Ever since our encounter with the stray cat at Nanie’s house last October, my husband and I have been talking on and off about getting a cat. We really want a dog, but our current circumstances are not amenable to that. Last Thursday, a small, sad black cat showed up at our door. He cried and pushed his way in as TheBoy left for work in the morning. He stayed there, pressed up against the door until the afternoon, crying intermittently. Not able to stand his suffering, I brought him in and shut him in the bathroom and headed to talk to the apartment manager to see if they might keep a record of who owned what cats in the complex. No such luck.

This left us with a dilemma. Pay the pet deposit and keep the cat, while looking for the rightful owner? Take the cat to the shelter? Shoo the cat away and hope he didn’t make it out to our very busy street? We opted for the first option and, I admit, to our chagrin, his owner was found before dinner time. However, we were determined that now was the time to adopt a cat. And so we did.

Friday, TheBoy left work early to go and visit the humane society (Greenhill) and spent some time in the Cattery. What a trip that place was! A large open room full of toys and cat trees and cats everywhere! There are also ancillary rooms that hold more specific types of cats ranging from new arrivals to the elderly and from kittens to special needs cats. We wandered around, petting cats and trying to gauge their interest in us. Not much from most of them. So we set about the ancillary rooms. In the second room we found our new girl. White, medium length hair and with grey tabby spots, she began purring immediately and reached out to touch us. That was all it took, we were sold. We took care of the paperwork and now, she’s ours!

Introducing Pica (pee-ka, which is after the unit of measurement in typography. Admittedly, we’re pronouncing it wrong, but she responded more to it as pee-ka than the correct pie-ka.)

We took her in for her free wellness check-up on Monday where she got her rabies vaccine. All is well with our little girl and we are spending much time playing with and loving on her.