Confessions of a Grandma

The icicles are dripping slowly outside the window as I sit here.  My cat would have been riveted.  He could sit at the window and watch the drip...drip...drip all afternoon.  He loved Christmas, too.  The tree went up and he was ensconced under it for the duration of the season.  We still miss that cat. We do not plan on putting up a tree this year, or on doing anything else in the way of decorating, for that matter.  The ceiling and wall painting will not be completed until a couple of days before Christmas Day so it would not be worth the work involved to decorate and then take things down three or four days later.  Usually, I like decorating so I am not giving it up forever, but things are definitely scaled back this year.  I will have our family get together, but other than the pierogis already in the freezer and two pies, everything else will be store bought.  The kids will be kind of disappointed not to see a tree at Grandma's house...

We always told him he was the pick of the litter. He was a singleton. His mother was a purebred, very petite Siamese. His father, obviously, was not. I brought him home telling a skeptical Mike, "He just followed me home. What could I do?" That night, he jumped up on our bed and slept on Mike's feet. He was Mike's cat form that moment on. Notice in the picture he is rolling around next to Mike's (and trust me on this) very stinky sandal. Obviously some kind of chemical/olfactory bond took place that first night. Mike could hold that cat in his lap for hours. If I tried to pick him up or pet him for any length of time he would stalk off in a huff. His preference was so distinct and so well communicated that any cat person could immediately "read" his nonverbal communication--"I LOVE him, but her job is to feed us so I tolerate her presence in our house." Because it was my job to feed him (even though Mike often did), he would only wake me up in...