happy equinox, happy anniversary.

today is the first day of spring (at least up here in the northern hemisphere). it is also, unusually, the exact same date it was last year, march 20. which also happens to be exactly one year since we went to the local pet shelter and got our kitty. awww.

it was a sunny saturday afternoon, very unlike today which is cold and rainy, and i had been doing some random looking on petfinder. i noticed there was a shelter less than a mile from our apartment. and we wanted a cat. we had been forced to give up our other one when the apartment complex we moved into insisted they had a $200 non-refundable pet deposit for cats, $300 for dogs. and plus, his cat loved his parents' house and yard so much, we felt it would be cruel to take her away from that and stick her in a little 1-bedroom apartment. so we didn't have a cat.

we had decided we were going to move out at the end of that year's lease anyway, so we went down to the shelter. we filled out an application for adopting and hung out in the cat room for a while. there was one very striking grey calico kitten who was only five months old and had been given up because her owners were moving (i ask you, who gets a cat, and then gives it up almost immediately? some people make me want to get violent). but she was very stressed out, probably because she was so striking-looking, and everyone was cooing at her and trying to touch her, which you're not allowed to do because it can spread disease between the animals.

and then over on the other side of the room, there was a little grey-tabby and white stray, who, when we paused beside his cage, walked up to the door and bonked his head into it, hard. "hello!" so when they brought us to a visiting room, we asked to see both cats. the grey-and-white one sat comfortably in our arms before hopping out and confidently exploring, always with a little twitch of the question mark tail. the little grey calico kitten jumped out of his arms immediately and went and hid in a corner. so the cats basically made the decision for us :) we took home the grey-tabby and white kitty, and he's been confidently exploring ever since, even if he is a bit of a brat sometimes. luckily, we also somehow managed to avoid alerting the management company, and they never came around to demand the deposit money.

he's sitting on my lap right now. such a soft kitty. we like our kitty.