Just One Won't Hurt

Saturday night, I went with Jess and Mitch to the Humane Society to get a cat.

Mitch waited patiently in the car (until his PSP battery died; then he waited patiently inside), while Jess and I went from cage to cage trying out all of the cats.

I came to the shelter wanting probably a kitten (but probably not a tiny one), that was probably

 black (since they find fewer homes for black kitties), and probably female (since I'm just not into having my furniture marked).  But I was open to changing my mind.

Jessica reminded me that it is Very Important to have a kitty that already purrs.  Because by the time they're old enough to be adopted, they already know how to purr.  

I wanted a cat that would be cuddly, but that would also play.

We tried out the kitties that were in the entry area, and we liked one of them, a black kitty named Chartreuse.  But we thought we should probably keep going, because they had a lot of cats.  

In the cat room, we found a bunch of fun cats.  Jess liked a cat named Biscuit that mewed a lot and had a funny meow, and Wanted Our Attention.  I liked two cats of the ones in the room.  One was named Abby, even though it was male.  It was a fluffy little black 5 month old kitty.  The other one I liked was named Wit.  He was a Siamese cat, but a nice one.  (My experience

 with Siamese cats has generally been that they are mean.)  When I took Wit out of his cage, he did NOT want to go back in.

They had "Get Acquainted" rooms, with a story on the walls about a man who did

n't want a cat from the pet store, because he was old and he wanted an older cat to match him better.  And they told him to go to the shelter, and he did.  It was a nice story.  

We took Abby into the Get Acquainted

 room, and he was okay.  I liked him.  BUT, he was so so fluffy that he had poop in his tail, and it got ALL over me.  All over my sweater, all over my pants.  And then Jessica was done with that kitty.  She suggested we try Wit.  So we did.

And I didn't care for Wit.  Because he was so needy that he only wanted to sit with me, not

 chase the mouse when I threw it for him.  Plus, he was meowing so much that I didn't want him to bother the neighbors while I'm gone during the day.

So I still liked Abby alright, and was going to get him, except that Jess reminded me of the kitty from the front room, and we decided we'd at least Get Acquainted with her before deciding on the suuuper fluffy boy.  So we got her, and I'd forgotten how much I liked her.

When I took her out of her cage, she started purring, loudly.  She cuddled with me in the Get Acquainted room, and then when I threw a mouse for her, she was interested in that, too.  And she had medium length hair instead of long hair, which is preferable (and doesn't get poo in it).  

I picked Chartreuse.  And I filled out the papers and hoped they wouldn't remember me from when I had such an awful experience as a foster person for kittens.  

They remembered.  

"I recognize you," the lady said.  "You're one of our fosters!"

"Yeahhh," I said.  "I had one litter."

"And now you're adopting a cat!"

"Yep.  One.  Not six."

The lady laughed.  She knew that six cats are too many for an apartment.

And I finished doing the adoption papers, and when they called me up they started to give me instructions.  "It's already got these shots, but it will need two more, on this day and this day," the lady said.  "And it looks like he was neutered on--"  

"You mean spayed."

"No, neutered."

"The kitty I'm adopting is a girl."

"Aren't you adopting Toby?"

"Chartreuse."

"OH!  I had you adopting a five year old, male, black and white cat!  This is all wrong."  She looked at the adoption tag I'd brought up, and adjusted things.

When everything was back on track, they got one of their adoption cat carriers, and they went to the cage where my kitty was.  "She's a really nice little cat," the lady said.  "She was in a crate with a bunch of other cats, and she went around and groomed all of them."  (AWWW!)

And I had them make a tag for her, because they do that.  They didn't really have any cat collars, though, so we decided we'd get one later.

I named her "Paley," for William Paley, who wrote Natural Theology, which we studied in my evolution class.  (Basically, I kind of blogged about this before, but Lamarck had started this idea that species can change.  And everyone was SO sure that there had been a special creation, meaning that God made species special for their environments.  And religious people had kind of three reactions to Lamarck's stuff.  Some people were like "Impossible!" and decided that it was all nonsense.  Other people decided that God put fossils on the Earth to test our faith, and that dinosaurs never actually existed.  And some people were like "Evolution?  FANTASTIC!!!!  God make things make themselves!  HE'S EVEN GREATER THAN WE THOUGHT!"  And that was basically Paley.  Love. It.  He was sort of like a C.S. Lewis, I think.  He had this watchmaker analogy that was a Big Deal.  It's fun reading.)  

So anyway, we got in the car and drove to Target for a couple things, and then... to Jessica's house! (Because I was staying for MLK Jr. weekend.)

And Jessica's cats were not really sure what to think of the new little cat.  Annie hissed.  Alley was interested.  Paley just kind of sat there purring, not really caring what they thought of her.  

She spent the weekend there with us, and then she spent Monday afternoon at Mitch's parents' house (while we went sledding), and then she finally really came home Monday evening.

She likes our house just fine.  She has good manners.  And cleans herself a lot.  She loves attention, and purrs a lot.  Loudly.

The pictures kind of look like I adopted a shadow with eyes.  In real life, she is three-dimensional.  At the shelter they told me she is probably part British Shorthair, because she has a little puffy face, instead of a long face like Jessica's cats.  She's cute.  

The End.  (Or, more cheesily, The Beginning.)