U -- Up

U is for Up. Cats often like to go up to high places where they can see everything. Up is also away from some predators and other pests like toddlers (not that I've met any), and sometimes Up is where the tasty breakfast lives.

There are a few different ways to get up. One is to climb up using your claws. This works on trees, and it worked in the wooden shed where we could climb the boards to the storage on top. Another way would be to jump. If it's not too far up, or there are steps, this will work. Ranger and Binx climb up the various levels of their corner cat tree to get to their top shelf at the clinic. I often jump on the stove and then jump on the top of the refridgerator. He doesn't like it when I do that while he's coooking. Sometimes, it's too far to jump directly, and I have to wait for my human to come by. I'll jump on his back and then jump on the high shelf. Sometimes I have to wait for him to realize that's what I want him to do. And other times, there's a slanted surface. When we went up on the roof of the shed, we usually went up inside, and went from there to the roof, and then we climbed up the roof.

Of course, we often want to get down after we get up. Sometimes we can go from one tree to another to delay our decision. Sometimes we can climb down or take the same steps we used to go up. Other times we can jump, but that's a long way down sometimes, and sometimes we knock things over when we do that. What I often do is use my human's back. He'll come over to where I am, and I'll jump down. It works best if I wait for him to bend over -- there was one morning I didn't wait, and I almost fell off. As a last resort, sometimes our humans (or some other humans they tell us are OK) will come up and bring us down. The first time I got up on the roof of the shed I could not figure out how to get down. I guess I didn't see my friends when they got down, so I didn't know where the entrance to the inner upper shed was. My human brought a ladder to the shed and I got down when he carried me. I only had to do it that way once.