Meet our stray cats (and shelter dog)!

    Penelope - About 7 years old

Penelope started visiting us when we first moved into our current house.  She was pregnant and very wild but would come on the porch to eat if we pretended not to see her.  Gradually, over the course of two years, she got a little friendlier and would let us occasionally pet her just a little while she ate.  Then she began to sleep in a big dog house we put out on the porch for her.  During this time she had another litter under our porch.  Finally we managed to fool her into going into a cat carrier by putting it in the same place as her dog house.  The plan was to get her to the feral cat spay/neuter clinic and re-release her but she was pregnant again - VERY pregnant.  So she lived in our garage for a few days, had her kittens and raised them to the adoptable stage, THEN she went to the spay clinic.  By that point, however, she was too "friendly" to just put back in the woods but nowhere near friendly enough for anyone else to give her a chance.  So she moved in with us.  She spent the first few days behind the washing machine but now has progressed to the point where she will come and sit with us and watch TV as long as we don't move too awfully much or try to pick her up.
      May - 6 1/2 years old

May arrived on our porch exactly one day after Ashley died of heart disease.  May was a starving teenager with a sore on her hind quarters from being shot by a bb gun.  She belonged to our neighbors who had obviously not been taking care of her and who had named her Doodles.  When we asked if May belonged to them they said she did but said we could just keep her if we wanted.  Robin also rescued May's sister Leelu from them on the same day.  Because of the timing with Ashley we didn't expect to keep either of the girls but after they lived in the garage for a while, they moved in due to overwhelming sweetness.  May is a bit of a hypochondriac.  She spent a lot of her first few months with us being visited by the vet.  Most notably, she limped for a week and we couldn't find anything wrong with her.  After the vet checked her out and declared her well, she changed legs and limped in a totally new way.  Ever since we bought them the "Video Catnip" tape, May likes to watch TV.  She loves her video of birds and jumpy animals but she watches regular TV too hoping to find some critters worth watching on there.
      Leelu - 6 1/2 years old

Leelu was named Snickers when Robin rescued her.  The neighbors owned a mastiff as well as our girls and Leelu was hanging out on the porch, hiding from the dog under the tarp that covered their gas grill.  To this day Leelu still wags her tail when she's excited or happy about something.  Leelu was described as "the stand-offish one" but she has become one of our friendliest strays.  Like her big sister Smudge, Leelu is very noisy but she tends to respond more with a series of chirps and grrrrs.  Leelu loves any box or basket and will try to fit herself into any space with walls.  Now that she is a nice big girl, sometimes she needs help to fit in and will stand with her front feet in a container chirping until someone helps her out.  Her other favorite pastime is feeding the fish.  Leelu quickly picked up on the morning and night fish feeding routine and stands next to the aquarium wagging her tail and making noise to remind me to feed the fish.  Since she was so good about remembering I began giving her a kitty treat for being such a good helper and suddenly all the other cats wanted to help feed the fish as well!
       Señor Tail - 6 years old

Señor Tail is from the litter of kittens Penelope had under our porch.  He has a little kink at the end of his tail which is not visible now because he's so fluffy and beautiful.  When he moved in he was like any other kitten and he loved everyone, but he especially loved Leelu.  He would chase her all over the house until she got tired of playing with him.  The only way she seemed to know to get some peace was to jump on the back of the toilet because he was so little he couldn't jump up and get her there.  He would stand on the bathroom floor and mew at his big sister until she came down.  When he first moved in he was so little he wasn't very good at wrestling with his siblings.  The only way he had to pin the bigger cats was to back up to them and sit on their heads.  The butt attack was his most powerful weapon.  Although he's big enough to hold his own now, he still reverts to sitting on a head in the heat of battle.  He's a big boy now but he is still sweet and loving (when he feels like it) and he's still sometimes called "The Baby".
      Jesse - About 6 1/2 years old                  

Jesse joined our house as a fully grown boy at about age 3.  Robin brought him home after someone at work said they were taking Jesse to the pound.  He had been given up by his previous family when they moved away.  We kept his name since we never intended to keep him and didn't think it was fair to give him a new name when his new family would probably rename him when he moved in with them.  Unfortunately, no one wanted an adult boy cat.  Also unfortunately, Jesse felt that he was the boss of the cats we already had so he didn't mix well with them.  He wanted to play with them, but he had no social skills and would play much too hard so we continued to search for a good home for him.  A year later we decided he probably already had found a home and he lives with us.  He has an uneasy truce with some of the cats but not with others so he has his own bedroom in the basement at night.  During the day he leaves the basement and lives in the whole house except for the bedroom where everyone else spends most of their time.  Despite his problems with his brother and sisters, he is very loving with people.  Jesse loves to be held and will ride around draped over our shoulders for as long as we will keep him there.

     Fletcher - 1 1/2 years(in this photo he's 3 months )

Fletcher is our shelter puppy who moved in near Easter.  We had been keeping our eyes open for a dog for about two years but we got more serious about it recently, searching websites for all the animal shelters in the area.  After driving to a shelter south of us to look at two dogs we had seen on-line (one was already adopted, the other said that she liked to chase cats!!) we stopped impulsively at our local shelter.  There we found Fletcher howling.  It was just five minutes before they closed so we left to think it over.  Although we'd been looking for so long, the prospect of actually taking a dog home seemed so scary!  But the next day Robin got him and he moved in.  He is trying to play with his kitty brothers and sisters but he gets so excited by them that he tends to bark and bounce and that makes them run away - they are just so furry and fast.  According to the shelter, he is part lab and part spaniel.  You can't see it in this picture but he has a beautiful white chest with black spaniel speckles. 
 

      Smudge - 17 years old

We found Smudge and her brother Ashley in the woods of Northern Michigan when she was just three months old.  She was afraid to come but was hungry enough to take a chance.  She belonged to Jenny for six years before Robin showed up and she has begrudgingly allowed him to live in her house.  He is even allowed to pet her in a pinch.  Although Smudge's breed is officially a domestic short hair, she talks like a Siamese.   She has something to say about nearly everything!  One of her favorite games is to play "closet" where she gets to sit on a very high shelf and talk and purr.  She often sleeps on Jenny's pillow at night and usually needs at least one petting session at about 3:00 each night.  The first apartment Smudge lived in had one carpeted wall from a previous tenant.  Every night after bedtime Smudge and Ashley would race around the apartment and Smudge would climb to the top of the wall and hang there with all four legs hanging on and a wild look in her eyes.  She is a beautiful girl but it's hard to get a picture of her because of all her black fur.  Smudge died of kidney disease in July, 2006.  She was diagnosed with it in October, 2004 and we were able to treat her and keep her happy for a long time.

Tripper died totally unexpectedly from heart disease just about a month before we opened this site.  Tripper was also found in the woods of Michigan when he was a kitten with his brother and sister who live with Jenny's mom.  Tripper was the cat who always purred at everyone he met.  He loved every person who entered the house and everyone loved him.  Tripper got his name because he would run in front of you and then suddenly flop over on his side and start wiggling hoping to be pet, effectively tripping whoever was walking behind him.   He would do the same flop and wiggle every day when we came home from work out of sheer joy about having us home and would stay on the living room floor until he had been pet.  As I update this site it has been eight months since he died and we still miss him so much every day and every night even more when he's not there to flop over next to us on the bed. 

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