There better not be any mice in here

We are positively overflowing with cats. With our four indoor cats and four to six outdoor cats, we could have full laps all day long.

Introducing... the Critter Cavalcade!

This is Ruby. She is the queen of our household. She is a whopping 17 pounds of cat diva. She walks through the room with her curling umbrella-handle tail held high, and announces herself with chirping meows. She is always sweet, except when she's in the bathtub. When we feed the cats, she always eats first. She sits wherever she wants to, and she has no problem showing her contempt for the dog.
Except for the dog, though, Ruby is a love kitty. You know how people say that cats are independent, that they don't need people, and that they don't need that much attention? Ruby has made it clear to us that none of those things are true. Although she would never deign to beg for attention like the dog, she always manages to be close to us, and often finds one of our laps. If she gets stuck on the other side of a closed door from us, she claws and mews till we open it. Almost every day, I wake up with Ruby sharing my pillow or nestled at my feet.
Ruby has taken a liking to the kittens, especially Chili. She cleans their ears, and lets them sleep next to her.

We got Chili and Buster in September, when they were about 8 weeks old. They are even more identical in appearance than Ruby and Poppy. We had to put a collar on Buster so we know who's who. This is Chili. He's the smallest of our indoor cats, and definitely near the bottom of the social totem pole. For a long time, Chili didn't seem to have much personality. He is beginning to show some individuality lately. He has picked up Ruby's style of meowing. When he enters the room or jumps up to you, it's a trilling BrRrRrow?? sound. Chili isn't very affectionate, but he does follow me around the house a lot. When I am in the basement, he likes to prowl around and talk to me. I think his face makes him look like he is always a little surprised, or confused. His fur is a little wooly, different from the girls.

Buster is on top of the box, pestering Poppy.
Poppy doesn't much care for the kittens, but she's non-confrontational. Sometimes she swats them but more often she just leaves the scene, to sit somewhere else and glower at them. I don't know if it's her temperament or her facial pattern, but Poppy often looks like she's glowering, scowling, or otherwise agitated. She's a little weird, from the tip of her half-pink nose to the end of her half-length tail. She spends most of the day lounging around in bed, snoozing with her head on a pillow. She is usually very languid and quiet. She likes us, but doesn't often seek out our affection. And then, she will appear out of nowhere, clamber up onto your shoulder, and nudge you and purr into your ear in a very intense way. Occasionally, she goes on a little freakout and starts running around the house with her tail puffed out like a huge bottle brush, meowing up a storm.
Poppy's obsessed with the outdoor cats. She likes to stand in the window and furiously claw at the glass. I'm not sure if she's trying to get their attention, or claw them to bits. Sometimes we let her outside, and she will ignore the outdoor cats, happily putter around in the yard for hours, and then claw at the door to come back inside. She thinks she can hunt. But the only time I've ever seen her catch something, a toad, she got so freaked out that she dropped it, and then drooled furiously for ten minutes.
Poppy seems to be at the bottom of the totem pole here. She is always the last one to eat, and she usually sits on the sidelines watching when the other cats are playing with toys. She will even yield kitty treats to the kittens! Where Ruby would be very lonely without company, I think Poppy would be just fine being an only cat, even if she was with a dog. Poppy tolerates Banjo just fine, and even says hi to him sometimes by giving him head nudges.

This is Buster. He looks almost exactly like Chili. I still can't tell them apart, except for Buster's collar. As they are growing up, his personality is emerging a little.
Buster is a bit skittish. If you walk straight towards him as if to pick him up, he runs away. Occasionally he is very affectionate, almost to the point of aggression. He will stand on your lap and demand attention, purring loudly and delivering head-bumps to your hands and face. But if you actually pick him up, he will go into mean kitty mode and claw at you till you put him down.
Buster seems to be a little bit smarter than his brother, though I can't really explain why.
Buster and Banjo are kind of buddies. Banjo likes to play wolf puppy games with Buster. He growls and whines and mouths the kitten, and Buster swats him gently in return and puts up with it till he is soggy and disheveled.

Banjo is our dog. He is so outnumbered that sometimes he thinks he's a cat. He's half Chihuahua and half mutt, which adds up to about 15 pounds of slightly neurotic dog. We got him from the pound last May. He was skinny, scared, and not happy. Since then he has completely transformed. He is bouncy, playful, energetic, affectionate, defensive, needy, demanding, and a little slobbery. He's very smart, and usually pretty obedient. We have intentionally trained him to follow some commands, like 'sit' and 'lie down'. And there's some that he's just picked up without being trained, like 'go away' and 'come and get it'. Right now I am trying to train him to chase deer off of our property. He gets very excited about chasing dogs, cats, and rabbits, but he doesn't seem to recognize deer and horses as things to chase. So when I spot a deer in the yard, I run to the window, put my hands on the sill, and growl and bark at the deer. I'm sure I look ridiculous, but when the dog is done rolling around on the floor laughing at me, he imitates this, and he really is learning to recognize deer and chase them.

From left to right, here's Mama Kitty, and her three kittens Sprite, Farley, and Lucy. We are pretty sure that all the kittens are female. Mama Kitty and her litter appeared less than a week after we brought home Chili and Buster. Mama Kitty was brazenly stealing Squirrel's food from his dish on the porch, so we followed her and found the kittens in the neighbor's shed. She acted feral and was quite skittish around us. Soon enough, her kittens joined her in the pilfering. For awhile we tried to chase them away, but we are suckers, so now we are feeding them willingly.
Mama Kitty has gotten used to us, and will let us pet her a little and pick her up sometimes. Sprite is also a little bit tame, and will let us pet her while she is eating. She has the softest fur of any cat I've ever seen. She feels like a long-haired rabbit. I wish we had found her sooner, so that we could have tamed her and made her a house cat. These two will meow loudly at our front door when they think it's mealtime.
Farley and Lucy are more feral, and won't allow us to touch them. When we feed the outdoor cats, they will sneak onto the porch, growling the whole time, pounce on a few kibbles, and scurry off to eat them.
Mama Kitty and her litter have some distinct physical traits in common. They have very small ears and short, skinny tails. They all have sort of a white face mask. Farley is almost identical to Mama Kitty, except for the extra spot on her nose.

In November and December, some other cats started hanging around too. We haven't chased them off really, but we try not to feed them. One is almost solid black with spooky yellow eyes, and the other is very similar in appearance to Mama Kitty, but more gray and less striped. I think they are both closely related to Mama Kitty, since they have the same body shape and little ears and tail like her. I wonder if the little tail is because they are crossed with Manx. There is a Manx breeder a few miles from here, and there's an inordinate number of feral Manx cats in town. A couple of them hang around here sometimes, but they must get their food elsewhere, because we don't see them often.

This is Squirrel. He's our original outdoor cat. He is a huge, fluffy cat, but very light weight. The first time he jumped up on my lap, I couldn't believe how light he was.
Squirrel was the previous owners' outdoor cat, so he kind of came with the house. We would have him as an indoor cat, but they said he was not allowed indoors because he sprays. We haven't really had him inside enough to know if that's true... but he definitely knows where we keep the indoor cats' food bowl. Every time we open the door, we have to immediately stick out a foot to keep him from running in and munching down all their food. Despite his somewhat lonely existence, Squirrel is a very friendly and affectionate cat. When we are outside he follows us around and 'talks' to us. When we sit down on the porch, he quickly jumps up in our laps.
He seems to like our dog pretty well. When Banjo is outside, they play chase games all around the yard, till they are completely winded.

Since all these cats have arrived, we no longer have 60-odd quail in our driveway every evening, and we haven't noticed any vermin in the house.