(Laura's version)
Our family currently includes 3 cats. They each have distinct personalities, but are all very silly.
They were all born in September 1996; the girls, Grace and Adele, are Maine Coon tabbies who are sisters from the same litter. Omar is an Egyptian Mau who is two weeks older. They've grown up together with us and get along as well as any reasonably compatible batch of siblings or roommates.
a.k.a. Spoob, is an inveterate Lap Pig. In fact, he's curled up in my lap right now. He's very demonstrable & affectionate, and has a definite talent for homing in on Comfy Places to Sit. Especially laps. He's also wound up a little too tight, but then narrow gene pools will do that sometimes. Except for the occasional incomprehensible spaz attack, he generally seems to enjoy life as a happy spoiled brat. He's very maternal/tenderly parental with the girls, licking them clean and snuggling up with them -- when he's not jumping on them and chewing on their necks. If they weren't all fixed, we'd probably have to regularly pry him off the girls with a crowbar -- especially Grace, who likes cuddling up with him. His favorite game is clamping iron jaws onto airborne feathered bird toys.
a.k.a. Sméagol (i.e. Gollum from The Lord of the Rings) or The Pill, is weird, sneaky, and obsessed. Sometimes (only when alone with someone) she will get into weird affectionate moods with a lot of purring/cooing, but most of the time she haughtily disdains being cuddled by us -- the Princess Pill mode. When she flops in front of Omar to get licked and cuddled, she's Princess Hoe. Like Tolkien's Sméagol, she loves investigating dark mysterious places, discovering secrets, and lurking in dark hidey-holes. Her favorite Precious toys, which she chases and demands with alarming compulsiveness, are shiny metallic elastic strings like the ones people put on wrapped presents. Her (and the others' too) main goal upon capturing them is to immediately ingest them.
a.k.a. The Load, seems to be the most mentally opaque of the three -- or maybe just dense. Though a full sister of Grace's, they have completely different personalities. She's very large and very hairy. There's occasionally some evidence of activity behind her huge, vacant eyes, but we have no idea what. When either of us are using the computer, she attacks with embarrassing and sloppy affection, dithering all over our laps and head-butting with her cold wet nose to get us to pet her. She's The Load because you can always count on her to be inconvenient and/or in the way somehow or other. Despite all that, she's sweet and obviously devoted to us, grateful for all the slobbery affection she can get. Like her sister, she loves sitting in laundry baskets full of warm clothes, or even dirty ones. She plays with everything.
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| Grace and Adele, looking like sisters
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This would be Omar.
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| Spoob the Lap Pig demonstrates that he can in fact find his
own ass with both hands, and no map.
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Adele stares vacantly at nothing in particular.
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| Princess Hoe.
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Chillin'.
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| Move along, nothing to see here.
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Again with the sisters.
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| When they were little | ||
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| Before the flash, ~15 minutes after meeting each other,
Christmas 1996.
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After the flash.
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| Isn't that cute. They're too big to all fit on the
same chair together now.
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Eric pinned by kitties. It's a little hard to see
here, but Grace has her back foot stuck behind her head. She's crashed and doesn't
seem to notice.
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| Baby Spoob, soon after arrival.
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Baby Spoob with his favorite toy
("bird"-on-a-string).
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| Historical Note | ||
| It would seem that cats like Spoob and other spotted tabbies are the basic "default cats" of earlier civilizations, at least around the Mediterranean area. Omar's ancestors came from Egypt, so maybe he's a distant descendant of the guy in the picture below. | ||
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| From a Thebes papyrus ca.1000 B.C. Some nobleman is having a fine day out hunting birds in the river marshes, with his throwing stick and his trusty cat, while his wife and little boy pick flowers. Note that the cat has black undersides on his feet, just like Spoob and other Maus. ("Mau" means "cat" in Egyptian, apparently) | This scene is from a mosaic at Pompeii. Again with
the birds.
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