Sasha's Big Move

As it turns out, when you live in a new city and don't have a job and classes haven't started yet, you have a lot of time on your hands. So judging by the torrent of academic doom-bringing emails I have been receiving from the second years, I seized what is apparently one of my last opportunities for spontaneity and went home for the weekend. Daring, I know. Laura and her cast were home so the three of us got to spend some quality time together. The whole fam also road-tripped down to Bloomington for the day to see Jenna and go to an IU game. Those who know me know my stance on football, and can approximate my feelings towards live football where the distractions that make televised games bearable are frowned upon. Highlights of the game include seeing and then trying to take a picture of my face with a Northwestern flag I saw on the top of the stadium (I know, I know, Big 10 or whatever. I'm still making all the connections) and getting a inverse-raccoon style sunburn thanks to my sunglasses.

One of the reasons I had come home was to transplant one of our cats to Chicago. I had decided to bring Sasha, because even though she has a crippling fear of the unknown, her life consists mainly of laying on the floor and watching me do stuff. It's hard for her to do that when there's 200 miles between us. My car was filled with stuff I forgot and one cat in a crate in a larger crate. I thought that'd be nice for her and me, because I wouldn't have a car filled with impossible to remove cat hair and she'd have a little freedom to move around but be unable to crawl under my seat and root herself permanently to the floorboards. I learned that lesson the hard way. However, freedom was not what Sasha wanted for this trip. As I was paying attention to the road as all good drivers do, my estimate is that she spent 98.7% of the trip like this...

... out of her bag, but wedged beneath it in a pathetic bid for some security. I'd have felt sorrier for her if she hadn't punctuated the trip with bouts of loud, plaintive meowing. I figured out that after the initial twenty minutes of meowing, she only spoke up when I did. This meant no talking on the phone and no singing, two of my favorite things to do in the car. I was down to podcasts, which I don't mind, really. I've got to keep replenishing the font of random knowledge in my head somehow and podcasts provide a easy way to do this. This trip did remind me of a joke, though. What do you call it when someone throws a cat out the window while driving on a highway? Kitty litter. Heh. Animal abuse is bad, kids. Don't throw cats out windows.

Once we made it to my apartment, I brought Catface in first and put her bag on the bed. She made no move to leave or even extract her face from the blanket to see that this wasn't, in fact, the vet's office, which is the only other place she ever goes. I made four more trips back to my car, and with each load I brought in, I checked to see what she was up to. Each time, it was this...

... with no variation. She moved a bit if I petted her, so I knew that the trip hadn't completely broken her brain. I proceeded to watch some tv and put my new stuff away so Sasha could come out when she felt comfortable. For the record, it takes over four hours for my cat to get comfortable enough to skulk out from her bag, look around furtively and then scurry under the bed. She stayed there for the next few hours, looking entirely annoyed with her new surroundings, as evinced below:

I eventually lured her out with the promise of brushing, but as soon as my attention was diverted for even a second she was back under the bed. I went about my business, making sure her necessities were out in plain sight should she choose to leave the bed. She didn't. Oh, well. Cats are resilient little things, aren't they? If they can survive falls off of buildings and trek hundreds of miles to reunite with lost families, they can adjust to moving to a rather nicely decorated and furnished apartment with a person they already know and like, right? Right?