On the cat topic:
I have 4:
We started with 1- Penny, my wife's magnificently defiant silver longhair that didn't appreciate me stepping into their lives. She was a queen and extremely possessive of her favorite underling, my wife, and didn't take kindly to this intruder showing up. It was a contest of wills, and my mastery at scritches barely made up for the moments when I earned her angry glare that said "your shoes will suffer tonight while you sleep."
We thought Penny could use a companion, so at Christmas we got an all-black american shorthair kitten- Cinder, my little lump of coal. She's daddy's little girl, lovingly crawling onto my arm whenever she wants scritchies, regardless of what I'm doing or what she has to claw into to get there. Everyone else calls her "devilcat" because she's got this nasty tendency to establish dominance through fear, and establishing fear through creative bloodletting.
Then 2 kittens-Francis and Suki- showed up on our doorstep- they're a bonded pair. Suki's a runt that looks like a miniature maine-coon and Frankie's her gargantuan all-black bodyguard. He's the gentlest guy, but fiercely protective of his sister, rescuing her from any fight, calming her when she has a seizure, and cuddling with her whenever possible. She's the sweet, innocent-looking, evil mastermind that knows that she can get him to attack Cinder just by going up to the sleeping black lump of coal and squealing like she's been attacked. He then lumbers into the room and launches his 18-lb mass into the air above Cinder before she even blinks the sleepy look off her face.
After Penny passed away, we waited a bit, not sure how to replace the silver queen. A friend referred us to a posting for a kitten needing a home and we decided to adopt, sight unseen. Turns out that she's remarkably similar to Penny... in appearance. In demeanor they couldn't be more different While Penny had a composed ladylike regal air, Keyta's makes use of Matrix-like gravity-defying hyperactivity. She moves more like a grey squirrel than a cat.... a hypercaffeinated grey squirrel may be a better description... on acid.
That's our crew.
Now, back to the stockwatch...