About Pearlie

Pearl hard at work supervising her human

Pearlie is a pure white, blue-eyed Oriental Shorthair cat who is totally deaf and 100% attitude. At the tender age of one year she was given to a no kill animal shelter. As kind as the volunteers who cared for her were, still such an environment was hell on earth for a cat who hates other cats with a passion, and distrusts all strangers. To compound the problem, she became ill with upper respiratory and had to be given pills daily for a long time. I came to work as a volunteer at that shelter, and fell in love with this gorgeous creature. I'm not sure she appreciated the fact, however, that of all the volunteers it was I who was most able to hold her down and get a pill down her without requiring stitches afterwards. To put it mildly, Pearl can be one mean cat. At her best, she deigns to allow you to pet her. In the shelter, her mood was mercurial. One moment she would allow you to pet her, the next any move towards her was met with slashing claws. Despite all that, I asked to be allowed to have her. To be honest, I think the other volunteers were thrilled to see her go - they even waieved the adoption fee for us.

On her gotcha day I arrived to work with a kennel cab to take Pearl home in. We set it up with a warm towel and left it, anticipating a huge battle when it came time for me to leave, as Pearl hated being put in a traveling kennel. She seemed especially quiet that day and when it came time to leave was found sitting near the kennel readied for her. She allowed herself to be picked up (rare in itself even now) and placed quietly inside. I closed the door and the other volunteer and I stared at each other. My first clue that Pearl made up for her deafness by being psychic.

I always say that we were Pearls second birthday present as she came home to us only a day before her 2nd birthday. At the time, I had a multi-cat household, but managed to arrange things so she only had one or two cats actually sharing the same part of the house as she lived in. Early on I discovered that in most ways, Pearl was like any other cat. She ignored me when I shouted "no" at her just like everyone else.

Just a few days after she came home, Pearl was lying next to me (Pearl does not lie on laps - she may deign to lay near you, touching you even, but she does not do laps) as I worked on the laptop. The phone rang and I saved my work then jumped up to answer it. When I returned the laptops wallpaper had been changed to a picture of a white cat I had saved, and on checking my letter I found several lines had been added. If you left out a few constonants the additions even made some sort of sense. Pearl just smiled smugly and purred.

As time went on, she showed more and more her interest and pleasure in the computers, laptop and desktop. For awhile we had an old portable set up just for her with Petz4 as a screen saver (she became furious with me when I "adopted" a dog and I had to take him back to the "adoption center"!). She made it clear the white cat was her favorite pet. She also loves the IM and often makes a contribution or two to the conversation. In fact, she has a boyfriend and email pal living in Australia, a black Oriental named Growlie. They often email ecards back and forth mostly complaining about their incompetent humans I'm afraid. Its not at all uncommon for me to get up in the morning and find Pearlie busy at the computer.

As for her psychic abilities she cannot hear me call her, of course, but I have found that if I "think" at her she will look at me. Of course, I still have a 50/50 chance of getting either, "You may pet me now slave" or "AS IF!". For some reason, she slid out the door one day and disappeared. Normally, she will peek outside, or accompany me out onto the balcony of our new apartment to supervise the people on the jogging trail below, but she never leaves the safety of her home. Of course, I was frantic when I realized she was gone, and its quite pointless to go yelling "kitty, kitty, kitty". I looked high and low and then realized what I really needed to do. I went and stood in our doorway and thought, "Pearl, you have 10 seconds to get home, then I am closing this door and you will spend the night outside in the cold with no food or litter box." Here she came, trotting around the corner of the building and straight into the apartment as if she hadn't noticed me standing there at all. Hmph.

The photos of her reading the cards are real. I was doing a reading and left the cards and candle alone for a few moments to attend to something else. When I returned there she was. She was obviously quite busy and so I left her alone. But I did succumb to the urge to grab the camera.