I first saw F. W. Furball (my name for him) at the vet office when I dropped my dog off for doggy daycare. There wasn't anything unusual about him, he looked like a normal kitten. But little did I know that he would develop a strange and unusual behavior. He was normal in size for his age, with smoke grey hair that stood straight up and he would climb up the side of the cage they had him in, and then he would pull himself up onto a shelf just so I could scratch him. The girls at the front desk begged me to call my husband and ask him if I could have him. I was a bit hesitant because the last time I brought home a kitten he had said that it would be the last one. After several days of thinking about it and in a way, hoping that someone had adopted him already, I asked my husband. I was surprised He said yes. I loaded my dog and a cat carrier into the van and away I went to get my new kitten. When we got home and I opened up the carrier, F. W. walked out as if he had just been on a vacation and had returned home. My other cats had run and hidden when I brought them home, not F. W. He went right to the food dish and then to my dog's bed, where he made himself very comfortable and went to sleep.

Several weeks went by and F. W.'s personality hit full bloom. He would crawl up into our laps and stretch out so his head was about chin height and watch our mouths as we talked. He interacted with the other cats as if they were old friends. My dog would watch him with a look of discuss on his face. And my oldest cat would hiss and growl at him and then give him a big swat that would send F. W. rolling across the floor. Not once did F. W. let the treatment he got from my dog or oldest cat stop him from trying to make friends with them. My other cat, Casper, so named because one minute you would see him and the next minute he was gone, loved F. W. They would chase each other all around the house for hours.

One day when my husband had gotten home from work and sat down and took off his shoes and socks, there was F. W. watching his every move. My husband threw one of his socks at F. W. to see what he would do, well, he grabbed hold of that sock in his mouth and took off running. He didn't get very far when he started stepping on the part that was trailing behind him. He'd take a few tumbles and get back up and start again. This went on for about ten or fifteen minutes until F. W. figured out that all he had to do was to stop and give his head a big jerk and that would move the rest of the sock out of his way. He played with that sock for an hour or so and then decided to do his nightly love thing with us. The only difference was that now he showed an interest in my husbands cigarettes.

He watched my husband take a cigarette out of the pack that was in his shirt pocket and then watched him light it, mimicking the movement of my husbands mouth. Also, when we talked, F. W. would watch us so intently as if he was trying to learn how to speak. We would ask him questions and he would answer in a load meow, very different from what my other cats do. But the meows were as long as what a word would have been and he would wait for us when we told him to and if we told him to go on, he would.

Then cigarettes started showing up all over the house with tiny pin point punctures in them. My husband would have packs of them on the night stand when he went to bed and when he woke up they were gone. This went on for well over a month. We new that F. W. was responsible for the missing packs of cigarettes and the ones that had been strewn around the house but we could never find the packs nor were we able to catch him with it. Then one day as I was cleaning my house, he came running out of our bedroom with a cigarette, filter end in his mouth. I tried to catch him but I was laughing so hard I kept missing. When I finally caught up with him, he had dropped the cigarette somewhere, I still haven't found it, and he had this "What!" expression on his little face. We never found the packs of cigarettes and he didn't eat any of the cigarettes we found, he only played with them.

One day I was cleaning out my van and of course I had all the doors open while I was vacuuming. F. W. came up to me and was loving all over me and then he went on to do his thing and I never thought about him any more. When I was through I closed up the van and came into the house. Three days went by and I was starting to worry about F. W. because I hadn't seen him since I cleaned out my van. I opened the door to my van to go grocery shopping and out jumped F. W. scarring the you know what out of me.

He has grown up and out of that stage but he is our fearless cat. He will approach every animal he sees wanting to play, even the dogs. He's been chased and he's been banged up some but it never stops him from trying to be friends with every man or animal he meets.

Oh yea, the F. W., stands for Fuzzy Wuzzy or Fuzz for short.