This is Datchi, the quiet and shy one...`tho, not lately, he's gotten awfully bold. He's a siamese with blue eyes, is about 12 years old, and I'm told he would be show quality if it weren't for the little white spots on the backs of his ears. (Rumor has it that he got those from another cat we once had, Sasha, who was much beloved in our house and is missed still.) Datchi loves to curl up in your lap, but only if you're just about to get up, and he loves to rub against your legs, but only if you're walking. One distinguishing feature about him is his snaggletooth. One of his fangs is noticably longer then the other, which the vets say is not unusual, but Datchi's ranks in the longest they've seen. We got Datchi back when we lived in London, just before we moved, when he was just a kitten. Dad says he looked like a drowned rat most of the time, and he's still rather small for his age. If you stick the tip of his tail in his face and wag it around, after a moment he can't resist the urge to give it a tongue-bath.

This is Smudge, our mottled Garfield, our Cannibal Cow, our cuddly and loveable cat who walks around humming "If I only had a brain"...when he isn't begging for treats, that is. Smudge is about 5 years old, an American Shorthair with a patchwork coat of marmalade orange and creamy white, with amazing rust-red eyes. I've noticed that his tail is NEVER straight, it always manages to have a little curl to it. He loves to play rough, and whenever he sits with me he's all the time kneading my legs and lap. And he almost never stops purring. We got Smudge when we lived back in Florida, about a year before we left, while my brother Kris and I were on vacation visiting our grandparents who live in Wisconsin. While we were away a hurricane went by the house and I'm told that my family quite literally plucked Smudge out of a tree a few days before the hurricane struck. Luckily for my parents, Kris and I came back just in time to help with the post-hurricane clean-up. Smudge likes to be up high and if you hold him so he's close to your shoulder, watch out, because he'll try to climb up onto your shoulders. Actually, he'll climb up onto your back and make you walk around bent in half till he decides to come down. Lately he's picked up the habit of crawling up onto my shoulder and then onto the back of my computer chair when I'm working on my computer. I'm fine with it, since before he started this he would insist on sitting in my lap and nibbling on my fingers...while I was typing with them. Go fig, he's a goofy cat. Oh yea, and he squeaks. He doesn't meow, he squeaks.