We Are The Thorsons: I {heart} my Zoey!

When most people see her, they stop and stare. But when I see her, I pick her up {remembering to bend at the knees so I don't hurt my back} and snuggle her a little! Yes, my ~~little~~ cat Zoey is quite large and I love every pound of her. It hasn't always been the case, but she is the most mellow cat these days {probably because she is intolerant of most activities}.

Zoey was born during the summer of 2004. She was the cutest little kitten in the whole liter!!

There she is - the little one in the middle!

Isn't she adorable!

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She came to live with me at my apartment in Mankato while I was in college. It was there in Mankato that we discovered many, many things about my little Zoey. One, she had ear mites. Two, meow mix cat food did a number on her poor little stomach. Three, she sucks the tip of her tail. Four, she LOVES feathers. Five, she LOVES to eat. Six, she can play dead. Seven, she'll sleep in your underwear drawer if you forget to close it {cough, RJ, cough, cough}. Eight, she loves looking out windows. Nine, she is absolutely terrified of vacuums.

Zoey's bad hair day after getting ear mites washed out of her poor little ears.

She was not a happy camper the rest of the day, poor thing :(

Here she is a little bigger.

Just hanging out on the window ledge.

After Mankato, she moved to St. Peter with my sister Hillary. {I was up in the cities taking classes at the U and staying with Kristin who is allergic}. It was in St. Peter where she really gave Hillary a hard time. Zoey decided that she liked the bubbles her automatic water dish made if she flipped the little lever to get more water out. She continued to hit the lever, see the bubbles, hit the lever, see the bubbles, etc until the entire water dish was drained and all of the floor. {Zoey, you are a naughty kitty!} It is also here where Zoey became over-obsessed with her food. She would eat and eat and eat all day is she could. So we resorted to feeding her two times a day and eventually she got an automatic feeder which would dispense a quarter cup of food twice a day. This in turn caused more problems for poor Hillary. Zoey would sit at her bowl and meow and cry and act like she was going to die if she didn't get more food. {The vet even considered anti-depressants for her at this time although we never put her on them} She eventually learned how to stick her hand up the machine and get a couple extra crunchies to come out. {She's pretty smart!}

Zoey had a lot of energy when she lived in St. Peter. She was run back and forth through Hillary's apartment if she got razzed up. I wish I would have videotaped her because she would go absolutely nuts. She would run to the sliding glass door, see her reflection in the window, get scared, hiss at herself, get even more scared, turn around, run like a bat out of you know where and then she was shimmy up the bathroom door frame. Hillary and Ryan C. liked to give Zoey catnip from time to time and Zoey LOVED it. She would get all happy and rub all over everything. One thing Zoey liked to do in St. Peter was jump from the floor to the counter to the top of the fridge to the top of the cupboards and watch Hillary cook, do dishes, etc. Well, once when she was high on catnip, she went to the top of the cupboards and started rubbing against the edge. Well what do you know, she was so into rubbing against the cupboards that she rolled right off the top of them! Per Hillary and Ryan, the only thing that got hurt was her pride - ha! Zoey gained the nickname Zoikes while in St. Peter and Hillary and Ryan would pull out the "zoikesanator" {squirt bottle filled with water} whenever Zoey was being naughty.

Here she is sucking her tail {hehehe, Ryan just saw this picture and asked if this picture was recent as she "looked a little thin."}

This is her playing dead. In Mankato, my roommate RJ would tell people when they showed up at our apartment "Hey look! My cat plays dead." He would then make a gun with his thumb and index finger point it at Zoey and go "Bam! Bam!" and when the people turned to look at Zoey, she'd be laying like this - lol.

After St. Peter, she moved up to Duluth with me for medical school. I continued with the automatic feeder as to not let her gain too much weight that she had already proved possible. She loved Duluth. Outside one of my windows was a pine tree with lots of bird activity. She would sit on her little perch in front of that window for hours and cackle at the birds and try to attack them! While bird watching her tail would zip back and forth like something fierce.

She was a good companion to have up in Duluth as I went through my first year of medical school. And for the most part she was pretty well behaved besides begging for more food everyday. {I didn't give her any catnip though.} She would sit on one of the dining room chairs next to me while I studied. She never let me out of her sight. If I was in the living room and had to go to the bedroom to get something, sure enough, she would only be a few steps behind. In the mornings, I would go to the kitchen to get breakfast and she would follow behind and then lay on the rug in the kitchen. She has a little red cat bed that I put in the corner of my bed and every night she would jump up on the bed and climb into her little bed for the night. It was nice to have somebody with me in my apartment as living by yourself can be kind of lonely sometimes. Oh, she also played catch like a dog! It was awesome!

For my second year of medical school, I moved in with Hillary at her place in Duluth which meant Zoey had to go live with Ryan in Omaha. She had a good time in Omaha. It was the first time she ever experienced stairs and still to this day she goes up and down stairs pretty funny - Front foot 1, front foot 2, back foot 1, back foot 2 and then on to the next step. She continued to like feathers, catnip and laying in the window down in Omaha. She took a liking to laying in boxes while here as well. She stayed on the automatic feeder in Omaha - twice a day as normal - until Ryan couldn't take her endless crying in the middle of the night and waking the other roommates up for food, so he set the feeder to three times a day. And this my friends, is the beginning of Zoey's life as a fat cat! I remember going down to Omaha to see Ryan after he had unknowingly-to-me set the auto feeder to three times a day and Zoey was HUGE. It looked like she had a volleyball in her belly! But turning up the feeding frequency stopped her mid-night cryings and she's been one happy ~~little~~ big camper since!

Hanging out in Ryan's sock drawer.

Being naughty and eating Ryan's paper.


She loves feathers!!

Waiting at the window for Ryan to come home.

More feathers!

Sucking her tail.

She ate through a bag of cat treats! Must have been before the feeder went up to three times a days.

She even broke into the catnip bag.

Sleeping on her back as usual.

She's been in Owatonna with us for the past two years. She likes it here as well. She no longer gets to use the auto feeder as we have two cats and she would eat both cat's portion of food. So she is large but she sure is happy. She still has a fear of vacuums and blots when ever she sees it come out. She loves when we open the doors and windows so she can sit in front of them and smell the fresh air. We give her baths on a pretty regular basis to keep her bottom clean. She is getting more used to them and I might say she actually enjoys them now.

It is really cute. Just yesterday I was out pulling weeds in the front yard landscaping. Zoey was sitting on the screen door watching me. She gave me a little meow and I started talking to her. For about three minutes I could say "Hi Zoey! I love you! Whatcha doing in there?, etc" and she would respond back with little meows. She melts my heart!