Meet the critters

I've mentioned my cats before, but I realized this weekend that I've never posted any pix of them. Unlike Miss Kitty over at Educated & Poor, I only have two. (And alas, I have no chickens.) Meet Maddy and Hazel.

Maddy is 13.25 lbs and 9 years old this month. She was the biggest kitten in her litter of five, born at the neighbor's across the street from my mom's farmhouse. She is a treatwhore and a snugglehog and snores when she sleeps in the crook of my arm at night. She also gets in my face when my alarm goes off. However, a few pets on the head resets her snoze button.

Hazel (often known around here as Lulu) only clocks in at 8.6 pounds and will be 9 years old in May. A shy little thing even now, she was born to a mostly-feral mama kitty who rolled up to Mom's farmhouse and made herself at home. At only about 8-12 weeks old, Hazel chased a mouse into a hand dug well on Mom's property and managed to land on a red clay ledge between the well's concrete cistern/shell and the hand-dug wall, where she yowled and languished for a few days. Mom finally figured out where the little shit was, put a can of tuna in a small empty bucket, and wheeled it down to her ledge on a rope. The next morning, she pulled up a bucket with a small, weak, tuna-juice-covered kitten with a big tummy. She's been indoors ever since. However, all the meowing she did during that time broke her meower, and until we moved in with Papa (that's Guy) in 2001, dinnertime sounded like this:

Pixie: Who wants crunchies?

Maddy: [loud and proud] Mrrooowww!

Hazel: [muffled] Eeeooww.

I was going to take more pictures for this post, but it appears that our digital camera has gone to that great Circuit City in the sky, leaving us with a weird purplish test pattern instead of an image when we turn it on. It's 4 years old and needs to be replaced. Guess I'll have to use one of the office's digital cameras when I go up to Yuma next week (which I hate doing because you can never find them). Oh well, more cuteness to come when the Design Associates gossip mill is low again....