Pets

First, Marmie (who has just passed away at the age of 14). Another huge thank you to everyone who posted in her eulogy thread this past few days. I'm just now finally getting over the head- and face-ache I developed from all the crying I did, along with my wife. I hadn't been that upset since my mother passed away 9 years ago.

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Next, Calis. This one is one of my wife's two original cats, which she got as litter mate kittens on October 4, 2000. He will turn 12 this August. His brother got outside and somehow vanished in a matter of minutes a number of years ago. His name was Tristan and we miss him terribly.

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Then we have Shakey, who is a stray we adopted after my mother passed away in October of 2003. He lived outside, and may very well have been the former tenants' cat, because he acted like our apartment was his. We moved into the apartment a few months prior to that, and he was horribly thin and malnourished in the extreme Las Vegas summer heat. While my mother was still alive, she didn't want a fourth cat in the apartment, so we kept him alive by giving him food and ice water every day until we could bring him in. He barely stayed a member of our furbaby family, because for weeks after we let him inside he had a habit every night of scratching at the bedroom window or the sliding glass door in the living room, and meowing loudly and incessantly. It took throwing his ass back out twice, as well as locking him in the bathroom all night with the fan and a radio going in there to drown out his caterwauling for nearly two weeks, to get him to simmer down enough to keep him. If we had resorted to tossing him back out a third time, that would have been the end. We figure he was born sometime in 2002, because he was fully grown when we got him but still obviously very young. So, he's roughly 10 years old now. Here is Shakey, buddying up with Calis.

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Taz is another stray we adopted. We couldn't help it because she got so in our faces the evening we met her. My wife and I were riding our bikes home to our apartment after work, and as we approached our building out in the parking lot, Taz stepped out from between a couple of cars and looked at us meowing while we were still a good 20 yards away. We slowed down and got off our bikes, and Taz let us pick her up. She was still a kitten but mostly grown, and she also had an injured claw. We took her into our apartment and isolated her from the other cats for a day. She spent that 24 hours screaming her indignation over being locked up, plus knowing that there were mystery kittehs on the other side of the door. It was hilarious to watch when Shakey and Taz actually ended up playing their own version of 'patty cake' from opposite sides of the door, swatting each other's paws from the underside. Once we let Taz out into the general population, she continued to growl and grumble at everyone, including sitting at the common food bowl and grumbling while she was eating, enough to scare everyone else away from their food until she was done. Another classic she pulled was walking around the entire perimeter of our mattress while we were in bed, grumbling the whole way around. We both reached out to pet her and try to calm her down, but she just had to have that lap around the bed, and then when she had made it all the way around she just jumped off and away to grumble at something else. She no longer grumbles, but she's just one huge cat, and she loves to pick up a cat toy, dirty sock or whatever is convenient and carry it all over the apartment in her mouth like a baby, and she'll meow plaintively the whole time. Sooooo cute!

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Finally, our newest addition, Sammy. This one was brought to our apartment just over a year ago, by neighbors who saw him out in the side street which runs along our apartment complex, and they claimed that he had been nearly hit by a car. "Did we want him?" So my wife, who had answered the door, brought this beautiful kitten back to the bedroom. I thought the last thing we needed was a fifth cat, but the thought of him getting run over by a car for real caused me to cave in. He was maybe 4 months old at the time, which meant his birthday is probably about November, 2010. Sammy isn't the type who likes to be held for more than a minute or so (we've gotten him up to a minute from being completely antsy when you picked him up at all in the beginning), but he will cuddle up to you all the time on his terms. His favorite game is to play a highly unique and complex form of 'fetch' with plastic grocery bags which we tie into tight little balls, and sometimes wrap with a bit of velcro ribbon to give them more weight and heft. He will come up to us with a 'ball', meowing and brushing against our legs, or jumping up on the back of our chair or on the table, with a 'ball' in his mouth, signaling that he is ready for play time. We throw his 'ball' down the hallway like good hoomans, and then he will either bring it straight back to us for another round, or first he'll divert into the bathroom where he 'washes' the 'ball' in the tub drain area (where we always keep water lightly dripping because most of the cats love drinking fresh water from the faucet, or to get help grooming there) before bringing back this sopping wet tied-up plastic bag. And he'll do this continuously for upwards of an hour sometimes! He's now about 1 1/2 years old, and has really grown from a 5 pound terror kitten into the 14 pound Sammy we know and love now.

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And finally, a group shot of all five of them taken a few months ago on the pile of quilts that passes for our current bed.

From left to right: Sammy, Taz, Marmie, Calis, Shakey.

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