The Tail of Maggie

Once upon a time, almost ten years ago, Chad (who is now my husband) was living alone in an apartment.  He had been living there for about a year and thought it was about time to add a kitty to his life.

Growing up, Chad's family had a number of mostly outdoor cats.  One of his favorites was a striped gray girl kitty they called Quester.  She was very smart, rather fluffy and extremely affectionate.  She would climb on Chad's shoulder and purr and drool with happiness.  When Chad was renting a room at my mom's house for several years he'd had my sister's cat, Tristessa, to snuggle and pet and keep an eye on him when he was sick.  During this time, we started calling Chad "Catboy" and "The Cat Whisperer" because there's almost no cat on this planet that doesn't connect with and adore him.  Cats that are usually nervous around strangers take to him quickly.  Cats that aren't afraid of strangers adore him immediately.

Still, Chad was nervous.  He'd never had a cat of his own before - they were always family pets or shared.  This one would be all his responsibility, and he took it very seriously.  After deciding to adopt a kitty, but before actually picking one out, he went and got all the things the new kitty would need.  He bought a kitty carrier, food bowls and kitty toys, and a heated perch that attached to the window so the future kitty could enjoy the view from his 9th floor apartment.

It was a cold day when my sister and I went with Chad to the Akron Humane Society to see if we could find a kitty for him.  While we hung out in the lobby waiting for someone to take us back to see the animals we looked at pictures of pets in their happy new homes and pictures of animals waiting to be adopted.  On the bulletin board was a Polaroid of a fluffyish tuxedo kitty with the most adorable white stripe on her nose and white toes.  She was sitting very tall, like she was posing for the camera.  I pointed the picture out to Chad and he kind of blew me off.  He was anxious to see the kitties in person!

Finally they took us back.  Sadly, they were overrun with pets at the time.  The cats we were taken to first weren't even in the "cat room".  Chad had told the people at the Humane Society what he was looking for in a kitty cat and they had a few suggestions.  First we met a 6 month old kitten named Hannah.  She was all black and very cute, but Chad was actually thinking of adopting an older kitty.  Tessa had been three when my sister adopted her and we all felt that Hannah, being a kitten and so cute, would get adopted quickly.  Plus she just wasn't the right cat.

Chad reiterated that he was looking for a very affectionate cat.  The woman from the Humane Society introduced us to a three year old kitty called Mandy, who happened to be in the cage above Hannah.  When Chad held her it was love at first hug.  She threw herself against his shoulder and purred like crazy.  Then, for good measure, she leaned out and rubbed against my sister and me!  Chad had found his cat!  We went back out to the lobby so he could finish his paperwork and take her home.

While my sister and I were waiting for him, I noticed the cat in the photo I had seen was Mandy!

Thankfully, I wasn't the only one who wasn't crazy about getting a Barry Manilow song stuck in her head every time we talked about the cat.  After a couple of days, Chad decided that Maggie just fit his new kitty better and that's been her official name ever since.  She has about 12,000 nicknames.  She has very much lived up to her reputation of being a very affectionate cat.  The first night she spent at the apartment she was back and forth between the kitty perch and waking Chad up to tell him how much she loves him.  She has always preferred to sleep under the blankets with her head on the pillow being snuggled like a teddybear and loves to give and get kisses.

For about a year and a half, Chad thought apartment life with Maggie was purrfect.  But when he was working long hours his very affectionate kitty was lonely.  That leads us to the Tail of Phoebe which I'll tell another day.

Maggie being adorable with yarn in '09

Hello, 2012...

So here we are in 2012, a year people have been anticipating.

Let's get this out of the way, right now.  I don't think the world is going to end this year.  I'm planning to party on the winter solstice like I do every year because I'm a good heathen.  Okay it's mostly because I love eggnog, but I'm still planning my party.  I'm not concerned about Mayan calenders; look at them, they're circles, they don't end.  I'm not concerned about planetary alignments that are going to melt the ice caps overnight and flood the coasts (mostly because neither Countdown contributor and astronomer Derrick Pitts nor Jim Cantore have mentioned this danger).  Also I'm pretty sure The Weather Channel would have non-stop specials on our impending doom if it were even the slightest threat - "It WILL Happen Tomorrow!!1!"

That's not to say there isn't a lot going on this year.  There's the presidential election in November and the torturous 10 months leading up to it.  Who doesn't love being bombarded by political commercials that seem like rejected SNL spoof ads?  I especially love them now that corporations can pour boatloads of money into campaigns.  By November we'll all be begging to see strange guys happily singing about erectile dysfunction meds and that miserable gecko.  Senator Bernie Sanders is seriously charging toward overturning the Citizen's United ruling that gives us those terrible political ads (as well as outright buying our democracy). Bernie is one of the few truly good people in all of Congress, and I'll be supporting him in his effort any way I can.  

There's the Summer Olympics, too (no Quidditch, so I don't know how much I'll watch).  My big fear with the Olympics is that the park pool where I go will be even fuller than usual.  I finally found an outdoor pool to swim in last summer after five years of basically no swimming.  I am not going back to being pool-less.  It's 19 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm already dreaming of swimming this summer.  Some people might not find five years swim-less appalling, but I grew up swimming in huge outdoor, in-ground, semi-private community pool that covered an acre.  Yes - it was an acre of pool, with a water slide, and diving boards and it was set up like a lake so that most of the edges started at less than a foot and it got deeper toward the middle.  If I sound nostalgic it's because going to that pool almost every day every summer, meeting up with friends, swimming for hours on end was, for me, one of the best parts of growing up.

As far as my personal life, 2012 is looking huge but I can blog about pretty much none of that right now - partly because I don't want to jinx it and partly because so much is yet to be set in stone.  So, shhh... I'll talk about that another time.