If you ever want proof that I'm an incurable sucker

...all you need to do is look at Rhett.

While living in Windsor I went with Sara one day to help her rescue a kitten who was sick and going to be put down. I was absolutely NOT going to go home with another animal. I was merely tagging along for the ride.

I came home an hour later having adopted Rhett.

He had been in a tiny 2x2x2 crate at the humane society for a few weeks already and was an older cat. When I walked past his crate he reached out with his paw (and claws). I was hooked literally and figuratively. I opened the door and he purred and meowed with all his might. He wriggled around in my arms like he was trying to make sure as many square inches of his body as was possible were touching me and being petted. He nearly fell out of my arms a few times. I don't think I've ever seen a creature who was more happy just to be held.

With fresh tooth marks on my hands and arms from his zealous love bites I gladly whipped out my debit card and decided I couldn't leave without him.*

I named him Rhett, but the name doesn't suit him at all. He's a Gilligan. He loves everyone and everything but isn't among the brainiacs of the animal world. He often sees a nail in the wall and thinks it's a spider and will pounce on it. Repeatedly. He bites things (and people) when he's hungry. If someone came into our house right now and paid attention to him he'd leave in a second to go live with them, and forget he ever lived here. Not maliciously or anything, he'd just be so excited he'd forget about us.

The twist, of course on this new plan was that Miss Scarlett (aka Miss. Hissy, Miss. Pissy, or Miss. Crankypants) already ruled the roost** at home. Thankfully I knew bringing Rhett home wouldn't be smooth so no great expectations.

His first few days Rhett lived in the TINY bathroom of my Windsor apartment. He was un-tutored which meant he was fond of spraying, as adult males do. It also meant the pink monster (or red rocket) would occasionally pop up when I was petting him. This led to me running from the bathroom a couple of times.

Scarlett spent the first two weeks on a stakeout outside the bathroom door, hissing and growling to welcome him. When he was finally released from the confines of the bathroom after a trip to the vet's, she spent the next months chasing him to beat him up for intruding on HER space.

Nearly two years later I catch him coming to see her when she's sleeping, hoping for a quick few licks on the head or someone to snuggle up to. She's still fond of biting his ear, but it's more of an affectionate bite now than an "I'm going to tear you to shreds, dummy" bite.

He was a skinny little cat with wiry, coarse hair when I got him. He's now a plump sausage shaped cat who still loves nothing more than to curl up on you, purring loudly, flailing wildly. He's a master at both breaking into bags of expensive diet cat food, and none-too-stealthily-but-very-persistently eating from the dogs' bowls. He goes after cat toys with such focus it's as though he's possessed. He loves sleeping like Big Bird, with his paws stretched over his head.

The moment I come home Rhett comes racing for the door, belly jiggling and meowing the whole way as though he's telling me about his day. When he gets within a few feet he usually flops on the floor and rolls around on his belly meowing. It's like he's doing an impression of bacon frying. He couldn't be happier. It's as though his brain has some wires mixed up which make him permanently happy, for no reason. There isn't a mean bone in his body or a mean thought in his head (Dave would correct me and say there are no thoughts in his head).

I'm so glad I ignored all common sense and didn't leave him at the shelter that day, almost two years ago now.

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*well, actually the shelter had a policy where you had to wait 24 hours before picking up an animal, and it was a Saturday so I actually did leave that day but came back on Monday to get him.

**if she could talk she'd point out it was her house.

***This fact also meant that the pink monster (aka red rocket) would show up if you pet him too much and made for some awkward moments with me running from the bathroom yelling EW!

Hearing things

Last night Dave and I were lying in bed (don't worry, I'm not going there, you can stop recoiling in fear) last night, and I heard a noise outside.

It was faint but repetitive, and we had the window open to get fresh air now that it's warm enough outside. It's nice to have a breeze and a whiff of fragrance from the blossoms on the crabapple tree in the back yard wafting into our bedroom.

I thought the noise we'd heard was a cat fight, and that thought was based on a good deal of experience.

When I was a kid we had this completely lovable lump of a cat named Shadow. He was our first family pet.*

My sister and I were really excited to be getting a cat. There were two all black kittens left from the litter, a boy and a girl. For some reason we wanted a male cat, though the reason why escapes me now.

We asked the usual questions of the farmer about whether they had been vaccinated (they hadn't) and what their personalities were like. My sister and I were just so excited we were going home with a cat we didn't care which one we left with so long as we left with one. My grandmother had lent us an old picnic basket for the trip home.

He was really tiny so my dad asked how old he was. The farmer thought a moment and replied the kitten was "four weeks and, let me see, I guess nine days old"** to which I quizzically piped up "Dad! Dad!! DAD! Doesn't he mean FIVE weeks and TWO days old?" I was promptly told to "keep quiet."

On the way home in our 1979 diarrhea brown Datsun (not the pretty blue one here, but like it only diarrhea brown with two doors) my sister and I argued over who would hold him in the back seat most of the ride home. The kitten mewed what was quite possibly the cutest meow I've ever heard at the top of this hill on a gravel road. We stopped at the co-op on the way home to get him some food. He was so tiny he fell asleep in my ten year old hands with room to spare.

Neither my sister nor I would go into Zellers with my dad to get a litter box or scoop for him, fearing that the kitten would end up loving the other more in the impressionable first hours he was ours. We were too excited to leave the kitten in the car anyway.

The debate about what to name him raged on the whole ride home, and that night. Someone suggested we name him "Chip" because the colour of his black fur looked like the colour of a chocolate chip when he was sitting in the sun.

I, however, was none too impressed with this name. In fact I was so distraught with the idea of naming him Chip that I lay awake in bed all night and ran into my parents' room early in the morning when I thought I had a better name for him. Lucky for all involved his name became Shadow and I was celebrated for what was such a creative name for the cat.***

Shadow was allowed outside but he rarely strayed from our yard. When he did, it often ended in him being beat up by other neighbourhood cats. Shadow was the kind of cat the squirrels approached without fear, and who would come in the house after being outside with sunflower shells all over his head. He seemed to like the company of the birds, and it never occurred to him he should have some interest in attacking and eating them. Shadow was lover and not a fighter his whole life and loved nothing more than basking on the patio slabs in the sun and getting belly rubs.

The sound I heard lying in bed last night sounded like the noise that sent everyone running outside to rescue Shadow from being beat up when I was a kid. It sounded like cats off in the distance were fighting but it was faint. Our guys are indoor cats so I wasn't worried about them. I listened and tried to pinpoint where the noise was coming from.

Dave thought I was nuts though, and didn't hear the noise at first. Later he thought it wasn't cats, it was a table saw and the high pitched noise it makes when the blade spins through wood. He was convinced it was "mechanical in nature" (even though it was near midnight).

And thus, we had a stalemate.

We continued to listen, when finally, it occurred to me.

We were both wrong.

The sound we heard was a baby in a neighbour's house crying.

I don't know anyone who has an infant that young around here, but that's definitely what it was. The poor thing was testing out its lungs until the wee hours of the morning, probably leaving pacing and frustrated parents wondering how to soothe it.

And with that, I realized that if we can't tell the difference between a cat fight, a power tool, and a baby crying, we probably aren't ready for kids yet.

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*Actually, a goldfish I had (and whose name I've since forgotten but it was probably something really cool like "goldie") when I was five was our first family pet. Sadly, it met an untimely demise when my dad was changing the water in its bowl, and filled the bowl with water from the hot tap with the fish still in the bowl. I can still remember him trying to explain why the fish was floating on its belly. I bring it up when I'm in need of political capital, "remember the time you killed my poor, helpless goldfish dad?" I even do a good impression of the goldfish in its last few moments. "Ooh good, clean water! Wait, what's this? OW! OW! It's burning my skin! Oooohhh nooOOO!" It's really quite funny, I promise. Reading it now though, I think you had to be there.

**We now realize the cat was WAY too young to leave its mother's side. The other kittens in the litter had already been adopted out so we thought it was okay and kinda figured the farmer knew what he was doing. Incidentally the girl kitten was named Cricket and we always regretted not bringing her home too. She stayed on the farm. I'm totally going to name a pet Cricket. The funny thing was that our cat Shadow LOVED eating crickets (real ones, not his sister) and ate everything but the legs. We used to find them strewn all over the garage floor.

***At least so we thought. Unfortunately this wasn't true because I think every time we took him to the vet's office in his 13 year life, there was always another animal named Shadow waiting to see the vet. So much for creativity.

Rhett is the kinkiest number that we've ever seen... (sung to "One is the loneliest number")

So it turns out Rhett the cat is the kinkiest member of our household. I found this out yesterday, during his usual "wake up I'm hungry!" stomp on top of us in the bed where he meows, purrs loudly, flops, kneads his paws, etc on us. As per usual, I let him sleep on me for a while, and when he wouldn't stop giving me a breast self exam I politely shoed him away.

After the wake-up call I gave him, he decided to lie on Dave's side of the bed, purring loudly enough of course that we could still hear him if we were 50 feet away. We were both in the stage of "barely waking up" since Rhett starts this routine about a half hour before our alarm goes off.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Rhett rubbing against Dave's hand, being all cute. Dave quickly draws the line when Rhett pulls out the teeth (he bites random things when he's hungry, the list of which has included us, phone books, toothbrushes, eye drop bottles, TV remotes, pretty much anything he can find). Now, our programmable thermostat hadn't kicked in (since it starts the furnace at the same time our alarm goes off) so it was cooler in the house. What does Rhett do? When he lost the option of going for Dave's hand, he saw a nipple and went straight for it! All I heard was the sound of Dave yelping and Rhett hitting the ground with a thud. I don't think either of them knew what hit them.