Someone commented they hadn’t seen any Caturday posts recently (hello, Cheryl!), so here’s a post right before Easter 2022.

Luke has been my kitchen cat for, it now seems like, forever. I never had a kitchen cat before Luke volunteered for the position. Every morning he sits on the counter top or walks around the kitchen sink purring and asking for rubs. He’s there waiting for me to toast my bagels and spread cream cheese over them. When I’m done putting on the cream cheese I put the butter knife I used to spread the cream cheese on the edge of the kitchen sink for him to lick clean.

Luke and his brother Beau are both six-and-a-half years old (Luke points out he’s two hours older than Beau). They were the “bridge” cats between the first generation composed of Ellipse, Lulu, and Lucy. Luke and Beau came into the household after Lucy passed. Then Lulu left us, and finally Ellipse. For a time it was just Luke and Beau, then the clowder began to grow with the addition of Danï and Zoë, followed by their mom, Joan, and then finally by Nicholas. We went from three to two to four and finally six cats since 2015 (Ellipse and Lulu showed up Thanksgiving 2007 and then Lucy arrived the summer of 2008). Cat-wise it’s been an interesting time around the old homestead for 15 years.

Zoë loves to snuggle into blankets, and this one is her favorite. I keep it folded, but just about every day I’ll go back into the back bedroom and find her nestled in the blanket, napping or peeking out, like here. Rather than lift her out, I reach down and lightly scratch the top of her head between her ears. She loves that, and commences a purr I can hear across the room. All the cats are sweet, but she just seems to be the sweetest of the bunch. She and her sister are little girl cats.

Nicholas Joseph Purry is now nine months old. As the youngest he’s also the most rambunctious. Every time I hear a commotion in the clowder and check on it, there’s Nicholas in the middle. Nobody seems to get hurt, and the altercation quickly dissipates with everyone running off in every direction. He’s grown to be as big if not bigger than the two little girls, and they’re two years old now. I expect Nicholas to continue growing to a size to rival the two older boys.

All the photos were post-processed from raw in Lightroom on my 12″ iPad Pro. I know I wrote about how I wasn’t enamored of the iPad Pros I own, and I’m still in the same general camp on them. But this time, for this post, I found pulling the photos off the SDXC card using a Lightning-to-SDXC adapter with the iPad Pro allowed me to directly pull the images off the card into Lightroom, and then when I was done, to export the edited results as JPEGs to my iPad camera roll. From there I exported them to Flickr, which allowed me to link to them in this post. The whole post processing task turned out to be quick and easy, and Lightroom’s JPEG exports are much superior to Snapseed.

But back to the cats. The cats, along with our two dogs, are a continual joy. Yes, there are infrequent minor “moments,” but these are little creatures, and those moments always, quickly, pass. They love their persons and we love them all. How empty our lives, and our hearts, would be without them.