My Little White Prince: Winston, or P-Dub (for short)

There he is as he looks today: my little white prince. Here begins the story of my silly, cuddly, brain-damaged (or so we believe) cat.

He was discovered in the wheel-well of my dad's car in the early summer of 2005. My dad was forced to drive to a mechanic to get him out because my soon-to-be prince would NOT let himself be seen by the light. While the hood of the car was up the furry and dirty cat made the mistake of darting through the engine compartment, at which point my dad laid a firm grip on him. He decided to bring the dirty and frantic bundle home in a tightly bound box with the logic that because the cat had hitched a ride from our apartment complex, his owner must live in our complex.

When my dad brought him home, he released him in the seclusion of our little bathroom with my brother and I present. Immediately when the box was opened, the cat jumped onto and off of all four walls of the bathroom in the period of a millisecond and ended his search for an escape by climbing up my dad's leg like a tree. When he met eyes with my dad and realized his leg WASN'T a tree, he froze, trembled slightly, and slid down his leg again. Poor guy.

Shortly after that I put the kitty in a cat-carrier and took him around the complex, asking if anyone had lost him. No one claimed ownership, and I don't blame them. Look at this ugly mutt of a thing:


Later that night, when it was apparent we would be keeping the cat for at least a few days while we searched for his owner (or at least a taker), Hunter and I decided to give the grey mutt a bath.






When the wet soapy wash cloth proved too feeble to make a dent in his filthiness, we opted for dunking him.




Our discovery the next morning was that he was a white cat! But we had to give him another bath because all his filth didn't come off the night before.


And from then on it was just a matter of becoming endeared to him! When we realized how much we had fallen in love with him.... actually, when my dad realized how much I had fallen in love with him and him with me (he really believed I was his real mom, because I was the one who bathed him (on more than two occasions), brushed him, stroked him, played with him, etc.), my dad decided to let me keep him because my birthday was coming up! So he became Prince Winston, more commonly known as P-Dub.

(Sorry these two are side-ways. Don't feel like fixing them. Isn't he cute, thought?)




Now, we kind of knew from the beginning that he was brain-damaged. 1) What kind of a cat would stay in the wheel-well of a car while the car is moving? At high speeds? 2) He calmly submitted to baths. 3) When we let him loose in our court yard, he unsuccessfully tried to jump into our home through our closed French doors three times in a row. He just couldn't understand why the clear air in between the outside and inside of our home was so hard and head-bonkish.

Sidenote: That Christmas my sister, Heather, got Mario Party (a game-cube game). All four of my siblings loved to play it together, and one of the characters that one of us would always end up with was Wa-Luigi. We noticed that this character was the clumsiest and most brain-damaged of them all, so we began calling my cat "Wa-Luh-P-Dub."

Over a year later, he still believes I'm his mom. He usually follows me around the house when I'm home, LOVES to cuddle when I'm on my bed, and if I'm studying at my desk and not paying attention to him then he will leap onto my back from behind and try to hold on piggy-back style. When he realizes he can't hold on for long, then he contents himself with laying down next to my textbook and darting his tail across the page I'm reading...over and over and over again.

He's also still very clumsy. If he's feeling really needy of me, then while he's following me around the house he will walk so close to my feet that my legs often get tangled around his body. We often have collisions, but he usually realizes that its his fault and therefore likes to act like they don't happen.

He's the only boy cat of the house (we have three female cats here), and one of his favorite pasttimes is to wrestle with them. Therefore, the other cats HATE him and growl if he walks too close.

He meticulously cleans himself
because every so often I threaten to give him a bath myself (and I actually do still give him baths...probably once every four months...white cats get dirty!)

He's silly:


He's adorable:

And he loves to interact with me by playing with wadded up pieces of paper. I tried to take a couple of videos of him INTERACTING, but just like a cat, when you want them to do something, they don't do it. The videos are still pretty cute, though. But besides the fact that he didn't really do what I want him to do, I don't really know how to post them on my blog..yet. Maybe I'll try to figure it out later. At least the videos are ON the computer. If any of you want to tell me how to do it in three concise sentences or less (if that's possible), I'd love it, because I don't feel like experimenting on the computer right now.

Anyways, that's the brief synopsis of my little cat. Hope you enjoyed!