Furballs

I think that certain members of my family believe with full certainty that I will grow up to be your Great Aunt Myrtle. You remember your Great Aunt Myrtle, don't you? She's the one who lived in the small town, was the possessor of the One True Original Fruitcake, and owned about thirty cats. Yes, -that- Great Aunt Myrtle.

It's the cats, really, isn't it? I don't live in a small town, after all, and I'd be bored if I did. Most tellingly, I despise fruitcake. Intensely. What a waste of green artificial cherries.

Yeah, it's the cats. I -like- the cats. They're fascinating, and it's rewarding for me to be able to help them. If you knew me well enough, and you were to ask me what I would do if I won the lottery, I'd tell you that I'd build a huge cat palace, with rooms where colonies of rescued cats could live in harmony with one another until I was able to find loving, responsible homes for all of them. Yeah, that's what I'd tell you, because I'm a big softie like that.

But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, I know that I'd have to hire a full-time staff to run the cat rescue palace, and I would live someplace nearby but very separate, where I would have a rotating menagerie of cats to play with and even more full-time staff to play with them. Because really? Cleaning llitterboxes is not my thing.

And I can tell you from experience that two cats is plenty to keep me occupied. It helps that I have two wacky little cats.

Take Liam, for instance. He's about 8 1/2 months old and weighs well over ten pounds already. He doesn't know a stranger, and he's not scared of anything. Anything. He tries to stick his paw under the vacuum cleaner when it runs, and if he's in the bathroom while I'm taking a shower, he tries to climb in with me. He's a goofy boy, but his crowning glory is that he adores dogs. I don't know how this happened. He was never around dogs as a kitten, and I don't own a dog, but he thinks they're the coolest things. He runs up to them and rubs up against them. Hysterical.

Ani Banani, on the other hand, does yoga. She's not nearly as confident as Liam in everything she does, but she's a bit of a clown at the same time. She does everything with a solemn expression, be it eating, purring, or playing. She has one favorite toy; the others she doesn't seem to care much about. It's a plastic wand with an elastic string and a fur mouse attached. She adores it and performs all sorts of acrobatics trying to catch it, but she looks painfully serious the entire time. She's very protective of the mousie, growling when Liam approaches her and tugging on it when I hold the wand, hoping to pull it away from me. Her funniest trait, though, is her sink fetish. It started early on, when she would jump up to the bathroom sink to drink the water from the faucet. That's not so unusual in cats -- nor is sitting in the basin of the sink. But Ani, when she sees someone go remotely close to the bathroom, goes running up to jump on the sink, then makes these funny little mooing sounds until that person comes and pets her as she stands on the sink.

With idiosyncracies like these two have, how could I ever find time to keep more cats?