thanks for reading! Glad to hear you adopted cats too! Peppa can be a pain early in the morning but she makes up for it by being so cute!
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