About
Thank
you Sherry and Lora for introducing Maggie and me. Maggie and I met
in 1997 and married in May of 1999.
At the time we met, I had just adopted my first cat. Her name was Nikki and like many cat owners, she adopted me. I brought her to the vet, he said she was feline leukemia positive and was not pregnant. He said to "make her an inside cat" to reduce the stress and she would live longer. Well, she had kittens a month later. We started using a new vet soon thereafter. (Thank you, Scenic Hill Veterinary Clinic, we love you.)She never had symptoms of the feline leukemia and lived a good life, with us and her two kittens.
As the last paragraph implies, we kept the kittens. I named them after Rita and Runt the Cat and dog duo from the Animaniacs cartoons. Rita and Runt were born March 30, 1997. Runt passed away July 12, 2011 and his mom passed 17 days later on July 29. Rita is still with us and is currently 19 years old. She runs the house and charges a serving of treats every time a human enters the kitchen.
In 2013, our friends Kearny and Roberta in Roswell, Ga rescued a feral cat with 4 kittens. The mother cat died soon after the rescue, having given her all to save her kittens. When asked, we agreed to adopt 2 of the kittens to fill the hole left by the loss of Nikki and Runt. We adopted Stacy Hirano and Carl Karl (The unpaid intern). Our naming theme was based on secondary characters in the Phineas and Ferb cartoons. Kearny and Roberta kept the other two and named then Princess Powerful and Thor, God of Thunder.
While we were waiting for Carl and Stacy to join our family, a neighborhood stray had kittens on the porch of the empty house behind ours. My mom decided to start feeding them and fell in love with one of the kittens. We started to plot our capture of the momma cat and her kittens with the intention of having her spayed and released, adopting the one kitten and adopting out the remaining 3. When we finally got the cage, the other 3 kittens were nowhere to be found and we were only able to capture the one. He is now a member of the family and goes buy the name of Jeremy Johnson. (Another Phineas and Ferb character.)
Fast forward to fall of 2014. Mom goes out one morning with her dog Cinnamon and there is a cat on the front porch. The cat meows at her very demandingly and mom interprets this to "Hey human, would you be so kind as to feed me?" Since she asked so politely, of course, my mom replied, "Certainly fair cat, I would love to." She borrowed some cat food from us and started feeding the stray. Maggie and I started the spay and release talk again. We are apaprently all talk in that respect. We did however set up a sleeping area for her with a lamp for heat and protection from the bitter Northwest Florida winter. We finally decided to catch her and bring her to the vet in February of 2015.
Apparently there is something in the water here. If you bring a cat to the vet, it gets pregnamt. That's what happened here as well. The stray was pregnant and we chose to let the pregnency go to term and we would adopt out the kittens, then have her spayed and released.
She had her kittens Friday March 13, 2015 in our garage. We called them Thing 1, 2 and 3. We arranged to adopt out two of the kittens and were going to keep one. Kearny and Roberta volunteered to adopt the momma, so she was not going to be released. About the time she was ready to ween the kittens she started having medical issues that prevented her from moving her hind legs. That resulted in a visit to the Emergency Veterinary Center. She and the kittens spent a weeek at the vets. We then brought the kittens home to relieve her stress. They were eating kitten food by then. She was not recovering and the four of us discussed it and at the recommendation of the vet, made the decision to euthenize her. We had grown to love her by this time and wanted to say goodbye one more time. While we were in the room, she started moving her hind legs.
Well needless to say, we called off the procedure. Since Kearny and Roberta already had a special needs cat, they decided to take Thing 3 and we decided to keep this cat. I don't remember exactly when, but at some point she became Charlotte, Charlie for short. After we had her for a while, we were looking at pictures of Jeremy's mom we took when he was still on the back porch. We have come to the decision that Charlie is, in fact, his Mom.
So, I'm not sure if that's what an about page should say, but like many people, my children are my life. It just so happens my children happen to have 4 legs.
Maybe I should have written about Mom's Black book instead. OH Well!
Joseph Nalbone
Pensacola Fl
July 4, 2016