Sanctuary

Yeah, I got nothin'. I'm still knitting Starsky, and I'm a few inches away from the armhole shaping on the first front, and it's really boring to blog about, and it's the only thing I'm working on because I'm in that "knit until it's DONE" mode, and blah blah blah. I told Accountant Boy that I wanted it done and seamed by March 31st, because I want to wear it next weekend. We'll see how that works out.

Meanwhile, enjoy someone else's cats! These are my parents' cats, Romulus and Maggie. He's the big guy with the grey eyes, and she's the calico.

We didn't have cats when I was growing up, because back when they were newlyweds, my mom caught my dad's cat Smokey licking the butter out of the butter dish on the counter, and it convinced her that cats were wayward butter-lickers. As a result, we never had cats, and I never wanted one until I met Buddy the Cat. But that's another story.

(It ought to be a novel, the Woman. I'm endlessly fascinating. -- BtC)

Anyway, more than thirty years after the butter incident, my parents' neighbors moved and abandoned their two kittens, figuring that the little guys would fend for themselves. The kittens started hanging out on my parents' front porch, and my mom couldn't resist feeding them. This quickly turned into an hour-long evening ritual, where she'd feed them and sit on the porch and pet them. She named them Romulus and Remus. Remus was the scrapper of the two, and ended up losing an eye to an infection after a fight. He soldiered on for several years after that, but he failed to show for dinner a couple of years ago, and so then there was just Romulus on the porch. He gradually became more than a porch cat, spending a couple of hours a day skittishly wandering around in the house, learning how to be an indoor cat, learning to trust my parents to let him outside when he'd had enough of it.

I started hearing about another cat, a female that my parents called Rocky for her tendency to go into a boxing stance when playing. Rocky was another neighbor's cat, neglected but not completely abandoned. The neighbor didn't see the need to have Rocky spayed, so of course Rocky had kittens. Only one stuck around. My dad named her Maggie, after the character in 'Million Dollar Baby'. I hear Maggie stories every time I called home. My dad adores her. "Where's my girl?" he says every morning when he walks into the kitchen. She jumps up in the chair as he's sitting down, and he almost sits on her. "Get outta my chair, now. C'mon!" Then he tries to sit in another chair, and she jumps into that one before he can sit all the way back. It's a game they play.


Romulus and Maggie became fast friends, and that first picture is how they spend about a third of their day - alternately wrestling and sleeping in the dining chairs. They spend another third of the day curled up on my mom's bed, and the final third roaming the back yard. We should all be so lucky.

Neither one has tried to jump on the counter and lick the butter.