I am feeling very cattish this days

It has now been over a year since I had a cat around the house. As I joked to someone today, this means my life plan of being a certified (certifiable?) eccentric old cat lady with 42 cats by the age of 57 very seriously off track. I only have 5 ½ years left! My record was 5 (my entire family thought I was nuts). Two of them were only temporary babysitting for almost-ex while he was in the US on business for an extended period.

All of my cats have been moggies: some from the Humane Society, a few rescued from friends who did not realize that a partner or child was allergic, an acquaintance who had not neutered their pet and were presented with kittens, or who were, for various reasons, no longer able to care for the cats any longer. One was abandoned in my neighbourhood (by someone who discovered that owning a cat takes work) and made the rounds from house to house (mooching beds and food like a champion) through the white-trash central complex of town-houses where I live for nearly 3 weeks before she moved in with me permanently.

I gave up my last two to a friend with a farm when I was supposed to be moving into a house my sister had bought. Her kids have allergies, so pets in the house was out. The house deal fell through, one of the cats was killed by a coyote, and the other was so well settled in I left her with Guy.

Life then got rather complicated for a while, and I resisted getting another cat (I am actually thinking 2 kittens) until I felt a bit more in control. I feel almost in control now, and I am really starting to miss having another living and breathing thing in my home. For a long time I have wanted a pair of Abyssinians (ruddy variant), but I also have a weakness for grey and black cats, and as much as I love the look of the Abyssinians, I would be happier giving a home to some cats who needed homes.

All that being said, here are some photos of my babies (apologies for the quality):

Me at 24 with one of my first cats. I named her Gandalf (I had just read Lord of the Rings), but my sister took one look at Gandalf's skinny 2 month old self and said "That's not a cat--it's a rat." and Gandalf very quickly became 'The Rat'. It was all she would ever answer to. (I am sure my sister's constant exhortations of 'Here, Rat. Here Rat.' had nothing to do with it.) An amazingly sweet tempered but rather stupid animal, she converted almost-ex from dogs to cats.

The Rat died of a heart attack when I was away on business at just a few months short of 20.

Before The Rat died, when she was about 15, the wife of one of the professors in the computing science department had found a stray kitten (only about 5 or 6 weeks old) in the alley beside their house and had adopted it. Her husband turned out to be very allergic to cats, and she was desperate to find a good home for it. The minute I found out this kitten was grey, I said I would take it. And this is how we got Luke.

Luke was a rocket scientist of a cat, gentle and affectionate as grey cats tend to be. (He demanded games of fetch from almost-ex every morning while Brent was having breakfast. I had made little balls from left over yarn for the cats to play with and Luke would throw the thing increasingly harder and harder at Brent's feet until Brent picked it up and threw it for Luke to fetch back.) We had to take the garbage out of the house whenever we had corn on the cob, or we would wake up the next moring to find all the corn cobs had been dragged under the buffet in the dining room and gnawed on. The only thing more unusual in cat tastes that I had ever run across was a cat of my sister's who had a passion, bordering on mania, for cantaloupe, and The Rat, who could not be trusted if date bran muffins were anywhere in the house.

About 6 months after we adopted Luke, Brent was away at a conference overseas. Luke was still playful, and The Rat was getting too old to be pestered: I wanted to get Luke a friend, so when I went to pick Brent up at the bus station, I greeted him with a present, Sophie, a 5 week old tortoiseshell from the Humane Society (found wandering in the road much as Luke had been). She barely covered the palm of my hand she was so tiny. She and Luke (pictured above) were the greatest of friends: there were rarely apart.

Very shortly after we got Sophie, The Rat died. A few months later, Luke got very sick (enlarged heart) and we had to have him euthanized. We were both devastated by this, and after not very much conversation, and in complete agreement, we decided to head off to the Humane Society for another cat.

When we got there, there was a grey male, a couple of years younger than Luke had been and the spitting image of Luke in both physical appearance and sweet nature (not quite the brains, but almost). In the cage next to him was a beautiful little 6 week old tabby. We took both, and they were even closer friends that Luke and Sophie had been. We named the gray male Matthew. I wanted to name the little tabby Marcia (Matthew, Marcia, Luke ... I would only need one more cat to complete The Joke, but Brent didn't find it as hysterically funny as I did). We toyed with Olivia, but settled on Kylie.

.....to be continued.....