No, while it may be a building of some disrepair, and certainly of a great deal of disorganization, it is not a place of ill repute.
This is four-fifths of our children, clockwise from 9 o'clock, Angelica, Felicity, Elsa, and LionEl Tiger. I am using this diary to introduce you to our family, which is why we truly live in a cathouse.
Warning - photo intensive diary, so you may want to skip if on a dialup.
Let me continue by immediately introducing the final member of (and last addition to) our cat family, Cielito:
He is on a zafu, a Buddhist meditation cushion, as he contemplates the great outdoors to which he is not allowed to go (only LionEl gets to go outside officially, on a lead, although Elsa has managed to find her way. More about her later.
First an explanation. All of our darlings are rescued from one place or another. And they are generous enough to allow us to share their space.
A bit about the names. We have had many pets we have acquired since we got together. With the exception of the first, Cedric, a cat with all kinds of health problems, all have had "el" as part of their names. It started by accidend, with Wellington and Nelson, a pair of cats whose mother picked me out the day I had had to say goodbye to Cedric because of ill health: she looked exactly like him and came up and rubbed against me as I was walking home from Metro. In the subsequent conversation with her owner, I discovered she had a relatively new litter, of whom we took two. We later added other creatures, including our one dog, and all have had that syllable, so we have continued the pattern.
We got LionEl first. He was thrown out of a vehicle at the foot of someone walking a dog who uses the same veterinarian as do we, and that man thought of us. He has gone from being the junior cat among three to being the very tolerant senior member of the catfraternity. He is quite strong, but usually quite gentle. He has gone from being a tiny kitten to a large adult male, over 12 pounds. Very intelligent, he loves to sit before an open screened window or door:
and he is fascinated by his surroundings, as you can see as he examines a change in the pile of books on our stairway:
When LionEl had become our only cat, we decided to get him a companion. We went to an adoption fair intended to come back with one cat, and somehow wound up with three.
Elsa had been living in a woodpile out in the country, and according to our vet has given birth. But she likes to act like a kitten in one way. Her favorite thing to do is this:
if you have a rough blanket on you, she will come and nurse, while she kneads you through the blanket.
She is perhaps the brightest domestic animal I have ever known, even brighter than my late beloved Sheltie. There is no place in the house she cannot get. If there were a small hole in a window or a screen she would dart out and within minutes come back and present us with a dead vole. She pried off the grate to a return vent and merrily ran through the ductwork until I pulled it apart. If she walks into a room and one thing has changed since she was last there, she will notice it. When my sister in law stopped by for a visit for the first time in well over a year, Elas immediately recognized her. Perhaps you can perceive her intelligence in this photo:
or this one:
The golden girls, Angelica and Felicity, are a surprise - orange cats are almost always males, and when we met them, they were carrying male names, which our vet assured us was a mistake. Each has a nickname, Angelica answering to "Biddle" (leaves on the current would have to explain):
she does not have a mean bone in her body, is incredibly affectionate, and may be near-sighted - she does not attempt the leaps the other cats do. I sometimes call her "butterknife" because she (and her sister) are not as acute as the other three, and as my wife says, she is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she is still a wonderful cat.
Her sister Angelica has become known simply as "Shy" because she it, very intense, and still even after several years with us scares fairly easily.
I think she is gorgeous:
and she usually feels most secure when she can rub against or curl up next to Lion (short for LionEl):
Cielito has that name because there is a splash of white on his throat, like a star in a dark night sky. He is our most recent addition. Leaves fairly regularly drives back and forth to the Triangle in N C doing research on turning her dissertation into a book. She woudl regularly stop at a gas station just within Virginia. This guy was living in the gas station, and they took a real shine to one another. So he has joined us. He tends to be somewhat independent, and his social skills with other cats are not quite what they should be, although he does not have a mean bone in his body, and he does not get discouraged. He has a real personality:
By the way, Elsa is regularly on top of that pierced wood Indian screen, and Cielito decided to imitate her: right after I snapped this picture he jumped up to the top. But he weighs over ten pens, while she weighs just of 6, so he was not all that steady, and has not gone back up since.
Now you have met the family. Let me leave you with just a few more pictures, just so you can share our joy at how they brighten our lives.
Peace.