Household Discoveries

The cats are old hands at the normal, everyday things that happen in the house.  This doesn't mean that they don't occasionally flip out on me:  Bit still refuses to even be on the same floor as I am if I'm running the vacuum, for example.  But they don't even react to music, television, etc.  Fans in the window?  Bit likes to lay between the fan and the window screen, because she likes getting caught in the cool breeze.  Either that or she likes the idea of filling the entire house with her dander...

Argos is still learning the house, and its various noises.  He's finally stopped being worried when we play music or sing - in the beginning he had NO idea of what was up, and was fairly certain that he didn't like it.

He stares up at the ceiling fans once in awhile, but doesn't seem worried about them anymore.

But sometimes his reactions surprise me.

Take yesterday, for example.  I was using the shop-vac to clean up some of the corners in the living room - even if I try to keep the floors clean and swept, they tend to gather tufts of animal fur pretty quickly.  My shirt must have ridden up a little, because all of a sudden I felt something dripping on my lower back.  I looked over my shoulder to see a panting Argos LOOMING over me, curious about what I was doing.  I held out the vacuum nozzle for him to sniff, surprised that he wanted to be near the loud, roaring thing.  He not only sniffed it, he stuck his needle-snout INSIDE of the nozzle, then jumped back, eyes wide, when he felt it try to suck his nose in.  Hah!  But that didn't seem to give him a life-long fear of the shop-vac, which is good.

Today, on the other hand, we were all upstairs lying on the bed when the wind (it was storming outside) blew the box fan out of the window, crashing to the floor.  It startled ME, but it scared Argos witless.  I soothed him a bit, got up and righted the fan, turned it off, all of that jazz, but just left it sitting on the floor so that the wind didn't surprise us all again.

Argos spent the next five minutes staring suspiciously at the fan.  He finally lay back down, but refused to turn his back to it, and every few minutes or so would raise his head and crane his neck to see over the bed to make sure that it wasn't going to move again.

He's definitely making me look at things differently.  I now consider everything that we bring into the house:  is this going to freak the dog out?  Is it something that I can leave him alone with, or will he just eat it?