Loralee's Fancy: Luna

I went and did it now. I took my kids and got a new cat.

That wasn't exactly the original plan. Bruce and I had been considering getting a new pet, but not necessarily right now. So here's what happened:

Last Tuesday the girls and I had to run some errands, and I thought they might like to go to the animal shelter and just look. Of course the girls were delighted with the cats (dogs too, but we're not getting another dog until the yard is fenced in). The West Valley City Animal Shelter probably has about 50 cats and kittens right now, and they are having a June promotion—you can adopt any cat older than 9 months for only nine dollars. So I was beginning to think that maybe this would be a good time for a new cat after all—$9 for a neutered, vaccinated cat isn't a bad deal.

On Wednesday I had to go grocery shopping, and I wanted all the kids to go with me so they wouldn't just be home watching TV or on the computer. The boys didn't want to go so I bribed them with a trip to go look at cats.

Michael took his laser pointer to the animal shelter. It was pretty hilarious when he got into the cat colony—a room with about ten, uncaged cats.

On Thursday Bruce and I had to make a trip to Duchesne (say doo-shane) County. Bruce doesn't know this, but I told the kids that if they paid for the cat and all the cat trappings (litter box, food, etc.) then they could go get one that day. Later I realized that they probably needed an adult to go adopt a cat; Lindsey could drive everyone there, but she's still only 17.

Anyway, I called home to see how things were going once we got to Duchesne. Lindsey was prepared to take everyone to go get a cat, but Michael didn't believe that it was OK, and he didn't want to go with them. And then I started feeling guilty anyway. So I told Bruce that the kids were going to go get a cat while we were gone, and he said no; he wanted to be part of it if we were going to get a cat. So I relayed this message to the kids. But I told them that if they bought the other stuff, we'd still get a cat. When we got home that evening there was a shiny, new litter-box, a scoop, a box of cat litter, and a bag of cat food all stacked neatly on Bruce's side of the bed.

Before Bruce went to work Friday I asked him about bringing a cat home, and he said OK. We spent the day doing house work and I finally got the girls together and went to the animal shelter at 4:30. There had been two cats we were interested in, "Nova" and "Wednesday". But Wednesday had been adopted the day before and when we took Nova into a "getting-to-know-you" room she wasn't interested in us at all. So the nice lady at the shelter started introducing us to other cats.

First was "Dubs." Apparently people will trap feral cats and take them to the shelter where the cats are neutered, have an ear tipped to mark them as feral cats, and then tested to see how they behave with people. If they seem OK with people they stay at the shelter, if not they are released back into the wilds of Salt Lake County. Dubs was marked as a feral cat and he was dirty enough to be one, but I really have to wonder. All he wanted to do was crawl into your lap and be petted to pieces. In fact, even that wasn't enough for him; after some petting he had to climb up to your shoulder and bump his head on your chin so you would pet him more and more. I liked Dubs.

Then we looked at "Corinne." She is a pretty gray tabby who behaved almost like Dubs—she took a little longer exploring the room before she settled down to be friendly. Kaylie and Lindsey liked Corinne.

Then we saw "Queenie," a little toroise-shell cat. She was a very curious kitty—about two years old. She didn't mind us petting her, but she didn't want to sit in our laps; she was more interested in the toys and in seeing what was going on in the world. Rachel liked Queenie. I think Jessica liked all the cats.

Well, after two hours of alternating between the three cats in the "getting-to-know-you" room, Lindsey, Kaylie and I all decided that we just liked whichever cat was in the room with us, but Rachel really liked Queenie. So we would get the tortoise-shell (although we agreed that she needed a less stupid name). We finally left the shelter at 7:00 with our new kitty.

That first evening she sought out places like this—small and a little difficult to remove her.

She spent most of the evening hiding from as, as I suspected she would. But she came out at night to wander the house, and meowed all. night. long. I was ready to kill her in the morning. We were given 30 days to take her back and make an exchange, and on Saturday I was thinking of how friendly Dubs was, and how our new cat hadn't made herself seen at all yet, but how she kept me awake all night, and things weren't looking too good for her at our house. I even took Bruce to the shelter that afternoon to meet the other cats we'd been considering.

However I am a mostly reasonable person and I could still attribute our cat's apparent unfriendliness to being in a new place. I thought we'd give her some more time—although if she remained standoffish and kept me awake at night for the rest of the weekend I would have no qualms sending her away.

But by late afternoon she was hanging out with us, exploring the house, letting people pick her up and pet her, and just being cute in general. The only real test would be if she kept meowing all night long. In the meantime, we had to come up with a better name than Queenie, or Kitty (which is what we'd been calling her).

on my bed, of course

I always think of magic/witch names, or Greek myth names, or Bible names, or ancient Egyptian royalty names for cats, and I've been re-reading the Harry Potter books and thought that Molly would be a really cute cat name, but the kids didn't care for it at all. None of them. Ryan looked up cat names on-line and found a few that were OK as well as some really stupid ones. Then Brandon came up with Luna; I liked that pretty well. At dinner on Saturday night I told the kids to choose between Molly or Luna and (of course) they all chose Luna.