Our weird roommate

Seems like only yesterday I was giving the cat his first taste of cornbread and marvelling when he actually ate it; in reality, it was three years ago. Since then he's gone from ignoring human food to not being allowed alone in the room with it. Today I heated up some turkey stew for lunch and then left the room for a moment to make a call; I returned to find him standing on my chair, paws on the table and face in my mashed potatoes. Last week he trashed some lunchmeant monshu had left on the counter; he'd already gotten in the habit of putting uncooked meat waiting to be cooked into the microwave oven after a similar incident some time back.

But he's retained most of his charming old habits (like sleeping on my arm and licking water off his paw) and recently revived one. Now almost every night as I head downstairs to bed, I find him scrambling to the banister in the hopes I'll fling toys up to him from the lower landing. Whether by accident or design, he seems less proficient at schnagging things and better at whacking them away to carom off the walls. Good to learn that my youthful reflexes haven't completely atrophied.