So the couple I've been staying with here in Atlanta since Saturday night have these two beautiful (and very silly) cats. One is an orange tabby named Andy, who was walking around on the desk for the past several minutes, getting fur in my glass of water and all over the keyboard. Eventually, he decided he'd rather go mess with Amos, the slick, black, whatever-breed in the other room. Andy is friendly in that catly way, but doesn't really like his head messed with 'cept when he's in the mood for a good scratching, and then only just on the top of his head between (and not including) his ears. Amos, on the other hand, is incredibly cuddley.. he'll even jump up onto your shoulders as you sit in the chair if he gets particularly excited. He puts his face right up to yours and says "cuddle me! I'm loverly and I make you feel special because cats are normally alloof but I'll cuddle with you!" Andy likes sitting on the footrest of the chair or sleeping at the foot of the bed, making sure not to touch you at all. Amos, though I haven't seen or heard of him napping next to any humans, loves to sit in your lap in the recliner or at the computer desk. Unlike my old cat, who was pretty cuddley, though, he doesn't want to be in the same room with humans unless he's in the mood to cuddle.

Amos and Andy have a weird system going, too. They were both bought by Renee and her hubby almost 3 years ago when they were both little bitty kittens, sitting frightened in cages at the humane society. The pictures Renee's shown me of their kittenhood are hilarious, between their poses and their massive craniums.

It seems that Amos, in all his deep and dark blackness (Ecky, my old cat, was really a deep, dark brown underneath his black outercoat, so that in the right light he looked more like a soft, fuzzy little teddy bear than a cat sometimes .. but Amos is pure black in any light, with no other spots on him, and with these very yellow eyes like a faded post-it note) seems to be the dominant, more territorial cat. He picks fights with Andy regularly, and he gets to eat out of the food dish when he wants to, even while Andy's trying to have his own meal. So today I watched Andy step aside to let Amos eat, even though Amos could've eaten at any time earlier than that instead of sitting in my lap, and then Andy pawed little pieces out of the dish when Amos's head wasn't in the way, and ate them off the floor. Obviously, I'm thinking, Amos is the dominant cat.

However, they don't really hold to that apart from the food dish. Andy does more with the litter box to mark his territory. And, even though he often looks to Amos for permission to cuddle with someone in those rare moments he's in that mood or thinks he can wrangle a good scratching out of a nearby hand, he can also stare Amos down when he's comfy and Amos wants him to move.

Very, very odd cats.

Wonderful to be around, though. So normal, so natural. I wasn't really much of a cat person before my older brother brought Ecky home one day when I was in maybe the 8th grade. I'd played with cats at friends' houses, and I loved holding kittens almost as much as I loved holding puppies, but I didn't think I'd ever really want to own a cat specifically. I'd already had gerbils, parakeets, and a golden retriever (not in that order) along with taking care of class pets during breaks, and really felt no desire to stray from my pet-owning experiences. In fact, we still had a gerbil for the first year or so that we had Ecky, 'till she (the gerbil.. Ecky was a boy) apparently got her nose stuck in the wheel and died a gruesome and horrible death. Poor girl.

Ecky was one of the great loves of my life, though. He grew on my immediately when John brought him home, and I apparently grew on him as well. I don't actually know where he is now, but that's a long story.

It's nice having Andy and Amos walking in and out of the various rooms I'm in at any given moment, though. Andy just came back in and is across the room now, but even just having him in the same room is nice. There's just something about a house with pets vs. one without, and especially with pets that have the freedom to move around as they wish. (As opposed to gerbils or birds in cages. And then there are those gerbils out of cages, but that's not important right now. What is important is that cell phones ring at such a frequency that humans cannot distinguish the location from whence the ring comes, which is why when a cellphone rings in a semi-crowded or crowded room, several people at all different areas of the room will check to see if it's theirs. Thanks, Sarah, now I know! And knowing is half the battle. The other half is carsasm.)

So all that aside, I really just wanted to express that it's such a peaceful, wonderful thing to have these two cats running around.

And their owners are two of the neatest, most hospitible people I know, to boot!

Darrin is a flight-simulator technician and around Christmas of '96 he brought me to his workplace and let me fly one of those babies. I crashed it once, and I managed to complete the flight (thanks to a great deal of work on Darrin's part, but don't tell him I know that) the second time. Renee sat in the back playing with the controls to make it storm and stuff. What a great night. Half of why Atlanta feels like home to me is because these two are here and I get to visit them each time I'm in town. That's interesting, because they don't really feel completely at home now and once they both graduate from their re-college-ing with new degrees that will let them work in other areas if they want to, they'll very likely end up moving elsewhere.. the sky's the limit.

Andy's rubbing his head against my wallet/planner now, as if it's gonna scratch his head. Silly cat.