I’ve discovered a few more of the old photos I think are worth sharing…

About ten years ago, one of the smaller pieces of feline furniture I owned was what Derek and I called The Loki Dream Home.  It was a simple piece of furniture: mostly plastic with short carpet in all the right places, a canvas cover over the top sleeping platform with another platform below that, and firmly planted on the ground via two sand-filled bases.  It was one of those cheap things that catches your eye while at the cat store, something in a small box that assembles into something that would never fit in the car… like most furniture.

Loki absolutely loved the thing.  Grendel wasn’t as fond of it, but part of that could well have been due to his hip surgery and inability to climb or jump for several months.  He mostly used it as a scratching post but otherwise ignored it.

But oh how Loki loved that thing.  He’d sleep on it, play on it, use it as his own personal watchtower, and generally claim it for his very own.  Well, since no one else was using it…

One reason for the dichotomy in their responses to it, at least back in those years, has only recently occurred to me.  Grendel has always loved people and spends his time hanging out with anyone in the house.  Loki, on the other hand, spent his early years treating people with disdain, keeping them at a distance, and pretty much ignoring them.  That included me.  So for him, The Loki Dream Home provided a wonderful place where he could keep an eye on the resident humans without being too close to them… you know, where they might actually touch him or something, an action which usually provoked incessant bathing on his part in an attempt to wipe away the monkey cooties.

But Loki is a rough-and-tumble kind of cat, hard on furniture just as he’s hard on people and the rest of The Kids, so it wasn’t too long after he fell in love with his Dream Home that he began destroying it.  It started with prompt removal of the feather toy attached to the top, something that hung over the side and made for a bit of fun while sharpening claws.  I suppose the toy remained functional for about two weeks—give or take.  Then one day it magically appeared in another room after having been brutally detached from its perch.

And when the toy was removed, what next?  Well, there was that canvas top covering the highest sleeping platform.  It attached to the furniture with six thin plastic rods that held it in a nice tent shape.

To Loki, however, that covering was more than just a roof over his head.  It was obviously meant for play, to be climbed upon, to be pulled and bitten and attacked, and eventually to be destroyed like the feather toy before it.  That’s why you can see part of it sticking out like a broken bone (on the left side of the photo).

Once he’d dismembered its pieces and parts in bloody and ongoing battle, I removed it for his safety as well as for aesthetics.

That happened after The Twins were adopted, though.  When those two little ones came home, Kako discovered The Loki Dream Home and tried to stake her claim.  Bad move…

The first time Loki found her on the top perch, he kicked her to the curb like refuse.  She never again challenged him for that spot.  In spite of the cruel treatment at the hands of a mischievous god, she did learn she could use it as long as she didn’t provoke his wrath.  She accomplished this by staying quiet and meek and planting her tiny behind on the bottom platform where she was as inconspicuous as possible.

It was never really safe for her there.  Loki would get in one of his moods and drop upon her like a plague of locusts sweeping down from the sky.  She rarely knew what hit her.

And do you think he did it because he wanted her spot?  Nope.  He did it because he didn’t want her on The Loki Dream Home.  It was that simple, that selfish.  He’d return to the top platform as soon as he’d ejected her.

Yet another reason for his name…