In the spirit of mini-rants, mini-cat-chats lets you post about minor, random cat events (with pix per the rules).
Leonidas, my youngest at about 7.5 months, is now the Lord of the Flies. No fly is safe from being hunted and devoured once in the house. Presumably this is to fill in on the days that Pearl, the hunter, fails to bring him a live rodent to play with. Not very many of those, alas.
Cuthbert. Deaf, autistic, demanding yowler. Will gladly hang out in his crate and encourage you to take him for a ride. Is not generally interested in being petted, and does not like being held, but will vigorously head-butt you when the mood strikes. Also does not like to groom, as it enhances his grumpy-looking demeanor. He’s got a reputation to uphold.
Get a good night’s sleep around Cuth – he’ll likely kill you in the morning.
He likes to chase cherry tomatoes around the kitchen, yowl until I rescue them from under the stove with a yardstick, then eat them. He also enjoys green olives (except the pimientos) and fresh basil.
NOw that the weather is warm he’s happy because he can sit in the window and keep watch so that the robins and grackles won’t take over the universe.
Feather is a bit needy, but mostly a very nice cat. She’s a peach and grey calico who hates to be picked up, but loves going for rides in the laundry basket. She adores her [del]mommy[/del]co-habitational human. 
Max is totally needy - if she’s awake, she’s making noise. She’s a black and orange tortoiseshell who loves to be picked up, loves going outside in our cat-proofed back yard, loves all pork products, and adores her [del]daddy[/del] co-habitational human. She also likes to orbit her daddy - she flops down on the floor and pulls herself around him while lying on her side. 
Brandon. I’ve never owned a cat before, just dogs, so I usually describe him as the most dog-like cat I’ve ever known. He’s very calm & laid-back, a bit needy at times. Sometimes smart & sometimes incredibly dumb. Considering what I’ve read about other cats, he’s surprisingly unflappable. Hardly anything seems to upset him.
The first picture makes him seem almost regal, but really, this is more reflective of his personality.
Mrs. Peel, the little tabby who hates all other cats, or did until we brought home Leonidas. Usually we have adult cats, strays or retired barn cats, so this is her first kitten and it apparently brought out all her latent maternal instincts (at 12 years old)!
My favorite picture of her - this is often my facebook picture because it so expresses how I feel sometimes.
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii264/NijelTheDestroyer/?action=view¤t=MrsPeel1.jpg
And another of Leonidas a week after we brought him home - 6 weeks old, still pretty thin and sick with a nasty eye infection, but starting to be more cure than pitiful. Who doesn’t need more cat pictures.
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii264/NijelTheDestroyer/?action=view¤t=Leonidasandhisfoot.jpg
Ah, my dear Mayhem. Thirteen or fourteen years old, prone to drooling when she’s feeling particularly affectionate, and still looking (other than some missing teeth) not a day over seven. She can be demanding, a pain in the ass, and generally impossible to please, but she’s my kitty.
In the last several years, she’s taken up the habit of sleeping at the head of the bed, near my head. Lovely unless I have a guest, who gets to sleep in the furry spot.
We have Skinny Cat and Black Cat. We adopted them a couple months ago from a family that was being relocated by the bank. I felt awful for them, but they were happy the cats stayed together. They are actually named Midnight and Sandy, but we sort of eased into accidentally calling them Skinny Cat and Black Cat. I have pictures but I don’t have a photobucket acct.
Skinny was less than 5 lbs when we got her. The previous family had taken her to the vet but they said she was just a small cat. She was spayed the week before we got her and now she has packed on a few pounds. She may be 7 or 8 lbs now. Not fat, but at least you don’t cut your hand on her spine and hip bones when you pet her now. She likes to perch in the highest place she can find. She sits on the top of the closet door when it’s open, and sometimes she balances on the top of the shower door, but not often because she ends up getting stuck in the shower if she makes the mistake of coming down on the wrong side. She was the one who warmed up to us first. Her first week she sat on the rail and took a flying leap into the 12 ft tall windows on the front of our house trying to get at the bird outside. She didn’t learn. She’s just… daredevilish.
Black Cat is more properly named Princess Whiny von Bitchypants the Black Cat. She has this Siamese meow that sounds a little like a child being murdered. You don’t hear it much until it’s about Midnight (how I suspect she got her name) and she starts dragging toys through the house letting out these gutteral, awful noises and sitting approximately 6" away from your arm’s reach by the bed so you absolutely have to move to pet her and make her shut up. She also demands a refill if the food bowl gets below half full. She drinks with her paws. When she decides the other cat needs a bath, she holds her down and bathes her.
We pretty much don’t cross her. She can be sweet and loving, as long as we do what she says and nobody gets hurt. Although they are my boys’ cats, Black Cat seems to have adopted me as her special project/slave. When my boyfriend wakes up in the morning and I’m still asleep he says they sit on either side and guard me. From what, I have no idea. I’m glad I don’t see the scary ghosts they apparently do.
That first one of Brandon is really nice, happycamper.
Molly and Betsy spend a lot of time lazing in the sun. So does Clark.
Here’s Al and Nikki. We joke that Al has a crush on one of the guys on the local news, because when he’s bored, he’ll wander around the house making multisyllabic yowling sounds that sound eerily like “Adrian! Adrian! Arambulo!” He has far too much dignity, and is smarter than shit. We’re fairly certain that he understands conversational English and is learning to speak it himself; he also howls “Ohno!” when it’s bathtime. He’s pushing twenty pounds and is not at all fat, but he knows his food schedule and is very punctual about reminding us.
Nikkiis sweet and very, very dumb. She’s pretty much a furry embodiment of the Southern “oh bless your heart.” There is absolutely nothing going on inside when you look at her eyes, so she should be grateful for her good looksand unimaginably soft fur. Almost four years old now and her fur still feels like a kitten’s. She’s small, too, so she really does seem like she never outgrew babyhood. She decided for herself at a very young age that when Any Human is lying in the bed, Her Place Is By The Feet. However, if she’s got the bed to herself, she’ll curl up in the exact geometric center, so as to take up as much space as possible. She often sleeps on her back with all four paws up, at Maximum Cuteness level.
So there you have it: one giant intelligent male and one tiny airheaded female. The yin and yang of cats. Their only commonality is both were found as lost strays by Mr. Shoe’s mother, who has a … knack for finding strays, you might say. Al was already both neutered and declawed, and he was hanging around getting skinnier and skinnier. Nikki was a tiny orphan she found drenched and crying in the rain under a bush. (Actually, her beagle found the kitten.) She had a terrible case of ringworm on her face at first, poor thing, and narrowly escaped being named Molly Ringworm. You can just barely see the scars in the super-close-up (sorry for the blur).
Oh, and they both seem to enjoy watching us have sex. We often pause the tv to watch when they’re playing, so I guess it’s the same with them. “Oh look! The humans are wrestling again!” “Yup. She’s winning, too.” 
Awwww! I’d love a cat who hunts down and kills flies- I hate flies. My Katya tries to hunt bugs, but isn’t very good at it. She is the softest cat in the world, though, so I will keep her.
Anne, we’ll have to get together some day and have a Softest Cat competition.
Jezabel is Mommy’s cat. If I am stuck in bed, she sleeps right beside me, if I am at my desk she sleeps on the corner of the bed closest to my desk. She prefers to be tucked in to sleep, and normally likes to sleep between mrAru and I. She desperately hates traveling by car, if we end up moving onto a boat, I don’t know how she will react - though in her defense she has never hurked up in the car.
So I had my forty dollar bottle of meds sitting on the bar. One of my damn cats manages to knock the bottle off the counter and into the trash bin just beneath the bar.
Of course I don’t realize this until after I take the damn trash out. Thing is though, there was a bag of kitty treats sitting right next to where my pills used to be. Funny how they were careful enough to NOT knock that over into the trash.
Fuckers!!
Mrs Cake it seems to me you were looking for a home for a kitty awhile back. Did you find one?
I was lucky enough to adopt a brother/sister combo back in October (original post and picture here) and they are being fun sometimes and BAD KITTY sometimes. Streak is apparently not yellow but blonde. Shadow becomes invisible at will. And the knitted kitty toys I made them are incredibly popular and get carried around constantly with much mewing and carrying on. (The $12 frog toy I bought, not so much.) I will knit kitty toys for others upon request so you too can be kept awake all night. I should probably note that these toys are not designed to look like frogs or anything else; they are fairly phallic looking but the children seem to think they are baby kitties.
Meet Claire. And yes, her favorite thing is to get up in your face just like that. She’s 8 years old, and in the past 6 months has turned into quite a snuggly kitty. Her favorite thing to do in the mornings is sit in my lap and purr - not a bad beginning to the day. She loves playing red dot, eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (no chocolate or peanut butter, please), watching birds outside, and sitting on/sleeping in the closest Vera Bradley item she can find. I finally broke down and bought her a used Vera Bradley purse from a yard sale so she can have one of her very own - and so I don’t have to keep cleaning the cat hair off of my Veras!
A couple of more pictures for your viewing pleasure:
Claire on New Year’s Eve a few years ago - she was actually licking the bottle of champagne when I caught her.
Our 2012 Christmas card photo - it took about 20 shots and a couple of weeks to get this shot the way I wanted it.
Cassie Beth, that is a great xmas shot. Love how the light comes through the tree. (Mostly) black cats are really hard to photograph and you did good.
