Modern Vespa

How does s/he deal with you playing the guitars?

When my brother was staying with us for a year when he moved back from Malta, his girlfriend (now wife) came for a visit while she auditioned for the Masters in Performance degree at TCU and Texas Tech. When she'd practice her viola in the house, the cats would run and hide as far from her as they could get.

They are absolutely indifferent to my playing, and they act like they're deaf, which they're not, as they can hear a treat bag being opened from five miles away.

One of the cats we used to have with us liked the sound of my guitars, and would try to hop into my lap when I played, purring and rubbing all the way.

I don't play particularly loud, always use a 'finger-picky-folky' style, usually on an acoustic/electric nylon-string semi-classical type of guitar.

I never play the guitars seen hanging on the wall
above the couch.

New guy here. My cat Squeak.

SomeGuy,

Very unique coloring pattern on that rascal. I think the cat looks great.

We are kind of boring, my cat, my adult daughter's cat, my adult son's cat are all Tuxedos.

Bob Copeland

Thanks Bob. She showed up in the back yard a few years ago and never left.

A white nose on a black cat? That's pretty awesome.

Cheers!

Meet Wednesday! We picked her up yesterday (Wednesday) from the shelter.

Congrats!

Tortoise?

Aren't they almost always female?

The calicos are always female. Ours was very unique, we miss her.

Someone was very envious when he learned about the price disparity betwixt his food and my shoes....

So yesterday I posted here about our new cat Wednesday. Last night while watching "Griselda" my wife looked at her phone and saw a post from someone on a local FB page from someone who was looking for her cat and had just found out yesterday it had been adopted.

Imagine our shock when the attached picture was Wednesday or going by her real name Hammy.

We will be contacting the shelter today to get help and to return the cat to it's owner as long as she has evidence it is actually her cat. I am about 90% convinced it is though. I just could not keep a cat that belongs to someone else who obviously loves her.

There is no scarcity of cats needing homes so we will try again after our upcoming vacation.

Well, that's an unexpected twist. But you're right... at least you don't have to worry about taking care of the cat when you're gone....

OK another twist. We made an offer to return Wednesday through the shelter. The owner decided against taking it back confident she is in a good home. She even deleted her fb post that started this whole thing. People are weird. Anyway, she is staying with us!

Yes! Ment to be. Got to admit that pissed me off hearing the original owner doesn't want their pet.🤨

Sounds like Rob knows. She was a stray so I don't know about others. This one is certainly female.

Relaxing

We do that here too now n then.

Aaaand someone had a successful basement hunt tonight. His first kill. Bayek is now a full member of the Assassins.

Still buddies!

The one with the stripy face is my fav.

That would be Gracie, the three-year-old half-sister to the sealpoint male, Graham.

They were born feral one month apart, from the same playboy father, but different mothers.

A requirement for their adoption was that they had to be together, in a home with no children or dogs.

Gracie...

Our Cat "Jack" will be 15 years old this August 15th. This rascal may out live me. I think they live longer if they are total house cats and do not go outside to get infected fighting with local varmints. Just an opinion.

Bob Copeland
Minnesota

This lens was a fantastic purchase.

Lily doing her Bruce Willis impression from Die Hard

My wife and I have had 10 cats in the almost 22 years we've been married. For their entire lives with us, they've all been indoor only cats. We also feed them high-quality food.

We each had two when we got married in 2002.

Dirk - wife's Siamese cat. He was only with us for a short time due to kidney failure. He was 8.
Arianna - wife's Dilute Calico cat. She adopted her when she was 1 year old in 1995. She lived to be 20 (old age).
Lorenzo - my Butterscotch Tabby cat. I found him as a kitten while gassing up my truck at 1am back in 1992. He lived to be 16 (kidney failure).
Lance - my Siamese cat. I got him as a kitten that had been found at a car dealership in 1991. He lived to be 20 (old age).
Jackson - our standard Tabby cat. We adopted him at the age of about 1 in 2014. He lived to be 9 (brain tumor or neurological issue).
Leonie - brown tabby. We adopted her the same day we adopted Jackson. She was a 9-month old kitten and had heath issues during her formative months, so while she was a sweet girl, she didn't know how to be a cat. The other cats targed her for bullying, and she was miserable all the time. We ended up rehoming her back to the no-kill shelter we adopted her from when she was about 3 or 4 years old.
Digby - Nebelung. Adopted as a kitten in 2014.
Gemma - Dilute Tortoiseshell. Adopted as a kitten the same day as Digby in 2014.
Toby - Orange Tabby. Adopted at 2 years old in 2022.
Walter - Maine Coon. Adopted at about 8 or 9 years old on the same day as Toby in 2022.

Pic tax:

We visited the grandkids' cats this week. Harvey, Bacon, and Basement Cat. Basement Cat was a stray who wouldn't come out of the basement for a long time after she came to stay. She, Harvey, and Bacon are the friendliest of cats now.

One year of this hooligan terrorising the neighbourhood

The shrine of bygone kitties...

That's a great looking cat. Looks like he'd happily smack down a great dane.

Dang! Just look at the whiskers on that little shit..

That expression seems to be "I'm in charge here! Prove me wrong!"

the entire width of the "tv cabinet", 2 shelves on a nearby bookshelf, and the entire little shelf on the stairs from the main floor to the second are the shrine(s) of bygone ferrets.

i'm convinced it'll double before i exit this plane.

she already knows the cat's ashes go with me when i (inevitably) go first.

Eye on the ball! You already know you've got a one of a kind with Sir! You're here to stay, don't let me down. Get that knee fixed. Looking forward to your next forays! Proud of your service! Nothing is free.😉 Carry on.

And what a year it's been!

Was thinking about my past cats earlier, and thought I'd share a bit about them.

I've had 12 cats as an adult.

Velcro was my first cat. He was all black, and as a kitten he made a noise with his tongue that sounded like velcro being pulled apart, hence the name. He was born in 1989 from the only litter of my brother's cat. He died in 1993 of unknown reasons. I have no pics of him. He was a sweet kitty, but was allergic to fleas, so his fur would fall out in the summer.

Next was Lance. A friend of my girlfriend found him and his sister at a car lot as kittens in 1991. She could only handle one of them, and offered the other to us. She told us that they were both female kittens. My GF named the kitten Guinevere, because she was a Red Point Siamese, but the points were very light. We took her to the vet to be spayed, and when we returned to pick her up the vet said that he couldn't spay Guinevere, he had to neuter Lancelot. So his name became Lancelot, or Lance for short. He was the friendliest cat. And he adored me.

A couple weeks before I moved in with my GF in 1992, I found an orange/butterscotch tabby kitten at a gas station at 3am while on my way to my GFs house. I couldn't leave it there, so I picked it up and brought it with me. He had been sitting at the base of a fuel pump, screaming at the world. As soon as I picked him up, he started purring. He sat next to me the whole drive. We locked him in the bathroom with food, water, and litter to keep him from Lance. He was filthy from being at a gas station. The next morning my GF woke me early to show me the kitten. He had spent the night bathing himself, and had become the cleanest, most fluffy kitten ever. We knew we couldn't keep him, so we didn't name him. A couple months later, having had no luck finding a home for him, we realized we needed to name him. At the time we were big fans of Silk Stalkings on the USA Network. The main characters were Sgt. Lance and Sgt. Lorenzo. We already had Lance, so we named the kitten Lorenzo. Lorenzo turned out to be a one-person cat, and I was that person. When I married my wife, he would tolerate her if she gave him treats. If I went to bed before her, he'd jump up and snuggle next to me to be petted. As soon as she'd come into the room he'd get up and leave.

Lance was the Alpha between the two of them, and Lorenzo didn't mind at all. Lorenzo would find a comfy spot to sleep, and Lance would see him and probably thought, "that does look like a comfy spot, I think I'll sleep there, too," and would lay down on top of Lorenzo. Lorenzo would just shift and make room. Lance wasn't very bright, while Lorenzo was very smart. We'd put up a baby gate to keep Lance out of certain rooms. Lorenzo would simply jump over it (or on top of it and then down). Lance would just watch him do that and be sad that he was trapped.

Lorenzo was very happy to be wherever he was. I'd frequently walk into the kitchen and see him sleeping on his back in the middle of the floor. He'd wake up and just watch me, while still lying on his back.

Cats of the past, round 2.

I forgot to mention one of the cats I had.

At the time of Velcro's passing, my GF and I lived in a townhouse. We came & went through the back patio, because our covered parking spots were back there. One day we came home and found a stray had given birth to a litter of 4 or 5 kittens on our patio. Since it was late Fall and temperatures were dropping, we bought an igloo shaped doghouse for her, which she moved her kittens into. We would put food out for her/them. She was very skittish, and wouldn't come near us. Over time, there were only two kittens left. We'd like to think that other tenants claimed them. I came home one afternoon to find the mother in bad shape on the sidewalk between our patio gate and the parking spots. My GF and I gathered her up and raced to the 24-hour emergency vet up the road. They took her from us and went to work, but the damage was too great. We figure that she must have been crushed between the stop block and a car tire when someone pulled into their parking spot. Only one kitten was around at that point. It took a couple of weeks of patience on our part to finally get her used to us to be able to get her into the house. She was a sweet girl, but never really warmed up to us. She also had issues with the litter box. We named her Laurel, to keep the L name theme going. My GF and I broke up in '94, but remained roommates (she was looking for a husband, and I was NEVER going to get married - ironically, I've been married to my wife for almost 22 years, and my former GF is still single/never married). We ended up finding a 3-bedroom rent house to move to in 1995. When I moved out in 2001, I took Lance & Lorenzo, but not Laurel. I have no photos of Laurel.

When my wife and I met, we each had two cats. I had Lance & Lorenzo, she had Dirk and Arianna. We moved into a loft in April 2002, and got married that June. Dirk contracted pneumonia and developed kidney issues all in a short period of time, and ended up passing that November.

One of the things that made my wife realize that I was The One was how Arianna behaved around me. According to her, Arianna hated all men. But she came right up to me and purred and snuggled with me the first time I saw her. Arianna also had a litter box use issue - she wouldn't use it with litter in it. And if there was a rug or towel or any clothes on the floor, she'd pee on them. That's why we moved into a loft, we figured that it'd be easier to keep concrete or hardwood floors cleaner than carpeting. Over the years we discovered that we could put 2-3 layers of paper towels in the bottom of a litter box, and she'd use that. She was a very sweet kitty, and was very active, up until her final days. The last loft we lived in was on the 23rd floor of a former office building in Downtown Dallas. She loved sitting on the windowsill. When we moved into a rent house in Irving, she'd spend the day sitting in the window, watching the world. The Google Street View car caught a pic of her on one of their passes through the neighborhood.

I only have two photos of Dirk, and they're group shots with the other four cats (see second attached photo).

One interesting aspect of the blended clowder: They all played with each other differently. Lance & Lorenzo played by wrestling. Dirk and Arianna played by chasing. When Lance would try to play with Dirk, he'd want to wrestle, and Dirk wouldn't. Arianna would take offense to Lance's actions and would launch herself at him to protect Dirk. Lance & Arianna didn't get along until the last couple of years of Lance's life, when it was only the two of them. Lorenzo was such a compliant cat that he would play with Arianna by chasing with her.

I also found a photo of one of the cats we had when I was in High School. Sam was a 3rd or 4th generation of offspring from the first cat we ever had when I was a kid. He had been a farm cat, and when my parents split up and my dad moved us into town, we only had our dog, Poindexter. About a month after we moved, my (now former) step-mom showed up at our house with Sam. She'd found him with a severely broken leg, and took him to the vet. His thigh bone had been snapped in two, and had healed poorly. The vet said he'd never seen that injury in a live cat before - dead ones, yes, but not live ones. He said he'd be lucky to regain 10% use of the leg, and recommended he become a housecat, which is why she brought him to us. She had named him Sam, short for Sure Ain't Much. Within a year, I was unable to tell which leg had been broken. He'd come and go out the window and would hunt down squirrels and rabbits in the neighborhood.

Graham, being reassured after the carpet cleaning guys and all of their noisy equipment left

He's still wearing his 'google-eyes'...

more fisheye lens fun.

And the beat goes on.....

Always graceful