Living with cats

Here are our two cats doing what they are best at doing. The fluffy ball of blue-gray fur on the left is our older cat Rosie and the short haired black and white one on the right is Henry. Rosie is over twelve years old and is in charge of the entire house. Her jobs are to eat, sleep, hide when anyone comes to visit and use the litter box at the worst possible time. We already had a female cat (who has since died at the age of seventeen) when we went to get Rosie and were thinking of getting a male cat to keep Elsie company. But Rosie had been rejected by her mother and seemed to be terrorized by her brother and hid behind my wife to get away from him. So how could we resist? She is a Persian but doesn't have the squished up face that most Persians do. She's very nice but, after all these years, is still a little afraid of us. She reminds me of a lot of people who had traumatic events in their life and never seem able to recover from them. We all have different handicaps in life and that is Rosie's little handicap.

Henry, our younger cat, is in charge of attacking us when we least expect it and keeping us up at night by chasing after imaginary beasts and making little half-grunt and half-purr sounds. We got him from a cat shelter and picked him because he reminded us of our old cat Elsie who was also black and white. Elsie acted more like a dog (she liked to lick us and used to come out and observe any company we'd get - she'd even sit and watch the repairmen that came to fix things). When my wife reached in to pet Henry in his cage, he licked her hand. That was it. We had to have him. He keeps Rosie active and entertains us all. Henry's little handicap is that he can't seem to purr anymore. He purred up a storm when he was younger (he will be three soon) but gradually lost the ability to purr. You can hear him trying to purr but nothing comes out.

Both cats are fascinated with our dog, Charlie, but they haven't seen him since we've been temporarily living in my mother-in-law's house because she doesn't want the dog in the house nor the cats upstairs. So, we'll be having a big animal reunion when we move into the new house.

This has been a pretty boring post to anyone who isn't in our family. But you need to know these things for later posts to make sense.