States are starting to re-open, which is freaking me out considering our government has done little during the shutdown to justify reopening. The radio DJs were talking this morning about how they already had haircut appointments scheduled. I think there is going to be an unfortunate confusion of “permitted” and “safe”: like, if haircuts are allowed, then I have a haircut pass I can show to the virus, and the virus cannot infect me! I am feeling very unhappy about all the additional people who will be forced to go back to work in these conditions.
Paul and I were talking about the effects the partial re-open will have on our household. We are extremely, extremely fortunate that we can continue to stay home until we find out if the re-open is as bad an idea as we think it is. Originally I wrote the rest of this paragraph as a list of all the ways we were fortunate, but when I proof-read it I thought it sounded like boasting rather than the Acknowledging Privilege I was going for. It reminded me of the Christmas letters we get from Paul’s aunt: it is clear she is attempting through heavy use of the word “blessed” to communicate that they know how lucky they are and that they consider the luck unearned—and yet she manages to make it sound as if God has singled out their family for these blessings, and that she really couldn’t tell you why God didn’t do the same for your family when he clearly had that option but evidently decided not to bother for some reason, *shrug*.
Anyway, I think we’re about to go into a Very Bad Time, virus-wise, so let’s not talk about it anymore, let’s instead fulfill a request for pictures of the cats. You’re going to raise your eyebrows at my concealing their names, but “cat names” is EXACTLY the sort of dumb little thing that gets a Secret Blog discovered.
Here is Cat #1, a boy, age 9, all orange with pretty fur patterns, long and slim like a ferret:
He is a sweetie-pie and suuuuuuuuper dumb. We have a downstairs floor-plan of the sort that would let children run endlessly from room to room in a big circle, and we don’t think this cat has figured out what’s going on yet: we often see him pass through the living room, looking all around him, and then after awhile he comes all the way around again and you can just see him thinking “Oh, ANOTHER living room! With MORE people in it! Wow!! I wonder how many MORE rooms there are??” He sleeps on Edward’s bed almost every night, and we’re surprised he manages to find it so consistently. During the day he likes to sit behind me on my computer chair, so that I have to perch on the edge.
Here he is on the windowsill where he likes to watch Chipmunk TV:
That chair is there specifically for his convenience and comfort, but he often balances uncomfortably on the sill instead. With him is Cat #2, a boy, age 9. Cat #2 is a large-framed cat, a polydactyl, with extremely soft plush fur, grey-brown tabby and white. He is a Giant Baby. We have treated him with persistently gentle love for 7 years, and he still frequently winces and flinches and runs from us. If you talk to him, he will meow back. He lovvvvves Elizabeth and is usually in her room or sitting near her. He likes me, too, as long as no one else is in the room with me: after Paul gets up in the morning, he’ll sleep in Paul’s place, and then he likes to come into the bathroom and sit on the carpet while I take a shower. Here he is again, with Elizabeth:
And again, looking pensively out the window:
Here is Cat #3, a girl, age 7, orange with white tum, white knee socks, and white gloves:
She is a bossy little queen, small and fat. She bullies and menaces the polydactyl, who is much larger and stronger and could easily beat her up if he’d only realize it instead of running away from her. She is very affectionate with people in a possessive/claiming way, and will make the rounds from lap to lap. She follows us around the house, supervising and judging. She is my favorite cat we’ve ever had.
Here’s a rare photo of all three cats together (normally you’d see the two oranges together, or the two boys together, but never the girl-orange and the polydactyl unless they’re about to fight); this was possible only because they were having Wet!! Food!! which blows out their circuits:
The polydactyl looks smaller than he is, partly because of the weird perspective and partly because he is hunched in as small as he can make himself. The girl-orange is mad because she can’t eat out of all the bowls at once. The boy-orange is oblivious to all drama.
Oh, I love cat photos! First, I admire and am in awe of your secrecy. It seems to me a model of how one should operate a blog. I have my own opinion of where you live, but I’m probably way off and anyway it doesn’t matter! But when you talk about your house, or your town, I have a mental map (just as I have a mental visual calendar for time). But maybe that’s just me.
We have FOUR cats and a very small house. We started with two (unrelated male & female, now 18 years old) — they are called Princess (our then 10-year-old daughter named them) and Licorice. Princess is a brown tabby and Licorice is (can you guess?) all black. The other two cats technically belong to our daughter, but she moved away to a place where she couldn’t have cats and now they are ours. They are brother and sister littermates and are about 5 years old now. The female is a tuxedo (black & white) and the male is all black. The female, as it turns out, is ALSO named Princess (she came with the name from her original home), so we call her Floof and the male is called Noodle, which is perfectly descriptive. We have different groupings. Most prevalent is the Black Cat Club, which excludes Princess #1. She is old and cranky and doesn’t get along with Princess #2. And then, when the sun is coming through the back door, we have sun-bathing cats Licorice, Noodle and Princess #1 — the “non-asshole cats.” They are all (mostly) sweet and wonderful, and we spend a lot of our time walking around the house, shaking our heads and muttering, “CATS.”
I am a little surprised you didn’t do cat pseudonyms. It would have given you an opportunity to name them all over again!
My votes for cat pseudonyms are as follows:
Boy orange, Hopkirk. Polydactyl, Watkins. Girl orange, Antonia.
Also I live with six rats and 5 of them are named after goddesses or mythological beings, and the other is named after a drag queen. Alaska doesn’t seem to mind not fitting the theme with Sybil, Artemis, Mabb, Juno and Venus. I’m a little sad I used Sybil on an animal because I would want to plump for it HARD if I were pregnant with a girl fetus, but it fits Sybil the rat so perfectly. She is very self contained and has an all knowing air, and is a bit too smart for her own good. All of our girls get on very well except that Mabb, Juno and Venus are all 6 months so it’s like having 3 humans all age about 17. They love each other but they don’t like to be bossed and they do like to boss each other.
Those are really good! I think Hopkirk suits boy-orange better even than his real name: he has a sort of formal, serious name, but he’s such a silly loop. And Antonia is perfect for the proud, queenly girl-orange. At first I thought Watkins might be too dignified for the scaredy-cat, but I think the -kins ending keeps it cute enough.
But we need to know your cat naming style! Can we get substitute names like you give for the kids?
What a good idea. So, my cat-naming style USED to be Somewhat Whimsical People-Names. But then I kept finding that about ten years later styles would change enough that I’d want to use that whimsical/unusable-in-real-life name for a real-life baby, so now I prefer either non-people-names or else names that are not my style for people. But we are in transition, because boy-orange was named under the old style, so he has a name like Theodore or Albert. The girl-orange came to us already named with a name that’s not my style so at first I wasn’t glad the kids voted to keep it, but now I think it’s perfect on her; it’s a name like Bella or Jasmine. And the polydactyl has a name has a nicknamey name like Buddy or Sonny.
I would read an entire separate blog devoted to your cats if you were so inclined, just FYI.
Also, I am delighted/surprised that your blog is STILL a Secret Blog, after all these years and all these readers! It seems like a FEW people in your real life know about it; but is it really just a handful? And have you directed them to keep it to themselves? And is it really just secret from Certain Relations or…?
This was a welcome diversion from All Things Pandemic and I really, really wish I could give your cats scritches.
I think by now all the main people in my life (close family, close friends) know about the blog, but at this point it’s mostly a secret from casual people: like, I don’t want my kids’ teachers or kids’ friends’ parents or Paul’s coworkers knowing about it. But also, yes, Certain Relations!
I love this post in about 500 different ways, but especially the cat descriptions and photos. Also, I receive several of those exact kinds of Christmas letters each year and you have captured so PERFECTLY the way it reads like they think God has specifically decided that THEIR family should have all these blessings, oh but not yours too bad. That drives me BONKERS. One time my husband and I had had an exceptionally terrible year in a few big respects and we wrote a sarcastic version of the Christmas letter recounting all the nightmarish things that had happened. We didn’t send it, but occasionally we go back and reread it because it was hilarious.
ALSO, after a few weeks of decreasing to a bearable level, my anxiety is ramping right back up to Early Shutdown Days level (i.e., VERY HIGH). My city is not reopening anytime soon, but the fact hat OTHER cities and states ARE reopening, and putting people at risk of suffering at the level that my city has experienced, is making me VERY ANXIOUS INDEED.
Yay, a cat post! This is just the kind of palette cleanser we all need right now. (Also the glimpses of your new house are great! The flooring is beautiful.)
This was the first thing I read when I woke up this morning and YAY.
I have two cats, littermate sisters, age 9, Maggie and Sophie. Maggie is extremely affectionate and talks to us and sleeps between my pillow and my husband’s at night; she likes to sit on my husband’s chest to be petted and pet him back with little strokes of his beard. Sophie is a massive diva and lives to be fed. We adore her.
HEARTEYES!!!
I am utterly allergic, so I live vicariously through other people’s photos of their cats.
Your polydactyl looks a lot like the cat who owns my dad and stepmom.
Cats! I love a good cat post. We have 2 cats, Pearl and Precious. Pearl is a beautiful snow white cat. She’s also standoffish and only loves my teenage daughter. Precious is grey and white and scrawny even though she eats far more than pearl. She also very dumb. But she is sweet and affectionate and good with the younger children. My 6 year old carries her around like a rag doll and Precious is all in. I’m so glad we have 2 cats so that the children know not every cat is contrary and spiteful like Pearl.
I love this. You are so observant re: personality, even on the level of pets! I have only lived with a cat once, a male tabby named Abraham Lincoln. He was aloof, a hunter who would provide for our house of college women by leaving his catch on the doormat. The personality aspect reminds me of a parrot my mother in law used to have. He was small and green and his name was Crikey. He loved my mother in law and brother in law, anyone else who tried to touch him would be greeted with blood drawing nips. He was allowed to walk around on the floor, and the only way to escape an ankle bite was to retreat to the counter stools. Parrots are a pain. Every morning he would wake the household by hollering “BUENOS DIAS!!!”
I am HERE for the cat photos and stories, thank you!
Gratitude for this post Swistle. I just watched djt’s mini press conference before his flight to AZ and blessings(!) your script was here to soothe me.
So happy all my bloggers are blogging more frequently during quarantine since I sure am haunting the internet more at this time. Something I’m DYING to know- please address in a post- is how often you refer to your children by their pseudonym IRL. Do you ever or often say “Elizabeth come for dinner” and she eye rolls and is like “Mom it’s [Anna]”. How do you refer to them in your head ie Oh it’s time to make Edward’s Remicade refill or Oh it’s time to refill [Bobby’s] Remicade? Does it depend on how much you’ve been blogging? Super curious. Thanks!
No idea how the dual name situation works for Swistle, but I have a secret blog too and I have never called my kids by their blog name. This might be because most of my kids’ blog names are not ‘real’ names as in Mini, Tank, Lad, Curly, etc. Sometimes when I am typing, say an email to a teacher or something, I have to pause briefly. I few close friends know my blog, and one of them tells me if I accidentally slip up and use a kid’s real name on the blog. That was years ago though, I think I am in the habit now.
How does it work for you Swistle?
I have trouble almost exclusively in writing: like, I don’t slip and call my daughter Elizabeth to her face, but if I’m writing an email or posting on my friends/family Facebook, I sometimes do. I have also occasionally slipped when talking to someone else, like my mom or a friend, but mostly with Henry’s name—I think because he had a pseudonym from birth, while the others all had names firmly established before they got their pseudonyms.
I am sneezing and wheezing just looking at their photos. I am an extreme allergic person who has always wanted a dog, but I think 6 kids is plenty. I do feel bag because the kids would like a dog. My allergist says even the hypoallergenic ones are not to be purchased by me.
Your cats really are so pretty. I didn’t know you had three cats. I love the description of the one walking through the living room and not realizing it is the same room he was just in. Hilarious!
I am not so much a cat person, and this is not helped by my mother who has a cat she utterly dotes on that is basically a giant snowball with an orange head and tail stuck on who delights in terrorizing my dog, whom she outweighs by a goodly number of pounds. This cat is also the reason we no longer have a Christmas tree at my mother’s, despite the fact that our family really does almost all our Christmas celebrating there. I mean sure, we’re not entitled to a tree there, and we do have a tree at our own house, and it’s my mother prerogative to decide that she doesn’t want to risk her terribly-behaved cat swatting all the ornaments down, but gah! I wasn’t a fan of an evil cat messing with a long-standing Christmas tradition.
The reopening of the US in the middle of the first wave seems like utter lunacy, and I think the best thing Canada can do is keep our border closed. My mom doesn’t believe we can do that if the US opens the border from their end, but yep, we can let people out and not let them in again without mandatory quarantine if they go to a place where disease is running rampant. I can’t imagine our flights (booked long ago) to California in July not being cancelled, or Canada not keeping the level-4 travel advisory in effect for the States, in which case I think we can cancel without penalty even if our flights technically aren’t cancelled. Sorry, back to the pets…
I will concede that I’ve met a few cats that seem quite charming, but I am firmly in the camp of team Small, Cute, Non-shedding Dog. Before I got one of these, I wasn’t a pet person, but I do find that owning one has given me a new appreciation for all similar dogs. It’s kind of like babies – I wasn’t really into babies until I had my own, and now I go a bit gaga over all small babies.
I love the cat post! I currently have three cats: Macy is a 14 year old tabby. She is very sweet and likes to be held. She will come right up to any visitor and meow for pets. After our two old cats passed away I adopted a black kitten from the Humane Society. Her name is Sullivan and she loves to play fetch. I throw wadded up pipe cleaners, puff balls and even bobby pins for her to chase and bring back to me many, many times a day. She just turned 2. Then a stray black cat came into our lives – she is around 2 or 3 and purrs louder than any cay I have ever had. Her name is Hattie. My son and I are all about cats normally, but because of being home all the time together we talk about the cats constantly. They are a major source of entertainment around here!
Oh, Sullivan. That’s a cat name that makes my heart sing.
Sullivan is so fun to say! And Sully! She is a girl, but I figure it is ok to give a girl cat a boy name. It is not like she will be teased in cat kindergarten!
I remember years ago you writing for a separate site and they published your last name (I assume it was your last name – it was definitely not Thistle.) I remember emailing you and emailing the site’s general email address in case the name was specific enough for google. You worked so hard to keep it secret and it would have been a shame to have someone’s error ruin that.
I’m glad you have been able to stay secret all these years. Your blog is my very favorite.
I’m not even a cat person and that was such an enjoyable read. (I read it twice). Thank you ❤️
Growing up, my very favorite of all our cats looked exactly like your tabby. His name was Shoe and he used to follow us everywhere like a puppy and he would also talk back to us. He came to us from an abusive situation and he was slightly skittish his whole life (18 years roughly we had to give him up during an upheaval in my family we had had him for 10 years at that point). It’s been at least 20 years and I still miss him,
Loved this post and I didn’t realize you had three cats. For some reason I thought one or two. Three is the perfect amount if your house is big enough or if they can go outside.
I have a female cat that is a lot like yours in terms of personality. We call her the office manager.
My cat is 17, and named something like Isabel, which of course then skyrocketed to popularity. In fact, one of my husband’s cousin’s named her daughter the same name about 6 years later. Amusingly, she had a dog named something like Sophie, and we ended up naming our daughter the same thing.
Our other cat and two dogs are named after places and one is named after an animal in another language.
Yay, a cat post!!! This was so welcomed and I loved getting to meet your cats! My darling orange cat is Willie Mays (WM), named after the San Francisco Giant baseball player because he (the cat) is orange (one of the Giants colors) and because I am a Giants fan and also because his (the cat’s) given name when he joined our family was similar to Willie May’s (the person’s) nickname, which was The Say Hey Kid. He is absolutely the light of my life and while I consider allowing another cat to join our family, I feel like WM is very happy living the only child life (as I also enjoyed) and I don’t want to rock the boat.
Hurray for your wholesome and entertaining content! We are a one cat one guinea pig house and they have matchy names like Peas and Carrots. We had two cats for a while as one came with my brother, but he has since moved in with his boyfriend and while the kids and I miss Uncle C, we don’t miss the cat fights. Brother and I did a VERY bad job introducing the two cats to each other and paid for it (we were both experiencing significant trauma at the time and it was our best).
I do love the idea of a bonded cat pair. But I think we’d have to get a kitten and cross our fingers. I wish there was an easy way to gauge if a cat is amenable to that idea. I’m having flashbacks to your cat who hated the busy household and was happier rehomed, although her name escapes me.
I love animals, but was always more of a dog person-I think it was mostly I didn’t know any cats growing up. Not one of my friends had a cat, but we all had dogs. Then long story short-my husband came across a kitten he fell in love with. A feral stray that had been brought to him for an emergency grooming. I was out of town with my sister who was visiting, I got back that night to see my daughter with a big cat scratch across her face. She was 2-I was ready to kick the cat to the curb (well, find a good home for it!). My husband said that he wanted the cat-it was covered in motor oil-because when it was in the tub, it was purring. Thus started my love affair with cats! Took that cat a bit to warm up, but he ended up being the biggest sweetheart ever. He was almost 20 when he died, and I won’t lie-it was like losing a very loved family member.
I still adore dogs, and we have two-but there is something about cats that is so enjoyable to me. We currently have 2 cats with such different personalities. Actually kind of stressful! Yet between the 2 cats and the 2 dogs we all muddle along :)
I love pet posts-hope you include them in your future writings!
My husband got a call from his parents the other day that they were on the way to drop his mom off at a friend’s house for a visit because she’d HEARD ON TALK RADIO that quarantine was over. Our state is not reopening! But it’s not going to matter with so many people acting like we are. I am so tired of being angry all the time.
The cat pictures are fab, and you have dispelled once and for all the idea I’ve had since I was a kid that orange tabbies were almost always boys. I knew it was probably wrong but was never in a position to look it up when I was actually thinking about it, so yay for learning something today!
Rlbelle, you’re right that colour in cats is sex-linked – the vast majority of tricolour cats are female, and orange cats are more likely to be male. https://petcentral.chewy.com/behavior-pet-facts-are-all-orange-cats-male-all-calico-cats-female/
I’ve also heard that a male cat that is all white with blue eyes is much more likely than average to be deaf, but it turns out the risk is linked to colour in general: https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institutes/cornell-feline-health-center/health-information/feline-health-topics/ask-elizabeth-white-cats-and-blindnessdeafness
It’s no fair to talk about a cat being polydactyl and not show toe pics!!!
(And yes, I realize that it would be totally not ok to say that about, say, a human child’s genetic deformity, but c’mon. Let’s see the toe beans!!)