If there is interest in Pearl and the other cats here at Catnip Manor, I will keep the series going.

I daresay your pootie stories would be welcomed as much or more than this one was!

I used to do that so much better when I moved every 2 years. That way I could associate time with whatever house I lived in. Then I bought a house and have lived here for almost 15 years now so for all I know it's 1968 again, I've totally lost track.

Oh da cuteness. Brain dribble in 5,4,3....

but from experience, I can tell you that Earl loves soft things like flannel or fleece. So if those are possibilities, he'd be deliriously happy! If not, the softest option you have will be fine. If it helps, Earl is solid gray w/green eyes. But we are not very fussy, so I'm sure whatever you send will be most wonderful.

Pictures - of course!!

Booter's mum, Bootsie whom I was never able to capture.

She had a litter of one, was ill as a kitten and knocked up as a kitten hrself -- and I suspect if not dead or eaten by coyotes is deceased now. Bootsie had two boots and a set of smaller gloves up front. When she appeared in my back yard, nosing her kitten in front of her where I could see him, she was weak, staggering and starving. I thought they both might have a respiratory infection, but put out a warm but worn out cat bed with a padded bottom to retain heat on my tiny back stoop, out of wind and rain, and put out water warmed to body temp for her in a proper bowl and a shitload of spendy dry food and one tiny can of specialty (sic) cat food on a proper platelet. Those things are stable and dishwashable, and junk bowls just blow away. She ate almost 2 cups of food in under 90 minutes, so the next morning I put out 3 cups, though she was gone.. the kitten was wedged into the padded cat bed so deep asleep I thought he was dead. NO I didn't take him at the time. He was still nursing, for goodness sake. 5 days later he was attacking little weed stalks blowing in the cold wind and snuggling to his mom who slept with him literally between her front legs, tightly curled around him. Gradually I 'd see him tucking into the wet food, then the dry and drinking the water.. and one morning she was gone. A "tender trap" didn't entice either of them.

Booter's name came because he's a B&W tuxedo, classic tux markings, except for the black coloration starting on the top front of his snout sharing space with pink hide .. and that black hide is tougher than the pink hide on cats, when they're tux or mask on mantle (diff markings, more like a hat, ratty cape etc., and not symmetrical, so that in dappled outdoor shade they disappear to birds and animals hunting them with limited color vision.. they melt into the pattern when squatting or sleeping, either one.) Booter, being basic, was your "basic bootstart cat" , a "beginner's model."

And he gets sung to, as does Bogie and as does Nutzy. There are doggerel songs for each one. Bogart, aka the Lummox, is jammed into the chair I'm in right now, sprawled falling out over the arm (leatherette recliner swivel chair.. beat to spit.. laptop is on a hospital bed table and the chair is the computer table's chair... Bogie likes to cram in right next to people, rather than on them. It's startled the rare visitor, downstairs.. I have two chair and a half hideabed easy chair, and he waits until someone is seated, and jams himself right in next to them, looks up at them once, then sighs and drops off to sleep immediately. Idiot. Trusts everyone and everything except the sound of cars...

Nutzy goes under furniture.. ALWAYS.. to avoid being picked up or even petted, except if I'm at dining table in my chair, and then she's in the next one over, waiting to be petted from neck to rump and flea combed (she's not got fleas, but those combs get out all the loose hair, so she doesn't hoick up furballs).

Booter and his mum before him were fed grain free food from the getgo, so she'd make good milk for a strong kitten and then so he'd have food to be weaned on to. He's never known a hungry hour ,was still a kitten, but a fully weaned one when Bootsie just LEFT.. left him in the yard and habituated to me, more or less. I went out, scooped him right up out of a 11 gallon galvanized oval tub om a greenhouse stand in which I grow a tomato plant every year, threw him into a soft sided carrier and hauled out the garage door with him on the seat in my little IQ, going from vet to vet in my town until I found ONe that would give him the instant flea killing pill and worming pill, as well as put flea drops between his shoulder blades. I also had them draw blood for communicable diseases, and finding none, he got his first round of shots, and then he came home with me to his owm hidey hole in a closed guest bedroom for 14 days, while he got snipped and the other two cats could smell him and he them through the bottom of the bedroom door. a choice of kitty beds, brand new cat toys all his own, reeking of good catnip, water, his familiar high quality food and a radio with human voices, music, etc., on a timer, on most of the time. Lights on timers and me visiting.

Post snip, Das Booter had about six days to heal up, and then one morning he shot out the door into the loft upstairsbefore I could put down the filtered water bottle -- and he ran right OVER Bogie who was lying there hoping to get a look at the intersting smelling newcomer. Bogues at the time was mostly a large overgrown kitten around 4 months older than Booter. Bogie just lay on the floor stupidly while Booter kept jumping back and forth over him, and The Wrecking Crew was born. You'd think the Lummox would have broken him. Bogues reminds me at times of the idiotic Abominable Snow man who keeps catching Bugs or Daffy or Sylvester and telling the screen he'll name them 'George' and will "hug them and love them and squeeze them and never let them go." Yes, Bogues is that thick.. and Booter, now an adult at half Bogie's adult size, is the Brain to Bogie's Pinky, the instigator of all their damage, and the leader in the galloping noisy races through the house..

Booter's the chow cat, the sniffer of the air looking for food to rip off, the searcher for things out of place to mangle and mark, etc.

And often on really glum days, my babies are all that make me laugh.. and they've pulled some truly STUPID stuff.... Nutzy sneaks onto the bed when my pain meds are not working that well, tucks herself behind my knees, puts her head on the covers over my thigh and purrs with a chirp in the purr; helps me lie still until the meds kick in. Then she'll lie on the bed while I work the Therabands until my feet just burn instead of stabbing me as if I had built in naile guns firing off at irregular intervals in one foot or another. I don't know many cats that patient while still acting mostly standoffish.

Bogues will moan and wail until I manage to pick him up and lug him around thrown over one shoulder.. He really DOES think he's a sack of oranges. He'll literally leap up to rob his wet pink dognose on the palm of my hand and get his whiskers pulled and chops rubbed. And he doesn't wriggle when I lug him around, but DOES expect to be carried up and down the stairs. Loony. Utterly LoonyTunes. And, of kharmic course, being the biggest cat he is the most insecure.