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It started in Hawaii where we lived in a high rise with windows that went all the way to the floor. Kylie would lay on the floor and look out the window down at the street at the passersby and it was like she was watching tv, it was her soap opera (actually it was more like reality tv I suppose). After awhile we noticed that she was reacting to different people in different ways, sometimes she would growl, sometimes she would wag, sometimes she got really riled up. Since we lived across the street from a bus stop we figured she most likely was seeing the same people at the same time every day, and it seemed she had decided who was nice, and who was not, and who was especially suspicious. It certainly kept her entertained and best of all for her, there were never any reruns!

Then in New Jersey her very own reality programming became more like animal planet! In our first apartment there she would manage to get herself up onto the rather narrow window sil and watch the squirrels on the roof of the building next door. And most of the time it was like they were performing for her, or maybe it was more like they were taunting her. Jumping and flipping around doing acrobatics, pointing at her and laughing, juggling acorns… okay maybe they didn’t literally do all that but they did know that she was watching them and that she couldn’t get to them so they had fun teasing her.

In our second apartment in Jersey we were on the ground floor and she could look out the sliding door or hop up on a stool and see out the back bedroom window, and in either direction see ground hogs, rabbits, or even deer. It was like Wild Kingdom! And Kylie had only recently discovered the joy of barking (a story for another time), so it was very exciting -and noisy!

Then we moved to Colorado where we had no easily accessible windows for Kylie to be able to “watch her stories” so we had to do some modifications. We bought her some cat window seats. They attached to the window sill and even though they supposedly supported up to twenty pounds we reinforced them with stronger material. We also had to arrange ramps or furniture so she could get up to them, then she was all set. She loved it, she would sit there for hours! Once she even sunburned her nose in the west facing window so we put car window tint on that one. She would sit there rain or shine, snow or sun, but at some point we started making her get down if it was just too hot we were afraid she would cook herself!

Sometimes she would get “grounded from the window seat” if she just would not stop barking at every little thing she thought was noteworthy outside. We would move the ramps so she couldn’t get up there for the rest of the day, which she thought was just cruel! Of course we never told her that her beloved window seats were really made for cats! She would not have appreciated that!

Once we bought the house and she had her own big back yard.. there was no need to install window seats anywhere. Although on occasion she would hop up on the back of the couch and look out over the front yard and up and down the street, Kylie was far more concerned with patrolling and exploring her domain than worrying about what was going on in the rest of the world. Why watch things happen when you can make things happen?!