Cats Herd You

It’s Newton, getting his easy on while keeping an eye on things in the neighborhood.

Not just that, he’s watching for the head peep to return from her adventure in the catmobile. We heard she was going to be be two-timing us with some other cats.

She’d better not be cheating on us with other cats. We might change the locks before she gets back. Unless she brings treats.

Gather around, kitties. Newton wants to tell you about what the head peep is doing today.

She has been really excited this week because she is planning to use the catmobile today.

This ties into the head peep finally joining Facebook after holding out for so long. She has been using it to get the information she needs to take a drive to help some cats. How? She’s driving a leg of a cat transport for the Cute Transport Network, helping get kitties to their new forever homes. Nine kitties are going to be riding with her in the catmobile.

We should have photos from the adventure for you on Monday. Until then, enjoy your Caturday!

Ashton is looking out of the window.

Something is coming. Do you know what it is? That’s right, everyone. It’s almost the weekend!

If she waits right here, then the weekend can’t sneak past without our noticing, right? She insists she can only wait until dinnertime, then someone else will have to take over watching for the arrival of Caturday. A girl has to have her priorities.

Like most bloggers, the head peep had cats long before she had a blog… or before there were even things called blogs. We thought we would take this opportunity to introduce you to some of them.

Not long after the head peep moved out on her own, she got a pair of cats from a neighbor’s cat’s litter, Cyrano and Scooter. Cyrano was black, and Scooter was a brown tabby.

Most of the photos of Cyrano are of him as a dignified senior cat.

Cyrano was a true gentleman, and he was also responsible for teaching the next generation of cats their manners. Perhaps that’s why we are a bit rough and tumble; we never had a mentor like Cyrano to teach us how to behave.

One of the very few photos she has of Scooter showed a bit of his fun-loving personality.

We’ll pause here while you squee over that spotted kitten tummy.

Scooter was a cat who knew what he liked. When he didn’t like a visitor, he would walk up to them and hiss, then stalk off, tail in the air. He was an extraordinary hunter, who quickly discovered that he could bring his quarry into the house, which caused quite an uproar when he would bring his prey into the bed where the head peep was sleeping!

Then, one day, a hungry, filthy kitten with enormous feet wandered up to the house and became part of the family, too. Once she was cleaned up, it turned out she wasn’t as dirty as originally thought. She was a marbled, dilute tortiseshell, who was named Sassy, short for Sasquatch because of those enormous feet.

Sassy was outgoing and friendly, and she never met a person she didn’t think wasn’t a potential source of treats.

While she was just six months old and scheduled for spay surgery, she escaped the house while in heat. As you know, it only takes getting out once, and along came a litter of six kittens. Four were adopted out, but Radcliffe and Rhett remained. Both of the brothers were gray and white, but Radcliffe inherited his mother’s extra toes.

When you look up “scaredy cat” in the dictionary, you’ll find Radcliffe’s photo. He was a wonderfully sweet cat once he warmed up to you, but he preferred not to find out whether strangers were in the house to eat cats or just to visit. Many frequent visitors insisted that he was just a figment of the head peep’s imagination, because he was never seen.

His brother Rhett was a gray and white cat, too.

Where Radcliffe got all the toes, Rhett got all the brains. If Rhett had gotten the polydactyl thumbs, too, no cans of stinky goodness would have been safe! He was a brave, sweet cat who adored being close to the people he loved. Toward the end of his life, he slept with his chin propped up on the head peep’s head every single night.

Around this time, a roof repairman at the head peep’s workplace found a litter of kittens on the roof of the office building. The head peep took two of the black kittens, who she named Louie and Talia.

Louie was a mischief-loving cat who made mayhem as a kitten when the head peep had to bring him back and forth to the office while he was being weaned from a bottle. He took one look at Cyrano and had a mancat crush, Cyrano remained his favorite thing in the world even after he had grown to be nearly twice Cyrano’s size.

Some of you who have been reading our blog a while might remember Talia, who was a senior cat when this blog began. This old, scanned photo of Talia showed how much she loved Sunday mornings with the newspaper. She was a cat who liked to snoopervise everything.

One of the striking things about all of the photos collected through the years is how rarely Cyrano was photographed alone. Most of the photos have either Louie or Talia in them. Or both!

This old, scanned photo (pardon the quality) shows Rhett, Radcliffe, Louie and Talia all cuddling together. The head peep misses having cats who would snuggle together like this. We just don’t like each enough to do that.

That concludes our little trip down cat memory lane. We hope that more of you will share stories of your previous cats, too.