YAS I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS. mostly because i think hubski has a dearth of cat pics.

I always had cats growing up. Ever since I was very little I remember there being cats that my parents brought to the house I grew up in when they moved (~4 cats total, 2 they brought and 2 farm cats that came with the house). And I have always loved them. I was a weirdo cat girl for WAY longer than it was appropriate (pushing 13... CRINGE). Somehow, cat ladies became en vogue recently which is bullshit because I was clearly way into that before it was cool.

At its peak, we had 7 cats at my house. Our house used to be on the edge of town so there were tons of fields and people would dump their cats there. There was a feral pair that mated and had kittens and we spent the next month or so doing TNR on them which was better than TV for little 6/7 yr old me. We were able to catch all but the mama cat who eluded us until she quietly disappeared. The tom was the next to disappear because of our reigning lightweight champion farm cat who lived to the ripe old age of 16(?) before promptly dropping dead on my 10th birthday.

The 3 kittens all survived and thrived (except for 1 that I didn't know about until a year or two ago because she was stillborn and quietly disposed of, RIP Precious), keeping our house rodent free during the land development that occurred on the old farmland across the street from my house. They were semiferal and really only my brother and I could ever get close to them. When I moved away to college, my little brother socialized with them a lot and got one of them to be a lap cat in his old age. One of them disappeared around my senior year of high school, and the other two died in rapid succession my senior year of college (last year). They lived to be 16 or 17, which is a long and fulfilling life for feral cats.

Pictures of them are rare. There's one picture of all 3 of them hanging on my fridge at home. Here are the 2 that survived the longest, taken by my brother to preserve their memory.

When the farm cat died, my parents felt terrible because it was my birthday and I was devastated. My dad spent the better part of an hour trying to water what essentially turned out to be bedrock to illegally bury my best friend on our property. To make it up to me, they promised to get me kittens and I was so jazzed. I really wanted a little tricolor, and my parents found a litter with a tortie and BOGO'd a second one. They were beautiful little fluffballs who grew into the worst tempered cats my parents have ever dealt with but they were mine. One of them is fat and bitchy and has expelled all sorts of excrement all over the house, and the other one is skittish and neurotic and has also expelled all sorts of excrement all over the house. Now I know to go for adult cats because 1) they tend not to get adopted as quickly and 2) they have established personalities.

Now that I'm in DC, I have yet to live anywhere where it made sense to have pets but DC's first cat cafe opened last month and I have been once a week basically every week since it opened and I think it's still cheaper than having my own cat.

Anyway this turned into a novel and I'm sorry but I just really love cats

Bonus picture of my dad harassing my fat bitchy cat