Me and my cats

  It doesn't show but I am already 19. Don't you think that I am looking much younger? Another 7 years and I will make it in the list of longest-living cats on Wikipedia, another 19 and I will be at the top. Knock on wood.

 On October 20 in 2018, life took a wrong turn - according to our cat Felix. We got another cat: Lisa, also called The Bear. Lisa is blind, one eye is now completely missing, the other does not work. She came from the cat place near my former office. In this photo she is still confined to her quarters. However, after a few days we started letting her roam freely around our flat. It works well, she has quickly memorized the location of most things and has developed a "flexible bumping" technique to avoid getting hurt.  The remains of the missing eye are still visible in this photo. She was a lap-top kitten in her early days - she doesn't do that anymore. She likes to sunbathe.

 In the summer of 2024, I retired from work and regularly went shopping by bike - always trying to find new routes. Directly it was 3 km, but occasionally I used routes of 20 km. On one of these routes I met an old cat. I thought it was a female, but another person said it was a male, so I called it "Obi" from OB, which means "old boy". Soon I found out that my first impression was better, and I had to choose another name. I named her "Madame Obi". She looked malnourished and ate everything I brought her. She was living in the grounds of one of those abandoned houses in Japan. So no one 'owned' her and she got only a little food from passers-by. She was deaf and couldn't find food for herself. This was the cause of her malnutrition. She wasn't wary of people which surprised me. Later I found out that many people who walked in the area knew and liked her. Her coat colors are unusual - as if two different cat parts had been sewn together, the...

 After a rain pour in May 2006, we went out for a stroll - and found a kitten in front of the apartment building. It wasn't wet at all so we assumed that someone had just dumped it here some minutes ago. Not unusual in Japan. Before the visit to the vet. The vet had cleaned it up a bit. She said he would be around 3 months.  He needed a lot of rest. My wife wanted to tell her parents the size of Felix. That was VERY difficult, he was wriggling all the time. Finally, with the help of my foot, we found out. He was very active and, fortunately, had no problems with locating the toilet - apart from the first time when he tried to pee behind the curtain. He is 19 meanwhile, more pictures will follow.

 In 2016, when I first met the cats near my workplace, I didn't know yet their relationship towards each other. I just remember that they liked to sleep in a basket full of things - it became a basket full of things and cats. My feeling is that these 4 cats are a family, the mother and her three kittens. I also remember that two of the kittens had very short legs. And I also remember that there were one full calico, the partly calico from the basket above and a male, nearly white cat. Most of them disappeared very quickly and I don't know what happened to them. The tortoiseshell cat which I show as mama-cat in other posts stayed and gave birth to many kittens which became my cat friends over the years until I retired from work in 2024. The full calico also stayed nearby.

 A quick overview Mama-cat in 2016 and 2024. There will be more stories about her.  2016 2024 She is still living. 3 of her kittens are living in my home. ---

She is one of the most beautiful cats I ever have seen. The photo is from 2016. But I don't know what has happened to her. Looking back, I don't understand why I haven't tried to give her a home.  Another photo of her, I don't know in what relationship the second cat is to her - mother or community.

I met this little guy in autumn 2016 in a place near my workplace in Sakura, Chiba (Japan). In contrast to the rest of the cats there, he was not afraid of anybody. Every day, I visited him during lunchtime and as soon as he saw me, he came running.  He reminded me about the important things of life: "Where is my food? Stop playing with that camera!!" Unfortunately, he developed a skin disease and he died at the end of the year when it was very cold.