So we were laying in bed last night, and I was harassing Fred about keeping Bear. This is nothing new, I did the exact same thing with all the other foster kittens we’ve had in the past, especially Jodie and Rambo. His response is always “You promised you wouldn’t beg to keep any of them!” and “What’s that you’re saying? That you never want to have any foster kittens ever again?”
“What would we name him?” Fred said. “If we were going to keep him.”
This is nothing new, either. We thought of new names for Rambo, too – the most popular being “Worm” and the second most popular being “Gollum.”
We started throwing out names that started with “S”, just to keep in the tradition, since all of our other cats have names that start with “S”. Not that we ever CALL them by their names, but still.
“Satchmo!” Fred said.
“Uh, no. Satchel!” I said, thinking of Satchel Pooch, the dog from the “Get Fuzzy” strip.
“Uh. NO,” Fred said. “Stevie! We could name him after Stevie the blind wonder cat!”
“Cute,” I said, pondering. “But Stevie was a pain and Bear is a sweet little monkey.”
I thought some more, then giggled.
“Shalimar!” I said.
Fred laughed. “That’s a good one!”
Silence fell as we both thought some more.
“Tom Cullen!” Fred said.
You know how something that’s not THAT funny hits you just right, and you start laughing so hard you come thisclose to passing out? That’s what I did when Fred said that.
“M-O-O-N!” Fred said. “That spells Tom Cullen!”
I flailed around and laughed, gasping for air. Under the covers, the kitten in question became alarmed and ran out from under the covers and jumped off the bed.
“These are our cats,” Fred said. “Spot, Spanky, Scrappy, Stanley… and Tom Cullen.”
“Man,” I said when I could breathe again. “That’s a good name. It’d be fun to call the vet and say ‘I’d like to make an appointment for my cat’ and when they said ‘What’s his name?’, we could say ‘Tom Cullen. But we call him Moon.’ and see if they got it.”
We went on to talk some more about other things, and I tried a few more times to convince him that we should keep Bear, even going so far as to say “Mister Boogers likes him so much! No one else will play with him!”, but it was no good, the man would not be persuaded to add a little kitteny goodness to the permanent household.
Hmph.
Bear hung out with me for a while, and when I went to put him in the kitten room, the spud asked if he could come in her room for a little while. I told her to put him in the kitten room before she went to sleep, and I went to bed.
This morning, I was awakened by cold little kittens toes on my shoulder. Fred was standing over me holding Bear.
“Two conditions,” he said.
“Huh?” I said, and yanked an earplug out of my right ear.
“I have two conditions,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“First of all, his name has to be Tom Cullen.”
“Of course.”
“And secondly, no more foster cats until he’s old enough to not get sick from every little illness they bring into the house.”
“Okay,” I said. “Kitten season is mostly over for the year. He’ll be old enough for us to start bringing kittens into the house when it starts up again next Spring.”
“Then I guess he’s ours!” Fred said.
The shelter manager called me a sucker when I told her we wanted to adopt him. Heh. Of course, if I’d had my way we would have adopted the first five, the second two, and all four of the most current batch. I guess it’s probably a good thing that cooler heads prevail in the And3rson household.
Meet Tom Cullen Anderson:
“Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I’m going to sneak up on him and scare him!”
When I talk about his crazy eyes, this is what I mean. Big, round, crazy psycho eyes.
He’s very clean.
We let the cats outside for a little while yesterday. Mister Boogers kept an eye on Tom Cullen (hee!). I guess we need to get Tom Cullen his own collar. We don’t want him running away!
He doesn’t need much room. He just wants a little of the Poo warmth.
Playing in the bubble wrap.
Making himself just a little TOO much at home.