So, I’ve been a little…gone, lately. I’ve had everything block – writer’s block, painter’s block, cleaner’s block, balancing-your-checkbook block, eating-healthy-foods block, etc. I have been very good at committing to snuggling with the cats and watching too much TV, though. So there’s that. Things with work have been very up-in-the-air and it’s kind of paralyzing me. I’ll explain soon, but for now, I thought I’d at least pop in and give the internet something it doesn’t have nearly enough *cough* of: CATS.

I suffer from a snuggle deficiency. It’s a serious medical condition and they have not managed to make snuggles in pill form yet, and we all know that fresh is best, so I decided I needed to get another cat. Let’s just all agree that, were my husband to die, I would not date ever again. I’d just get eleventy-twelve more cats. This seems totally reasonable. Luckily, S wasn’t against getting another kitty, so he agreed to go out and look since it’s kitten season and all. He’s such an enabler. Meanwhile, my mom was busy screamtexting me that I was insane. I chose to pretend she was wrong and instead texted pics of adorable kittens like these guys that I found at our local rescues:

Please ignore the cat ass in the background.

I mean, really.

But I decided to go home and think about it a little more since my favorite shelter wasn’t open the day we went out to look. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t want to get a kitten. Kittens are evil. They lure you in with their cuteness, but you don’t know what their true personality will be until they’re at least a year or so old. So they might be all adorable and shit those first few months, but then they turn into the antichrist, or worse – they turn into my little pitten, Dizzy, who is incapable of snuggling without licking your hand incessantly while insisting that you must not in any way do anything that could be vaguely construed as holding him.

We got Keely when she was about a year old, which was perfect because we knew what her real personality was. The downside to her being about 2 years old now, though, is that her most ardent desire is still to play in between snuggles. Dizzy, being about 4 years old, has outgrown that urge. So there were a lot of battles between the 2 that ended with Dizzy yeowling and trying desperately to get out of Keely’s grasp.

So, while we wanted a cat that wasn’t quite a kitten any longer, we also wanted a cat who was close in age to Keely. Enter Madeleine, or Maddie, if you’re tight with her like we are. Like all of our cats, she is named after a jazz singer/musician (in this case, Madeleine Peyroux). We went to the shelter that had been closed the first day that we looked and she immediately claimed us. She is, without a doubt, the happiest little munchkitten you’ll ever meet.

Within minutes, she’d snuggled up against me, purring furiously.

Her tail matches her paws. She’s THAT color coordinated. Watch out, Pinterest.

She’s got penny-colored eyes. I’m taking it as tacit approval from my dad. #penniesfornick

At a whopping 6 pounds, she’s teeny tiny. Based on her teeth, the vet says she’s over a year old. Based on her size, energy, mouthiness, and farts, I’d wager she’s a little younger. Those farts are no joke. I’m hoping the vet is right, though, because if she is that old, she won’t grow anymore and we’ll have a perma-kitten. Yessssss. So now we have small, medium, and large kittehs in Halloween colors (and since S’s favorite holiday is Halloween, he’s thrilled).

She’s actually much smaller than Keely, but it’s hard to tell in this pic, in part, I think, because she has a reeeeaaaaaaally long tail.

When I first brought her home, Maddie and Dizzy bumped noses and were basically like, “You cool? I’m cool. We cool.” Keely, on the other hand, WAS NOT HAVING IT. She was basically like, “Oh, hell no.” She immediately started growling and hissing and carrying on like someone had finished off the last of the bourbon that she’d been dreaming about all day at work (wait, is it just me that dreams about bourbon all day?). After freaking out for a couple hours and wandering around the house hissing at everything that moved or didn’t move or existed or didn’t exist, she ended up hiding behind the curtains.

She doesn’t seem to understand the concept of hiding, as she chose to hide behind the SHEER curtains.

When S came home, she raced over to the front door and started meowing at him, and we were pretty sure she was saying, ” Dad, you will not believe what Mom brought home today. There’s this thing prancing around my house and thinking she’s hot shit with her color coordinated tail and paws. She is not hot shit. I am hot shit. You need to do something about this, STAT. Oh, and the little brat drank all the bourbon, too.” But then she saw him pet Maddie and lost her damn mind all over again. She spent the bulk of the next week with both resting bitchface and active bitchface permanently affixed to her head, growling and hissing at all of us (and the ghosts that apparently live in the house?).

After figuring out that Maddie had no desire to become the new queen, Keely finally conceded that maybe the world hadn’t ended, and maybe it might be fun to play with the cat that wouldn’t scream bloody murder at her every time she chased her up the stairs, and maybe it wasn’t the end of the world to snuggle up to her mom even though the little cat was also snuggled up to her. Oh, and maybe she would enjoy the fact that her parents were giving her more tuna juice than usual in their efforts to make everyone settle in.

So now my phone is full of pictures like this that I text to my mom to prove that this was, in fact, the best decision ever:

And now Dizzy can enjoy getting an occasional break from Keely’s playfulness:

Yaaaaaasssss, bitchez.