I love animals. And cats have to be my favorites. I mean, I love dogs and I love horses and I love and have cared for many other animals. But of all those animals, cats have to be my favorite.
They are so soft and furry and they love on you like no other pet does.
The cat pictured above is my current cat, Atten. He and I have been together for a long time, must be going on 10 years now. He\’s a gray tabby and very cuddly.
He loves to come up and sleep under the covers with me. When I am in bed, he\’ll come up by my head and paw at the covers until I lift them up and let him in. Then he joins me under the covers and curls up next to me and sleeps there, sometimes for hours.
It\’s so wonderful to have a warm ball of fur curled up next to you, purring, under the covers.
One time, I suppose he got too hot, but he came half out of the covers, so that when I woke up, he was laying beside me with his head and shoulders up next to my head and the rest of him still under the covers – just like a little person. It was so cute. I tried to get a picture of him, but, of course, my moving around to get the phone disturbed him and he got up before I could get the picture.
My first cat, whose name was Calico, I got when I was about 8 years old and we lived in Texas. In color, she was – yep, you guessed it -, a calico. I was very imaginitive in my naming her, don\’t you think 😆 lol. For those who don\’t know, a calico is black, white, and orange in patches.
She was a beautiful Calico, in my humble opinion, and I loved her. She moved with us to Illinois and Germany and went with my family to Iowa when I went to college. I don\’t remember exactly when she passed away, but it was while I was in college.
We had a wonderful life together. I raised her from a kitten, and I still miss her and think of her.
When I was in college and living in student approved housing, of course I was not allowed to have any pets, including a cat. But when I got into graduate school and was allowed to live in housing that was not student-approved, I moved to Orem, Utah and moved in with Dalinda, who became a great friend and who also loved cats. She had a cat and I got two kittens who I named Squeak and Infinity (Fin for short). Squeak was a tortoiseshell (black and orange mixed) and Fin was gray.
Luckily, Dalinda\’s cat took well to the two kittens and we all enjoyed our time together.
They lived to be about 15 and 18 years old, if I remember right. I loved them dearly and they were so fun to have around. Squeak, especially, loved to play with the cat toys attached to a string on a stick. She would chase them around all over the place.
Next I got another gray cat, who I named Grascale. I loved her dearly also (as I have loved all my cats). We moved several times together and she settled in nicely each time.
Gray passed away when I was living in Michigan after I lost my job at Leader Dogs For The Blind, but before I moved to Iowa. It was very hard to lose her as I was also having a lot of problems myself, emotionally. But life must move on.
For a couple years after that when I lived with my parents, I respected their wishes not to have a cat. They didn\’t really like cats, they had just given in to their daughter and gotten one for me, but they didn\’t really want another.
When I got my own place again, I also got another cat after a year or so. That is Atten.
Don\’t ask me where his name came from, I just completely made it up. It\’s pronounced Ah-ten, by the way.
I had always been afraid of getting a male cat – afraid they would learn to spray. But, that has never been a problem – I suppose partly because he was neutered very young, before I got him from the shelter.
Atten has been wonderful even if he does love to scratch my furniture as much as he does his scratching post. I love his gray tabby coloring.
He also loves to sit in my arms while I work on the computer. It doesn\’t exactly make working easy, but it\’s very cuddly lol.
He\’s moved from Iowa to California with me and 3 different houses in California.
He loved my last dog, Zaakir (the black one in a lot of my pictures) to death. In fact, I would often wake up in the morning to find Zaakir sleeping on the dog bed next to my bed and Atten sleeping curled up on top of him lol.
He\’s not fond of Kaidin, but Atten puts up with him and bats Kaidin on the nose when he gets pushy.
Atten also likes the cat toys and carries them all over the house.
He\’ll chase and catch mice when they are around (a big seasonal problem in my previous home). A few times though, he caught a mouse, then brought it to my bed to show me and let it go on the bed (only to catch it again when it ran away). It wasn\’t exactly my favorite thing to have on the bed lol.
So there\’s my history with my cats. I love them, and I don\’t imagine I\’ll ever be without one.
If I find some pictures of some of my other cats, I\’ll digitize them and add them to this post (or maybe make another one, who knows).
