There's a thing that cats share with small children. That is, that you buy them a toy, and the cat, much like the toddler, favors the empty box over the shiny new toy.
I've written before about our cat's fondess for small fuzzy balls. Well, lately, she's shown a decided preference for two other "toys" that I think provide insight into, dare I say it, feline psychology. The first are fir cones. These are ordinary fir cones we picked up from underneath a Douglas fir tree and used in holiday directions. Two fell off, and the cat was keenly interested in them so we let her have them.
She wore them out. She would catch them and toss them and chase them across the floor, carry them around in her mouth (whether as prey or kitten, I hesitate to speculate). These are mid-size cones, about an inch and a half to two inches long. Part of the charm for the cat is, I think, the fact that the uneven shape and the nature of the cone's petal-like segments make them move erratically. More importantly, they are noisy as they skitter across the floor. The noise is also important; if the cat is snoozing and I nudge a pine cone, her ears swivel and she sits up to look.
Now, I want to make it clear that she's mostly ignoring the fuzzy balls she used to love, the mouse with little beads inside that rattle, and the toys that hang from her cat tree. She wants fir cones. She wants them to the point of carrying the last much-abused cone around in her mouth, and placing it on the floor and nudging it, in hopes that it will shoot across the floor as it was wont to do, but alas, the little petals are now long gone and the bare little stem no longer moves on its own. So I'll be bringing some more pine cones back for her, since the ones from December are pretty much done for.
In the meantime, she's decided that the Best Possible Bed is no longer her cat tree, or the small cat bed, or one of the over-stuffed arm chairs, no none of these will suffice for her noontime naps. She has a better place for that.
She has claimed an empty and clean pizza box from the local delivery place. It is hers, and she is protective of it, to the point of napping on the box, its lid tightly closed, and the tabs that keep it that way firmly in place. I have no idea why she so favors the pizza box, but she does. She will occasionally nudge it into a position and orientation with respect to the sun that meets her criteria for proper napping, but she seems quite devoted to it. Nor is she at all unusual; there are scads of cats with pizza-box fetishes on YouTube.