Monday, April 17, 2006

From the Office

Since I'm at work and can't upload pictures of my three repeats of blue "cascading leaves" I will tell the naming stories.

Mable came from the back of a beaten up pickup truck at a big box store a few days before my birthday. I won't tell you how pitiful I sounded when I turned to my boyfriend and said, "We won't go look yet at the kittens that are there. We will go get all the things we need from this huge store and when we are done, maybe there won't be any kittens left. If there are kittens, I will look. And maybe I will take a kitten home." Obviously, there were still some kittens. I picked the one that jumped out from the writhing ball of kittens in the cage to run over and bite me. I started calling her "Princess, go get me a beer," (I don't drink beer, that's the only reaons this was funny) which was fine until I was standing with her at the counter of the vet's office, shortening it to just "Princess" because the woman at the front had no sense of humor. Fast forward 6 weeks and many hundreds of veterinary dollars, in front of the vet counter again, but this time being asked if I had Princess the Kitten or Princess the Pit Bull. "Uh, how about Princess the name change?" Clearly, I wasn't enjoying calling my pet Princess. So we drove home from another expensive peek into her ears and backside, stocked up with piles of medicines and talked about a name. (Mable probably talked about getting out of the car and getting the greasy crap out of her ears, but let's not split hairs.)

We drove past the John and Mable Ringling Art Museum. And there it is, the name that every word processor tells me is misspelled. I guess that was more an acquisition story with a bonus naming blurdb. Onward.

For a year I joked that Mable would need a husband, and that next cat I rescued would be called John. In the same breath I insisted that I will not own a boy cat. They spray*, and sometimes they spray even after they're tender bits are removed. Enter Mittens, a white footed kitten that my neighbors were giving away. I was polite and called her John Mittens for about 4 hours and then she was just John.

Mable is the favorite, I am not ashamed to say. We have the most nicknames for her, she has cuter habits, and she is the cat that secretly binged on diet cat food under my sink for 4 months after we got the new kitten and had to feed them both kitten food. John is just bad, but I love her dearly, too.

*Yeah, that came back to bite me in the ass when John was a year old and living in a house with a third cat who is not popular in the cat world. John peed on my bed and at least once, me in the bed, every morning, and sometimes in the evenings when I returned home from work.

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