The Family

Okay! Okay! I know that some people have as much compassion for "pet pages" as they do for pages about that purple dinosaur, Barney. But, hey, I didn't ask you to wander into my personal interest page. Your browsing was entirely in your hands, and you chose to proceed anyway.

Karen and I love both dogs and cats; we've had a number of each. While we were in college, we decided that we needed a low maintenance, self cleaning, pre-potty trained pet that was somewhat larger than a guinea pig.

Now don't laugh, but at the time, our pet rat, Rambo, had just died. (Yes, he did say rat!) When he died, we went in search of a new pet at the local pet store. The rats were $2.50, but the cats were FREE! No brainer, right?

Well, aside from occasionally finding them hanging from the upholstery or eating the tips of the spider plants, the journey into cat ownership has been great. There's nothing like being woken up at 2:00 AM by a cat who's having a running fit, (otherwise known as 'turbo cat'). It sure is a heck of a lot easier than walking the dog at eleven o'clock on a rainy night. Just ask me, we also have a black lab.

Anyway, below is a quick introduction to our 'family'. We hope you'll enjoy meeting them. All of our animals are clowns and enjoy posing for the camera. (Click on the "thumbnail's" for the larger pictures.)

This is Shelby, named after the high performance Ford Mustangs of the late sixties. Yes, this is an odd way to name a cat, but it's a cool name and it sounded like a neat idea at the time. My only regret is that now we can't name our first child 'Shelby'. Anyway, this was the cat we picked over the $2.50 rat, and truth be known, she still considers herself an 'only cat'. Her favorite pastimes are getting brushed, beating up the dog, and running like a lunatic through the house.

Before we got Katy, Shelby was a fanatic about playing fetch. She would fetch those little plastic 'security rings' that you pull off the caps of milk jugs. If she decided she wanted to play when you were asleep, she would gently place the ring in your hand. If that didn't wake you up, she'd stand on your chest and drop it in your face. As a result, she spent more than a few nights locked in the bathroom where she would unroll the toilet paper for us.

Shelby is getting older though and currently has to have three heart pills a day. That doesn't slow her up though, just ask the dog.

This is Katy, which we believe is Irish for good luck. She's the cuddly one who's never happy unless someone is holding her. At night, she pushes me with her front paws to get me to roll onto my back so she can cuddle. If I ignore her, she puts her nose to my ear and lets loose a loud "MEOW!" It works. Her favorite pastimes are bird watching, sleeping under the covers, and ,of course, cuddling. Her favorite movie is The Bear which she watched from start to finish without blinking.

Everybody thinks Katy is spoiled because she only drinks filtered water. If anyone else (especially the dog) drinks out of her personal water dish, she wanders around crying until someone gets her a fresh bowl. She likes cold water best, but you better not put ice cubes in it; it makes her paw cold trying to fish those tricky things out.

Once, she was cuddling on my lap, and the dog, doing what comes naturally to a dog, sniffed the cat's butt. Doing what comes naturally to a cat, she turned around, hissed, and smacked him on the nose. Hearing the commotion, Shelby hops off the bed where she's been sleeping, runs down the hallway, down the stairs, into the living room, and smacks the dog. The cat motto in our house is apparently, "Anything to smack the dog."

We lost the baby of the family, Rita, to kidney disease in July of 1998. She meant so much to us that I couldn't bear to remove her from the web site.

She was born on 'Earth Day' in 1990 under the bathroom sink of our basement apartment. Hurricane Hugo had come through earlier in the year and forced a stray, who we named 'Cleo', into our carport. Cleo had two litters in our bathroom, one of which was conceived on top of my 1969 Mercury Cougar convertible. Less than a month after we had Cleo fixed, she left us to go live with another family. Rita was the runt of the litter and the last to catch on to all of the aspects of being a cat. Her favorite pastimes were getting her tummy itched, testing guerrilla warfare tactics on Shelby, and eating kitty treats. No one in this world was a stranger to Rita. If you came into our home, you were welcomed in her heart (and also welcomed to do a bit of tummy itching.)

You can't really tell from the picture, but she had one blue eye and one green eye, (the blue one was her right one). No, she was not deaf (she could hear a bag of cat treats being opened a mile away) nor was she blind, which, we were told, is a common characteristic for this eye color combination. She was, however, just a little slow in the thinking department.

Rita was actually the reason we stopped feeding our pets canned food. Rita had an odd way of eating canned food, especially the "chunky" type. She would take a claw, spear a single morsel, examine it carefully, then either decide to eat it, or flip her paw to rid it of the offense. After she'd decide she was done eating, the ceiling, the walls, and the floor would be covered with her "leftovers".

Okay, now we come to...the dog! Karen and I were taking an evening walk through our neighborhood when we heard the most pitiful crying sound. There, in the driveway to a home that had been for sale and unoccupied for a year, was a box. My wife, keeper of the world's softest heart, ran to the box and found a some torn up newspaper, a torn box of dog food, and a puppy. You could have held the little dog in one hand and still had room for him to chase his tail.

I tried to get her to find a home for him, but when I came home one evening and the two of them (my wife and the puppy) were sound asleep together on the couch, I knew I'd lost.

Well, the puppy grew. (They tend to do that when you feed them.) He turned into a pretty darn good dog who can yank a frisbee out of the air like it's nobody's business. His pastimes are frisbee, (actually it's anything that involves fetching) inspecting the garbage, and getting thumped by the cats. (Sorry, but we don't have many digital pictures of him yet.)

Click on the "thumbnails" for more pictures of the cats.

No, I didn't move the covers, did you?

No, Daddy, you cannot have your coveralls back.

Does anybody have any Static Guard?

Well, how do I look?

The purr-fect lookout.

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