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This post is in response to Lisa’s weekly blog challenge. List all of your pets and what made them special.

1. Daisy - Daisy was my first and best cat. My parents got him six months after I was born and determined that he was a female. He wasn’t. He didn’t care and neither did we. He was a short-hair grey and black tabby. He was the most laid back cat ever invented. We have pictures of me walking around the house with him in a death clutch (my arms wrapped around his chest with all paws facing out, back feet hovering millimeters above the ground).

Daisy grew old and fat but still loved kids. He slept on my bed every night. We’d have to put him out around 2am, but he would go to bed with me at 9pm. My brother would come in and pet him goodnight.

Since Daniel and I grew up in the country, we invented many new games including cat castle, moving circus, and baby carriage. Daisy was the star of all of our games. He tolerated cat castle (we built a blanket tent for him, placed him on a pillow inside, covered him in fake jewerly, and brought him little dishes of food and water), but he wasn’t too keen on movable circus (sitting in laundry baskets being dragged around the house, or baby carriage (you can figure that one out).

When he (and I) were ten, he developed severe glaucoma in his right eye. My parents paid for the surgery to have his eye removed. His wound healed and, aside from a slight loss of depth perception, he was fine.

Poor Daisy finally succumbed to a urinary disease and passed away under a bush in our front yard. We wrapped him in my pink satin pillowcase and buried him in our garden.

2. Slash

We got slash a month after Daisy died. Slash was a skinny black, grey and brownish tabby with a tendency to claw anyone who picked him up. He was very cute and a pain in the butt. After he got a little bigger, he decided not to shred us everytime we touched him.

After I went to college, Slash stayed gone for longer and longer. Everytime he came home, he looked healthy like someone else was feeding him. He disappeared in 2001. I hope he is still happily chasing rodents in the pasture.

3. Ginger

Ginger was my dog. She was a cross between a cockerspaniel and a poodle. Poor thing, she was smell, dumb, and ugly. She was never housebroken so she spent most of her time outdoors. My brother got a dog the following year so she had friends. In retrospect, I feel bad for ignoring her. She was a sweet dog but just not very bright. She is also the reason I will never voluntarily own a long-haired pet.

4. Doogie

Doogie was a black lab that was found by some hunters right before Christmas. My dad brought him home and we fell in love with him immediately. He wasn’t very smart either, but he loved attention. He played with Ginger and went to the creek with us in the summertime. He would stand in the shallow water and try to catch minnows.

When he was about two, he got hit by a car. He survived with a broken leg and some squished toes. For the rest of his life, when he ran he only ran on three legs. He never ran on the squished toe foot. He lived to a ripe old age and then keeled over in our neighbors yard one night. I think he was 14.

5. Feather

Feather was a small yellowish hound of some sort. He showed up at our house and we started feeding him. Mom named him feather because he had white fur around his butt that looked like a puffy feather. He was the sweetest dog ever. We think he had been abused though because he cowered whenever we made sudden movements. He got hit by a car on the road by our house.

6. Sapphire

Sapphire was a part Siamese cat with blue eyes who lived in our carport. She never wanted to come inside and was really wild. She had one litter of kittens on my bed when I was visiting my grandma. I was so proud that she’d decided to give birth on my bed. After that, we had her fixed. She lived out her days in our carport and died of old age.

7. Chester and Leo: Chester and Leo were the dogs we got to replace Doogie, Feather, and Ginger. Chester and Leo were two black lab mixes. Chesther was all black with wavy thick fur. Leo looked like a black lab. They played with each other and spent most of their time chewing on sticks in our front yard. They ran away or got picked up by someone passing by when I was a freshman in college.

8. Lulu

I can’t remember if Lulu was a stray or a cat from Greg. She was a black and white round little female. She had one litter of kittens including Cally and Grungy. I can’t remember what happened to her.

9. Cally and Grungy

Cally was a calico. She was skittish but she was my mom’s baby. She followed my mom around the house and would always sit on mom’s footstool while my mom read. Grungy was a brown and black cat. She was super friendly but had an unpleasant habit of drooling profusely while being pet. Grungy disappeared after being gone for longer and longer periods and Cally had to be put down because of cancer.

10. Petunia and Pansy

Petunia and Pansy were two sisters that were adopted from Greg’s “cat farm.” Greg was my mother’s boyfriend and he always ended up attracting pregnant female cats. He always got them fixed as soon as he could, but then another one would show up with dumplin’s in the oven.

They both had little bobtails. Petunia was a short-haired grey tabby and Pansy was a fluffy black and white cat with a fluffy stump tail. Pansy was a master hunter. One time, she caught a bird in her mouth in mid-air. We think she ran away with Slash. Petunia is mom’s new lap cat and hangs out with Milo.

11. Milo is Daniel’s cat. He adopted him one summer while he was home from college. Daniel was working as a waiter at a seafood restaurant. During his breaks, he hung out with his smoking coworkers behind the restaurant. There were some kittens that were living in the dumpster and there was one really friendly black kitty who always wanted attention. Daniel brought him home. Little did Daniel know that this cat would grow up to have the fluffiest, thickest fur ever known. Milo has a great personality and loves being held and picked up. You cannot sit in a chair and not have him in your lap. He lives at home with mom and Petunia.

12. Ralph

Ralph was a stray orange kitty that my neighbors and I fed while I was living in Austin. In the summertime, Ralph hung out in my yard and could be seen wandering the sidewalk between my and my neighbors houses. I didn’t adopt him because my lease prevented me from having pets. My neighbors already had two indoor cats and were content to let Ralph be their outdoor pet.

In the wintertime, I’d let Ralph stay inside where it was warm. He’d sleep on my bed all night and only go out when I went to work in the morning. When I moved, my neighbors agreed to keep feeding him and promised they’d take good care of him. I regret not going against my lease and just keeping him, but he was an outdoor cat and I didn’t want to transport him to a new neighborhood.

A few months later, my neighbor told me that they’d found a home for Ralph at the SARA Sanctuary in Seguin. It is a no-kill shelter/animal ranch in the country. I was happy for Ralph but sad to think that he wasn’t still sitting in front of my house in the sunshine.

12. Boomer and Boris

Boomer and Boris are my babies. I adopted them when Danny and I moved to California. After Ralph, I made it a requirement to find an apartment that allowed pets. We decided to adopt two cats so they could play with one another while we were at work. Originally, I wanted to get two adult cats since it is harder to find homes for them as opposed to kittens. I looked for two adult cats that liked each other but I was unsuccessful. One afternoon, we went to a local no-kill shelter. They didn’t have any pairs of compatible adult cats to adopt, but they did have a litter of two-month old kittens and their mother. The kittens were used to being around people and let me handle them. I wanted a male and a female, but the females had already been claimed. I took the two males that were left. They had a two-for-one special at the shelter so my cats were half price.

These are my new babies. They sleep on the bed with me every night and keep me company when I’m studying. They are also indoor-only cats. I’ve learned my lesson about pets and the outdoors.

Danny is asleep. He said he was going to get up but he passed out immediately. I don’t know why I find that so satisfying. Just sleep! What can it hurt?

I have some more accounting and IT homework, but I can work on it while he’s snoozing. I just hate when people force themselves to stay awake when they really just need to nap.

Lisa and I just chatted a minute ago. This is how my side of the conversation went.

Sarah: I had a really nice weekend. It was relaxing and I got a lot done. I had ten hours of homework, but it wasn’t too stressful because I spread the work out over two days. I also got to clean, cook, do laundry, and exercise. I feel like I got a lot accomplished. Danny? Oh he’s fine. We watched two TV shows together this weekend. That was our together time. That and the trip to the laundromat.

………..

It isn’t quite that bad. Danny and I do talk and hang out together when we eat or run to the store. We are around each other a lot. Even though I might get my studying done faster at the library, it is so nice to be able to sit at home in my PJs, do my reading, pet the cats, and know that Danny is just in the next room. It would be very lonely otherwise.

Well, we did it. Danny and I done got married on this here day in May.

Really, the wedding was fantastic. The food was good, the cake was absolutely delicious, and I really think everyone had a good time, even the random family members I hadn’t seen in years.

I’m completely exhausted but still riding the adrenaline rush. Tomorrow, we drive back to Austin to chill with Daniel and pack for our flight on Monday. All is well in the house of Breen.

I’m still sick, but I went to work today, unlike yesterday. I’m not coughing and I’m certainly not sneezing as much as I was earlier this week.

It is cold and rainy outside. We went from weather in the 60’s to weather in the 30’s. It’s supposed to snow tonight. I seriously doubt that will happen. If it does though, I will take pictures (oh yes, I will).

Even though I was sick yesterday, I somehow managed to get up by 2pm, shower, microwave something for lunch, watch the ANTM marathon on VH1, and take these pictures of the kitties.

What’s that saying about idle hands?

First of all, I finally made it to my math class on the scary, hard-to-find campus. It turns out that the campus is neither truly scary nor hard to find, so I will blame my inability to navigate on late-week exhaustion (yeah, that’s it).

I made it to my class and realized that I was back in high school. I was one of three people over the age of 22. I have a bad feeling that the HSers are going to get a crash course in college, be it community college. The teacher is Russian and, although I’m sure he’s a kind man, he doesn’t take crap. He was patient with the HS giggling and chatting, but he kept saying things like “and if THIS is hard for you, then you should go back to introductory algebra.”

The material we cover will be challenging for me but not impossible. I did make good grades in calculus and pre-cal once upon a time. I’m taking this class as a prerequisite for one of the MBA programs to which I applied. Plus, if I don’t get into the MBA program (I’ll be notified in eight weeks), then I can drop the class. Or that’s my plan so far…

We watched Serenity the movie last night. It was good. I thought it would be good and it was pretty much what I expected. It was a little bit dark but the story was interesting. Still, it doesn’t make me want to go back and watch the short-lived TV series.

I had a really nice day on Saturday. We slept late, did some shopping, went to the beach and walked around for 45 minutes. Despite it being January, this was one of the nicest trips I’ve had to any local beach. The weather was perfect: cool but not too windy. We stayed until the sun set and then we drove home.

We got home at 7pm, so I gathered up my stuff and went to the gym to swim in the pool. The gym wasn’t crowded at all, so I had a light workout and then sweated with the old men in the sauna. Mmmm….it wasn’t packed in the sauna - no sweat was swapped.

After that, I went home, showered up and then had a very nice Italian food dinner with Danny. Although we both agreed that what I ordered (spaghetti stuffed eggplant) looked disgusting, it tasted great and the waiters were not shy about filling my wine glass.

Here are some pics from the beach. We look happy because we’re not freezing (for once).

Here is a pic of what was hiding under the fridge. I got all of the “toys” out when boomer and boris immediately slid their new catnip mice up under the fridge.

Danny and I began our drive to California one year ago today. I can’t believe we’ve been gone for a year, but in a way, it definitely seems that long. A lot has happened in the last year. Danny is about to complete his first year of post-college employment and I’ve decided to return to school, probably out here.

We’ve both been really lucky. We live in a fantastic part of the country and even our neighborhood is well above average. We have jobs that pay us enough to live out here and still have a little money left over. We have two terrible/adorable kittens that remind us daily that we are not the most important beings in the house; they are. Members from both of our families have come to visit and more are planning to visit us soon.

The one downside is I’ve been missing my friends a lot lately. I miss my family; that’s a given, but I talk to them more often than I talk to most of my friends. I’m happy to be out here but I haven’t come close to developing friendships with anyone out here that compares to the buddies I have back in Texas. I know that it will take time, but I do miss the support network and “drinking buddy” network I could rely on any day of the week back in Austin.

Work is kicking my ass this week. Yesterday was the first time I had to take meds to cure the headache I’d caused by staring at the screen too hard.

I got home from work last night, made some stir-fry, watched recorded Simpsons episodes and started to doze on the couch. Danny and I somehow managed to peel ourselves off the couch to go to Safeway and Taco Bell. We were out of toilet paper and you can’t live for long without TP or at least a box of kleenex to get you by. After picking up the necessities, we hit Taco Bell to get Danny some dinner. He thought it was pretty funny that we made it a point to get TP and Taco Bell at the same time. Hee.

Once we got home, I got cozy on the couch while the kitties got cozy with each other on my butt. When I’m lying on my side, they like to nuzzle into my knee pit or curl up against my butt. It is strangely relaxing having a purring cat warming and buzzing your heinie as you drift off to sleep.

Today is my grandparents’ sixty-fourth wedding anniversary. That’s hard to fathom. I mean, can you imagine being with one person for that long? They are both in their late 80s. This means that they did NOT get married when they were 13 or 15 or some other ridiculously young age.

My Dad told me a funny story about them. They wanted to get married on Valentines Day, but they didn’t have enough money between the both of them to pay the minister until payday (the 15th). They had a very small ceremony and there is a cute picture of them standing outside the church with giant smiles on their faces. I don’t think my grandma had a wedding dress, so they are both wearing some nice, 40s-style outfits.

I called them to wish them a happy anniversary. One of my cousins is organizing a small family dinner for them tonight at their house.

Sixty-four years, man…..that’s crazy. These days, lasting for ten years is bordering on a miracle.

Here is another cat pic to keep you entertained while I think of something interesting to write about. Click the image for more cat pics.