23 thoughts on “The Best Things in Life are Free but Eat a lot

  1. You two crazy kids are twice as crazy as my wife and I have been.

    But we have a dog, so maybe we win after all.Report

  2. You and Maribou must have amazing willpower to have only ended up with four.  I’m afraid my wife and I would have had them all instead of just the three we have now. 

    Cats are way cool.  Except around the Christams tree.  Total maniacs.

     Report

    1. It was much more difficult to take Socks to the Petsmart to have him adopted than I thought it would be when we were first setting up the raccoon traps. (We visited him every day until he got adopted.) (Yeah. I know.)Report

  3. Oh, I should note: Maribou and I collaborated on this post. (You may be able to tell where she wrote a particular part and where I wrote a particular part.)

    I wrote the rough draft, she rewrote it, I rewrote one paragraph, and then we posted it up here.

    Any mistakes are mine, anything particularly awesome or moving is hers.Report

  4. Nice post, and a happy everything to you and yours.  Also I would like to thank everyone here for all the words from the past year.Report

  5. I’m madly jealous. The husband is allergic, the condo is small, I am both lazy but obsessed with clean floors and posessed of a very keen sense of smell. These factors together make actually owning a cat untenable. But I adore cats. You little darlings look like little darlings.Report

    1. The little darlings are much more rambunctious than they appear. It’s just that while one is yelling “Jeez Louise! You guys need to knock it off!”, one is less likely to reach for a camera.Report

    1. Maddy left us last year.  She had a gangrenous tumor on her mouth, it was starting to impact her ability to eat, and we were about to move.  Rather than subject her to the stress of the move, when she wasn’t going to last much longer, Kitty took her to the vet to do what vets do when these things happen.

      Condolences, Blaise.  Cancer sucks.Report

  6. What a sweet story. Thank you for sharing it. When I met my husband, I had two cats, who’d been with me for about ten years. When I moved to Chicago to live with him, we used to go out to a no-kill shelter in Deerfield to visit the dogs. We weren’t allowed to have dogs in our apartment and my husband likes dogs. On one visit, my husband and stepson, who was about nine at the time (he’s now 21–time flies) spotted this big grey Persian cat. My husband and stepson just had to have him and pretty much begged me. I pointed out that Emma and Bubba would likely not welcome another cat into the household, but it didn’t matter. They wanted him and I didn’t want to be the bad guy.

    Thus, Fuzznik, aka the Fuzzy Man, came into our lives. As I predicted, Bubba and Emma did not take kindly to him. It took Emma more than a year before she could walk by him without hissing. Poor Fuzz obviously needed a friend of his own, which is how Mali came into our lives. Balance was restored.

    A few months later, we acquired a place of our own and started thinking about adopting a dog. We’d visited the rescue place in Deerfield a week earlier and spotted a sweet spaniel and decided to go back to adopt her. Somebody else had beaten us to her.  So, we went to the cat room to visit the cats and there she was–the most beautiful cat I’d ever seen–china blue eyes, long silky fur, flame-colored points, and little white socks on each of her paws. Turns out she was a Birman. She walked over to me, rubbed against me, and mewed–clearly a cat who knew how to play to her audience. I was in love. And so we acquired Shana, which means beautiful in Hebrew. Cats being cats, she decided my husband was her one and only. She’d be nice to the rest of us when she felt like it, but him she adored. The minute he got out of bed in the morning, she was at his side rubbing against him, purring and chattering away.

    And that’s how we ended up with five cats, a number that held steady for several years. Things do happen. My kudos to you for making a place in your home for three feral cats and a rescue. All of you are lucky.Report

    1. Colorado Law states that people are not allowed to own more than 4 cats.

      As a Libertarian, I usually would go off into a rant about how, absent evidence of harm, it is none of the government’s business how many cats I own.

      As it stands, I find this is an excellent shield to hide behind. “Baby, they’re all beautiful cats but it’d be illegal for us to adopt one of them.”

      (The downside of that particular gambit is that I think that this will mean that we’ll be a four-cat household until doomsday.)Report

        1. I don’t understand how you can do it with five.

          Four cats is easy:

          One can, split into quarters, for breakfast.

          Two cans, split into halves, for dinner.

          Two litter boxes on THIS floor. Two litter boxes on THAT floor.

          Five would mean that you actually had to do math.Report

  7. We fed them mostly dry food, then split a can between four at dinner (Mali didn’t like wet food).

    As for litter boxes, when we lived in our condo in Evanston, we had an upstairs litter box and a downstairs one, cleaned once or often twice daily. When we lived in a 1000 sq. foot two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica (along with my stepson), we had one in each bathroom. I know the formula is one box per cat plus additional box, but we never had the room. Now that we’re down to two cats (who don’t like each other), we have more space and three boxes. It’s much easier.

    Much as I love cats, I don’t think I’d want five again unless we had plenty of space for them.Report

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