Happy Birthday Atticus!

Wow! Who's the little baby with the big paws?! And a smile on his face?!

It's Baby Atticus, at 6 weeks old. All together now - AWWWWW!!! Wasn't he the cutest little guy?!

And today, he's 9 years old. When I look at that picture, I can hardly believe how quickly the time has gone. He came to live with me when he was quite young - 5 weeks and 5 days. But from the very beginning, he was out and about the apartment, exploring everything he could. He was always good natured, loved when people and dogs came over for visits; it didn't matter to him. I wouldn't say he had a temper, but he did not like to be told he couldn't do something. To this day, he's very much a cat who likes things on his own terms (as Lorraine well knows!).

I don't have as many pics of him as I'd like, after all, digital cameras were just coming out and expensive. But I did get some goodies of him. Look at how small he was! And his big tail!

Atticus, September 1998

But, what makes Atticus so much different than Mae, who was an angel, and Gandalf, who's just plain goofy, is that he didn't know his own "strength". He LOVED getting into everything. And I mean everything. No cat of mine has ever demolished more things than he did.

The biggest? In the old layout of this apartment, I used to have a waist-high shelf in the kitchen, under some cabinets. On it, I had my toaster oven, my blender and my coffee machine. I came home from work one day to find that he had *somehow* managed to jump onto the shelf (no easy task as there would not have been much space), and take down EVERYTHING on it - coffee pot broken, toaster over door warped, only the blender survived the fall to the floor. And he was fine, luckily he hadn't managed to walk on the glass and cut his wee paws.

Nice.

Then there was the time he managed to jump from my washing machine (an apartment sized one), to the top of the fridge, walk across the cookbooks on the shelf, and knock down every book and container on the shelf. Containers of tea, oatmeal, and BEST of all - a FULL crockery container of rice, which landed on the floor, and shattered to pieces. To the day I vacated the apartment before they renovated it - I was still finding bits of rice all over the apartment. Again - he was fine.

Real nice.

By then I'd figured he needed some company, so in 1999, Mae came to live with us.

By then, he had mellowed out. And from the first day I brought her home, he showed his sweet, nuturing side by being very gentle and patient with her. This was taken a week or so after she arrived. He was much more svelte back then. We shall not speak of his waistline on his birthday...

He is the only cat I've ever had who will shadow me - he needs to be around me all the time! He's so intuitive, knows when I'm under the weather, or feeling a bit down in the dumps, and sticks by me even closer. And of course, he wakes me out of bad dreams (as I mentioned in a previous post!). I remember being SO OFFENDED when the vet asked me if he had some kur in him, because he was so rambunctious and HATED being probed at the vet's. Hmmph! Then they put a sticky note on his file advising that you had to "handle him with care"! So. Pissed. Off. My Atticus? Never! Anyway, funny how subsequent vets didn't seem to have that issue with him... Kur! Handle with care! Hmmmph! *grumble*

And he will always be my Baby Atticus!

"Aw shucks Mom...!"

What else have I been doing of late? De-stashing! I've managed to offload quite a bit of stuff on eBay and through the KBTH's "Shameless Commerce". But, I won't be doing the eBay thing anytime soon... I was successful, and sold everything - but I had just as much success, and probably made more money through the KBTH's Shameless Commerce. And instead of an auction taking 5 days - everything I posted on KBTH sold within 3 hours!

And I'm also all Canada Post'ed out. Sending out all those packages - very time consuming, so if I do so again, I won't be selling so many items at once.

Next post - knitting, honest!