my cat follows the sunbeam across the floor all day... does yours do this too??

ok so i work from home on saturdays (aka i sit around with 6 half-finished hobbies everywhere) and today i finally noticed that Pickle moves about every 40 minutes!! shes chasing the patch of sun as it slides from the rug to the couch and then to the one spot by the bookshelf i actually tracked it for a while and it lines up with the sun moving across the sky. tbh and the patch will keep creeping toward a different part of the room as we get closer to the winter solstice!! so basically my cat has a sundial and i dont lol

side note, while i was writing this down i forgot the tea i was making. its cold now. classic

yep mine does the same thing. it's true about winter too, the sun sits lower so the patch goes way deeper into the room if you have south facing windows it'll basically reach the far wall by december lol

if you want to get weird with it, mark where the patch is at the exact same clock time every week for a year you'll get a figure 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

my cat skips the sunbeam and sleeps on my keyboard because it's warm

fair warning on the figure 8 thing, if you go by your phone the clock jumps an hour on nov 1 and your nice analemma gets a weird gap in it. use one actual watch you never touch for daylight saving and leave it on standard time all year. tbh that's the only legit use for daylight saving i've found, and it isn't one... mine just sleeps wherever the sun happens to be at 2pm and gets mad at me when it moves

lol mine does the FULL migration. starts by the back door at like 9am, ends up wedged behind the couch at 4 where theres one tiny strip of light left. shes basically a sundial with whiskers, which i keep telling my wife counts as intellectual humor. she disagrees

the mad-at-you part is SO real tho. my cat glares at me when a cloud goes by like i scheduled it

mine does the sunbeam tour too, except at the end of the day she gets on top of the fridge for the last bit of light and then cant figure out how to get down. so every evening around 5 i'm standing in the kitchen holding a chair like a butler while she thinks about it for twenty minutes

i also once put a small mirror on the windowsill to bounce some light into the hallway so she'd stop sitting on my keyboard it worked for about a week. then my landlord saw the little reflected spot on the ceiling and asked if i was "signaling someone." i said no, which is true, but i also didnt explain, so now he thinks i'm weird and he's not wrong

the cat has since decided the keyboard is warm anyway

haha the mirror trick is genius!! i would totally forget i put it there and then spend a week wondering why theres a mystery light dot on my ceiling... wait what did your landlord say?? fun thing i learned while i was supposed to be doing something else, the sunbeam actually moves faster across the floor in winter because the sun sits lower so the patch gets all long and stretched out. so Pickle is about to have a very busy few months lol. also she'll be stuck with way smaller patches in summer, poor thing

lol so Pickle basically has a winter cardio season mine just quits in december and lies on the heating vent like she pays the gas bill. the fridge thing has gotten worse too, last week she waited until i actually sat down with dinner before deciding she was stuck again

oh mine does the heating vent thing too... like, except she likes to wait until right after I've vacuumed so the cat hair is the first thing anyone sees!! When my grandson Tyler visited last weekend he tried to make her chase a laser pointer instead of the sun spot and she just looked at him and went back to sleep... Just my two cents!!

lol the laser pointer snub is very correct of her honestly, the sun doesnt make you work for it. lowkey mine tracks the sunbeam so precisely that i once put a little tape mark on the floor where it hits at 3pm, and now she just sits on the tape whether it's sunny or not. my roommate said i vandalized the hardwood and i said no, i made a sundial with a cat on it and that's art

lol thats not even just habit, cats sit in taped shapes on the floor all the time someone actually studied it, they even sat in fake "squares" that were just implied by pac-man shaped corners https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2021.105338

so your sundial cat is basically science. tell your roommate its research

...put it there and then spend a week wondering why theres...

lol the mystery ceiling dot is SO real, my cat chased mine for like three days straight 😂 landlord just said "as long as its not a hole in the wall" and walked off so i'm calling that a WIN!! 🚀✨ wait whats the fun thing you were gonna say, it got cut off

lol your landlord has the right priorities fwiw half the time the mystery ceiling dot in my place turned out to be my watch face catching the sun while i sat on the couch, so i spent a week accidentally torturing my cat by just checking the time. now i check my phone instead and she glares at my wrist like it owes her money

...for it. lowkey mine tracks the sunbeam...

lol a tape mark... thats dedication!! my grandson Tyler did that with his gecko's heat lamp once, so I guess it runs in the cat crowd and the reptile crowd my herons do the same thing at the retention pond every morning, same sunny spot like clockwork

wait herons sunbathe too?? thats amazing!! lowkey i've seen pictures of them standing there with their wings half open like they're airing out... i read somewhere it might help with feather mites but i've forgotten where, which is very on brand for me lol. the gecko thing makes total sense though, reptiles actually need the heat!! Pickle has no excuse, she has three blankets and a heated bed i bought during one of my "i'm going to be an organized cat parent" phases... she ignores all of it and lies on the bare floor in the one sunny square instead

lol the heated bed never wins ours sat unplugged in the closet for a year before i gave up on it... real sun just beats the fake stuff, and i cant blame her. ours lost an hour of afternoon sun when the city let the neighbor put up a seven foot fence, which i'm pretty sure is a foot over the limit. so now she lies right up against the fence line at 3:40 and glares at it like she wants to file a complaint honestly she'd have better luck with that than i did...