Cinders is the first cat I got in California. She is more on the lazy and stupid end of the cat scale (at least, as compared to Smokey). The little teddy bear near her is Ashley.
I didn't plan to have a cat while I was at college. I am allergic to cats, and I wasn't sure if a cat and me could both live happily in the same small room. In April of 1992, I heard that one of the cats in Ricketts house (yes, that would be Cinders) was ownerless, and was going to be taken to the pound. I felt sorry for her, so I adopted her.
Like I've said, Cinders is dumber than the average cat. When I first got her, she was fascinated with walls. It seemed like she didn't know what they were at all. She would sit in front of a wall and just STARE at it. Then she would slowly look up until she was looking straight up the wall to the ceiling, and stare for a while more. It was as if she was thinking, "Wow! The wall goes all the way up from the floor!"
After a month, she stopped doing this when she was sitting on the ground. However, if I put her on a chair, she would start staring up the wall all over again. She continued this behavior for six months.
Another strange behaviour was that she sit on one side of the room and stare at a wall. The she would suddenly get up, run into the wall, bounce off of it, and then stare at it as if she was amazed that it was solid. It took her about a year and a half until she stopped testing the solidity of walls.
Perhaps I should mention that she was dosed with LSD before I adopted her. No, I don't approve of this, but she was a college cat, and such things happen. It's possible that she was experiencing flashbacks. This does make her behaviour more understandable, but I still laugh at it.
I never thought about a cat having diabetes until Cinders was diagnosed. The warning signs she had were: drinking more water, eating more food, and losing weight. The vet rapidly diagnosed the problem with a blood test. It took several months of experimentation with different varieties and doses of insulin before we found a combination that she responded to. Once we hit on the combination that worked for her, she went back to normal (except for being "pincushion kitty" twice a day). The diagnosis occurred when she was seven years old; that's on the young side for a cat to devolop diabetes, but she was overweight and didn't excersise much (yes, those are the same risk factors as for people).
Cinders died in January of 2000, at the age of eleven.