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Cats and Christmas and So On . . .

So it’s been a little while since I’ve written a life entry, and something very odd has happened in that time. We have a cat. Those of you who know me well are probably aware that, on average, I’m not a cat person. I traditionally prefer the campany of dogs (over cats or people, lol), but this feline won us over somehow and has since become a member of the family.

It started shortly after Thanksgiving. Melissa had gone to bed early and I was in my office working on something. I heard some noises out back, but since we live in an apartment I generally ignore the strange noises I hear. I glanced through the blinds of my office window to see if anything was going on out back, and saw nothing.

Another ten or fifteen minutes went by and I heard another noise, and this one sounded like it was on our porch. I looked out my window and didn’t see anything, so I opened the blinds on the sliding glass window and there she was . . . a little orange tabby kitten sitting on our porch looking like she wanted in.

I woke Melissa up and we considered what to do. After checking the weather (it was mild), we decided to leave her outside and see how long she hung around.

The next morning the cat was gone. We went to work like usual, and then came home early (because Melissa was sick) and still no cat. But around 5:30, she showed up again at our door and again acted like she wanted us to let her in. This time we obliged, feeding her some spare tuna. She had no collar or anything, and I made a quick run to the pet store for a few days’ supply of kitten food and litter.

We went ahead and took her to the vet, and she checked out fine. He estimated that she was about 5 months old. There was no identifying microchip, and checking with the leasing office the next morning revealed that this cat had been hanging around the apartment complex for a couple of weeks and nobody had come looking for her. It was clear that this cat was ours to keep. Melissa named her ‘Mei Mei’ (pronounced ‘May May’), which is Chinese for ‘beautiful girl’.

You can see some pictures on Melissa’s blog.

Generally, Mei Mei has a wonderful personality. She doesn’t scratch much (at us or the furniture), she uses the litter box, and she likes to be held and petted. She ranks as one of the few cats I like (there have really only been two so far, out of about 50 cats that I’ve met). We took her down with us to visit our families over Christmas, and after the first twenty minutes in the car she calmed down and went to sleep. My sister’s fat, idiot cat picked a fight with Mei Mei, and then Mei Mei won the fight!

Last night we took her back to the vet to have a bunch of other stuff done (we didn’t do everything the first night, since we didn’t know if we were keeping her and didn’t want to spend a fortune). She’s getting spayed, a couple of shots, an identification microchip, a fecal exam, and a blood test. Something tells me she will not be a happy cat when we pick her back up tomorrow (her surgery is this morning).

In other news, we had a great Christmas with the family in southern Virginia. Thanks to everybody for the excellent gifts, including a bluetooth headset (for my phone), a George Foreman rotisserie grill (for . . . Melissa, lol), another season of Simpsons’ DVDs, and much more! We also had a great time just hanging out with the families, meeting my sister’s non-official boyfriend, talking politics, and getting to know my parents’ foster kids better. Good times, good times.

As for upcoming projects, I have a lot of things on my mind. I’m still trying to force myself to write more for the site, and—more difficultly—trying to convince myself to finish reading the Qur’an. I’m finding it very trite in comparison to the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and I’m not very motivated to keep with it. I’m also working on the design and organization of the next version of this site (long-term project, may still take several months), and I’m looking into some major network infrastructure improvements at the apartment (moving from a home-grade network to a small-business-grade network, complete with a redundant file server). Got to put Christmas Gift Cards to good use, you know ;-).

Hope everybody reading this had a wonderful Christmas (or, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I just hope you had a good December).

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.