All About Hershey!

Hands down, my daughter's cat, Hershey, is probably the silliest cat I have ever seen. Amber adopted Hershey about 2 years ago from the UC Davis Orphan Kitten Project (a really great program, incidentally), and from the first day she brought him home, he has been mischief personified!

I bring this up because she just wrote to me today about the havoc he created on her computer when he apparently wrote his own macros while walking across the keyboard! Then he decided that the push-pins on her bulletin board were just a little too interesting, and knocked the whole thing down trying to get to them. This story immediately brought to mind Hershey's first attempt at flight.

It was Christmastime, about a year after he had been adopted, and he had come home with Amber over her long Christmas break. One of his favorite places to be at that time was on top of my desk - not because it was so terribly exciting up there, but more because it was my cat, Pumba's, favorite spot to sit. Pumba, being 2 or 3 years older, was Hershey's hero - and Hershey loved to imitate anything "the big guy" did - much to chagrin of Pumba, I might add! So this day, as was his habit, he had followed Pumba to the top of the desk and then pestered him to the point that Pumba felt the need to be elsewhere. As Hershey sat alone now on his perch, he caught sight of a spider on the wall - way up in the corner where the two adjacent walls met with the ceiling.

Immediately, he moved closer to the edge of the desk, and you could see the calculations begin as his ears perked up and he started to crouch lower on his haunches...then suddenly he did it...in one gigantic leap he jumped almost straight up and out toward the ceiling - it was incredible! - he got his nose to within millimeters of the spider!

Now the only problem was, in his eagerness to get the spider, he had not taken into consideration the fact that the desk he was sitting on was a good 4 feet away from the wall where the spider was and, as the saying goes, what goes up, must come down...

Fortunately for Hershey, he came straight down - if rather abruptly - landing on nothing but carpet - and 5 minutes after he came staggering from behind the desk - a little dazed but unbruised - he was back on the top of it, thinking of trying it again!

See Hershey in action:


Hershey Loves Shoes!