It occurs to me that I have mentioned the kids (a.k.a. the Ravening Barbarian Horde -- doing great, btw, the boys are lounging around in their underwear all day until forced to get dressed, just like Daddy, and the girl is grounded for taking a foray into my seldom-used stash of make-up when she was supposed to be cleaning the bathroom she shares with her brothers) and the books (hoping to get around to a couple of reviews this week; I'm participating in a couple of group reads over on Goodreads, and of course have done some fairly copious reading besides that. I'm better at keeping up with reviews on Goodreads than I am here...) but the cats haven't made much of an appearance yet. Except Stella -- the grey thing up and to your right. Her story will come one day. But first, the gorgeous black mini-panther (which, yes, I know, is not an actual type of cat. Per Wikipedia, it's a melanistic type of another large cat -- here in North America, that would be either a jaguar or a cougar. And "melanistic" refers to the atypical all-over dark pigmentation. See, you learned something. "Any day in which you learn something isn't a complete loss." --Belgarath the Sorcerer, David Eddings.)  (Detour over. I promise.) *Aaaanyway.*

That black --mostly; you can't see them all in the picture but he had three patches of white on his throat, chest and belly -- kitty is Gumbo. When I was in high school, my mom found him in a ditch by the side of the road. She took him home, bathed him (several times, to get rid of all the dirt and blood and ick), and committed the ultimate indignity of taking him to the vet. He was pre-weaned, so we ended up feeding him baby formula with a medicine dropper for a few weeks. Luckily, Mom works at the local college in the science department, so she just took him to work and he rode around in various people's lab coat pockets until he was weaned. He also had a broken tail, and it was amputated almost completely. He went from a scrap of black fur in the palm of my hand to a hugely muscular nearly 20 pounds of cat, with 2 inches of tail. You know how cats' tails poof out when they're angry? Imagine a big cat with a bottle brush on the end of its spine. Too funny.

Gumbo was, to me, the best cat ever. We bonded over baby formula, and he decided I was his Human. He would attack anyone else (especially if they dared get out of bed after dark) but me, he snuggled. His favorite place to be was snuggled down the length of my side with my arm around him and his head on my shoulder, purring till I fell asleep. He also had a little trick: when I was sitting he'd climb on my lap and stretch upward till he could snuggle his head under my chin. I would put my fingers against his throat to feel the vibrations as he purred, and when I spoke to him, he would put his paw up agains my throat in the same gesture. Sadly, when he was about 2 years old, I went away to college for my freshman year. A week or two before I left, he disappeared. I was a little worried and upset, but not too much; he had been known to go off on his own before, usually when stuff was going on (family vacations made him angry!). Sadly, that was the last anyone saw of him until I had been gone about  6 weeks, when my dad found his poor body behind a trash can in some undergrowth. We're not entirely sure, but suspect he was hit by a car and suffered internal injuries, and hid himself away to lick his wounds. No one else was as close to him as I was, but we all still miss him. His fur always had this wonderful smell, like fall leaves.

Love you, kitty!