Aleph

I've wanted a cat for a long time. Growing up, my family has had at least two dogs and two cats; I never really liked the dogs all that much. But both cats were fantastic, and since my last cat died (Sylvie, bless her heart, had to be put down while I was at school because she had an apparantely painful tumor on her back) ... what was I saying?

Right. Sylvie died sometime around 2001 or so, and I've wanted to get a cat ever since. This really hasn't ever worked out because I've been living in the dorms at school and moving every six to twelve months.

This changed on January 19th, 2005.

I've got a gallery of the day, and it seems to start out with a random picture of an arroyo near my house. Will had given me a ride to school that morning (although I have no idea why--maybe we had gotten breakfast or something) and so I had walked home sometime after noon.

Looking at the timestamps on my photos, it seems that Ken arrived back at the house around 2pm. He walked in my room and said something to the effect of, "my truck is meowing," so I grabbed my camera and headed outside.

His truck was most certainly meowing. As far as we could tell, a kitten was stuck somewhere underneath the body of the pickup. It took us a good five or ten minutes but we ended up finally figuring out that Aleph was stuck on top of the transmission and below the truck cab.

This is the first picture I've got of Aleph. The view is toward the front of the truck--the big silver thing on the right is the transmission and the reddish piece of sheetmetal on the left and top of the image is the body of the truck. The area on the left is, specifically, the driver's footwell. The pipe on the lower left is the exhaust pipe from one side of the engine.

Aleph was really going crazy by this point and was clearly upset. The precise mix of fear, hunger, and whatever else was bothering him isn't something I'm privy to; but, he wasn't in any way pleased with his surroundings. I'm guessing he jumped on top of the transmission while Ken's truck was parked at Jones hall during the day, and then rode the entire way back to the house. Brave cat, especially if you know how Ken drives.

Our first attempts to get him out involved simply calling at him and trying to squeeze a hand up there. It wasn't really possible to just go up and grab him, and I was afraid that if I tried to push a hand in front of his face that he would back even further into the engine, making rescue even more difficult.

As it turned out, he could move about fairly freely. We were able to coax him towards the top of the engine and could see him squeeze between the engine block and the firewall. It was pretty clear that the top of the engine was a tighter fit than the bottom, so we went back underneath the truck to concentrate there.

My first idea was to drape a washcloth over the cables and connectors on the side of the transmission so Aleph would be more likely to climb out on them where he would be more accessible. I tried at this for a few minutes but made little progress.

The same time all this is going on, I was waiting for [insert large company here] to return a phone call with a revised job offer. I had told them the night before that if they were willing to match my numbers, then I'd sign on with them. I was expecting a call sometime that afternoon with a yea/nay response to my request, and was pretty antsy at the time. As it turns out, they called while Ken was under the truck, still trying to get Aleph out.

At the end of the phonecall, though, Ken had managed to extract Aleph from the truck. Apparantely he did something similar to my first shot with the washcloth, but just used his hand instead. Aleph was inclined enough to take small steps out to the point where Ken could just grab him and pull him out.

Here is the first picture I have of Aleph after he was pulled out of the truck. He was hungry, pretty smudged up, and had a whisker that was a little curled (presumably from heat), but seemed otherwise in good health.

Overall, I estimate it took us around 45 to 60 minutes to pull him out. I've got no idea how long he was actually under the truck, but it had to have been for at least a few hours.

We took him inside and fed him some tuna fish and started figuring out what to do with him. We weren't sure for the first week or so and we kept things accordingly temporary: he ate and drank out of regular bowls, and pooped in an amazon.com box filled with litter.

After calling the shelters in the area, we finally decided to hang on to him. I gave Ken the right of first refusal, but he graciously let me claim the little guy. It took me another week to come up with a suitable name for him; I was entertaining ideas like Sophos, Hai-iro, Stimpy, and a few others, but settled on Aleph because it really did just seem appropriate.

I took him to the vet on 20050201, and he guessed that Aleph was around 12 weeks old. This was a good deal younger than I was estimating, although I have absolutely no reason to believe that my skills in cat-age-determination are ... existant, at all. That puts his birthday sometime around late November of 2004. I'll be getting him neutered (sorry, little guy) in a few months, when it's appropriate.

I'll be moving to Seattle at the end of the school year, and will be taking him with me when I go. He seems to enjoy the activity around the house and bugs people for attention when not much is going on. I suspect that he would get lonely when I quit living with Ken and Mac and unless I end up getting a place with people who don't work fulltime (which is doubtful), then I'll probably get another cat for him to hang out with. I've seen how neurotic attention-starved cats can get, and it's something that I don't want to put him through.

Since the first few weeks, Aleph has become a little bastard and does things like eat my shoes, climb my clothes, and bite my toes at 8am every morning. He is, however, megacute, and I haven't disowned him for specifically that reason. Yet.

An updated gallery of Aleph highlights is maintained on my server.