Apologia

I'm told it's a law of the Web that I must mention my cats in the description of my household. So I did.

For several years, the above was all I had on this page, plus a note that I didn't have any pictures. But now I do have pictures. So . . .

We used to have two cats, but alas, one of them never learned not to play chicken against cars, and was killed in August, 2001. A year and a month later, we adopted an abandoned kitten, so we're back to two.

The one we lost was Falstaff, shown here (left) in his favorite easy chair. He was a big orange lump. His brother, Orlando, is the big white lump on the right. The bottom picture shows the two of them in their accustomed pose.

The new kitten is named Cerberus. One of our daughter's co-worker's children found him abandoned in a dumpster, probably at about six weeks old. Now, some might think it odd that we named a cat after the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to Hades. (No, the cat has only one head.) Or you might think we named it after an aardvark. (There's a comic book aardvark named Cerebus. Word has it the author intended to name it after the three-headed dog but misremembered the dog's name.)

Anyway, I think it's partly that the kitten was going to be named Purrrrsephone, because it purrs very loudly, but then we discovered it's a boy, and Cerberus at least retains the underworld reference, which is appropriate for a kitty rescued from likely death. But the main reason is that it's fluffy, and indeed the people who first found it called it Fluffy, but we refused to have a cat named Fluffy, and meanwhile there was a three-headed dog in the Harry Potter books, and it was named Fluffy, so our fluffy kitten got named after a three-headed dog. Simple, right?

So anyway, here's a picture of Cerberus soon after he arrived, and one of his earliest attempts to sneak up on Orlando.