Orange Cat.

Good morning.

I am playing with this blog and figuring it all out. For some reason my first post logged itself as being written in 2019, and I have no idea why. Maybe I accidentally posted it from a parallel universe yesterday?

I think I am going to get into the swing of this daily update thing by introducing some of my more notable critters on the farm.

Since he has been with us the longest, it’s only right to introduce Orangie first and foremost.

We adopted Orangie in 2016 when we were living in Colorado. We assumed (incorrectly) that our existing cat was sad and lonely when we had to leave him all day, so we meandered into a local animal shelter where this orange cat made a beeline for me and instantly wrapped his claws around my shoulders in what can only be described as a giant cat hug. And just like that, we had naively succeeded in locating the world’s most terrible kitten.

Fast forward 8 years; he has eaten 137 phone chargers, knocked countless important items off our counters to their deaths, ingested the equivalent of several large sticks of butter in the sneakiest ways imaginable, and I think I recall him eating a significant hole in a dryer vent once.

Orangie is unique in that he has been to all the lower 48 states. Husband and I team drove a flatbed for a handful of years together, and he was our co-pilot for the entire time. Like any good co-pilot, he kept us awake all night by walking on our faces, scratched the seats to death with his lethal claws, and hissed at all of the forklift drivers.

For the longest time his favorite thing to do was to squirm between piles of clutter and bags, or underneath our safety net that we hooked up in the bunk while we were moving. It acts as a safety net for the other driver while they are (trying to) sleep in the event that you are team driving in shifts, which we were. He would get all tangled up in it and then look at us like he was helplessly suffering a painful death by crushing. I would obviously stop what I was doing, move a handful of different items and extract him, only to find that he had reinserted himself into a new, grotesque looking position as soon as I turned around. My friend told me he reminded her of the trash fish they catch in the nets that nobody wants, and it stuck. We called him The Dramatic Garbage Fish for a very long time.

Drama aside, he was a very good truck cat. He slept his way through 90% of our travels, has been snuck into dozens of hotel rooms via my sweatshirt, had a zero tolerance policy for flies inside the cab, and was a relatively kind companion to our toddler at the time.

We certainly hope he is comfortable.

He has nothing good to say about truck washes however.

These days he enjoys long walks in the tall grass and tormenting our shepard mix Calvin who is easily 12x his size. That’s a post for another time.