Animal house

I will not tell you how many cats we have. It's enough to say that we have "some." Once, we had two cats. When we moved into our house in McKinney in 2003, one of them, part Siamese,  must've had a mild stroke or something. That's all I can figure, because late at night after everyone had gone to bed, he would suddenly scream/howl about 10 times in a row, with each howl decreasing steadily in volume. You could actually count them: 10, 9, 8, 7, etc.

This went on for years.

It's funny what you can get used to if it happens enough, but to be honest, I never got used to it. At first we yelled at the cat. It had no effect. Then we chased the cat. He would just run under some furniture and wouldn't come out until you gave up and went back to bed. Then, when all was quiet, the howling would begin again. Sometimes he would do this two or three times during the night.

Other than the howling, he was a good cat. Not a friendly cat, at least not to me. When he passed on, we were all sad. We missed him, but to be honest, none of us missed his howling.

After an appropriate time had passed, we took a trip to the local animal shelter to look for another cat. As we drove there, I reminded my family that we were going to get one, and only one cat. No more. And they all agreed that that was what would happen. When we got there, they put us in a room full of kittens. One of them, a little black-and-white female kitten, seemed perfect. My wife and kids fell in love with her, and we decided that she was the one we would adopt.

She had a brother. I watched them playing with each other, chasing, tumbling and play fighting. My wife was already at the front desk, getting ready to pay. We were about to separate a brother and sister. Could I do that? How could I do that? I couldn't. So I went to my wife and asked meekly, remembering my adamant demand about getting just one cat, "Do you want to get her brother, too?" My wife looked like she couldn't believe it. "Really?" she asked. "Yeah," I said.

And this is how it was for awhile. Then along came Tippi.

I was in our computer room one night when I heard a car honk its horn right outside our house. I opened the front door to see what was going on. My wife had been on an errand, and as she was driving down our street, she saw a calico cat in the middle of the street trying to lick whatever remained inside of a Styrofoam cup. "I was afraid she would get run over!" Jane said. The cat seemed to be starving. She used to be owned by some neighbors from across the street, but they moved away and left the cat behind. So, obviously, we took pity on it and started to feed it. It was cautious at first, but after it realized that we were nice people giving away free food, she started to hang around our door. If she wasn't around when we'd go outside, we just had to call and she she would come bounding from across the street right to us.

So one night we decided to take her in, too. We kept her in our master bedroom, and the next day while I was at work my wife and daughter took her to the vet's to be checked out. While at the vet, she began to express milk. Tippi was a mom.

They found four kittens hiding in the bushes across the street. They were all well fed, but Tippi was nothing but fur and bones. When the family was reunited, my wife said that Tippi literally hugged each of her kittens.

No, we didn't keep all of the kittens. We eventually managed to find homes for most of them.

We used to have two litter boxes side-by-side in the downstairs hall bathroom. I got tired of that, and built a 2-story cat box holder that allowed us to stack two boxes on top of one another. I probably should patent it.

Did I mention we have a dog?