Nine lives

I occasionally have weird thoughts. Like, not serial killer weird, just unusual. A couple days ago Tay was out at a gig, and I was home alone with our three cats. We've only officially been living together for just under two weeks, so the concept of joint possession hasn't quite established yet, so I still feel like Nermal is my cat, and Tay's two cats are hers. I know that's not really the case for a variety of reasons and at any rate the cats are already over it, but moving on ....

I got to thinking, as I watched Nermal curled up under the bathmat attacking a crumpled Shoppers receipt, that she has likely had an abnormally interesting life, for a cat. She's on at least her seventh home in three years, and although I've been a fairly constant figure in that time, she and I have had a multitude of environments, partners and roommates over that time.

My ex and I decided to get a cat back in the spring of 2006, mostly a result of our varying degrees of aversion to children, also I had never not lived with multiple cats up to about a year before that. We went to Animal Control in London, and a possibly one-year-old cat slashed my ex in the face without provocation, and then poured on the cute. She came home with us about a week later. What her life was like before that time I have no idea. She was young but not a kitten, and had been picked up as a stray. Animal Control requires pets to be fixed, and rather than pay a deposit and have the operation done ourselves, the staff there put her in with a batch of cats that were going to their contract vet later in the week. We had temporarily named her after a coworker my ex was having issues with, and that got corrupted to Josie somehow. That almost stuck, because I'm a huge geek. But she was cute, so she ended up getting named after Garfield's cute sidekick. Also because I'm a huge geek.

Point of interest: in the Jim Davis comic, Nermal is in fact male. But still cute.

Nermal came to live with us on the third floor of our high-rise, and had a peaceful life of chasing string, clawing up carpet and watching the thousands of starlings that would land in the trees outside every night. When my ex had her work friends over for their Grey's Anatomy parties, she hid out with me in the bedroom. When we went away to Cuba, she lived with my ex's parents for a week, happily chasing chipmunks through the sliding patio door of their townhouse.

The conflict between my ex and her coworker continued to escalate, and in the summer of 2007 she lost her job as a direct result. We ended up making a sudden, unexpected and poorly planned move to Mississauga in the fall, ironically on our last anniversary. Nermal lived in her second home at my ex's parents townhouse for a few weeks while we got settled.

In a later post: Nermal comes to Mississauga, but not for long ....