So, you may or may not know (or remember) that my boy cat, Blackjack, had a bad brush with a urinary blockage back in the summer and I came THIS close to losing him. He’s good now. Thank you. Thank Bast. He’s on a special diet and everything but he’s there, curling up in the crook of my arm as I read for a while every night before i go to bed, purring like a furry little steam engine. He’s my cuddle cat. He hasn’t got meowing quite down – he began life as a street cat and didn’t get human-infested until too late to learn to communicate like that, I suspect – so his meows tend do be sotto voce, or they sound like somebody is strangling a goat. He literally bleats sometimes. He also snores, I’ve never had a cat that snored before. It usually ends up by my losing it because of “teh kewt’ and snorgling him (until he bleats). God, i love that little criter.

My other cat is a dignified old lady (who will turn 18 this Christmas) who has never really been “a kitten”: She’s what you might call an old soul, if such a thing exists in cats. She is a LADY. She is demanding. She is very much in charge of this household. She also has an incredibly hard to believe bent to sleeping  with all four feet tucked away under the oil heater in the office and I am damned if I know how she doesn’t burn her paws to blisters.

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