The best photo I have on my hard drive of our second cat, Midnight (yeah, I know, very unoriginal). All the others are blurry close-ups, though one is still worth posting just for chuckles. And yes, this is an old CRT computer monitor she's sitting on. She's a heat magnet. This photo was taken sometime in 2005 also.

Midnight didn't come into the family until around Christmas of 2001, but she appeared in the area around the beginning of the year and took to following me around everywhere I went whenever I went out for a short walk. She tended to hang around the neighbor's house otherwise, and that Christmas they gave us a call and told us if we wanted to take her in, we could--they had too many dogs to do it themselves, and she didn't seem to like dogs in the first place. Yay! Second cat!

Well, not quite. She had to be spayed and immunized and all that, which probably terrified her a great deal. When we did bring her home in January she refused to come anywhere near us for months afterwards, and we started to think that we'd have to find her a new home. But ho! After I'd left for college she decided she was comfortable with her environment again and soon made herself at home on my vacated water bed, which I usually kept at around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And yes, I like the heat.

I've become her favorite human--she bugs the ever-living CRAP out of me whenever I'm in the same room with her. She wants to be scratched in all manner of areas--head, belly, back, chin, ribs. She wants to be petted constantly, and she wants to leap into my lap and knead my gut until she lies down, exhausted, and takes a nap. Or until my stomach gets sore, whichever comes first. I can't decide if I've been imprinted into her sub-conscious as some parent or guardian figure, or if she's smarter than I give her credit for and tries to tell me how happy she is that she's here every time she sees me.

I don't get to see nearly as much these days as I no longer live at that house, but I do visit during my lunch hour at work and she still seems as smitten with my presence as always...although my mother tells me that she's warmed up to her quite a bit since I moved out. She never did like to get near my mother before....