Jokulhlaup and Virvelvind

It has been a rough year for pets in our household. Back in March, our first child (well, until we had real kids and realized how much more work they are than cats--but to our young minds it seemed fair to call her our child), Tsunami, had to be put down. She'd been shitting on the floor for four or five years--and me, being the dutiful, dedicated and loyal person I am, kept cleaning it up two or three times a day (but, really, I spent four years cleaning crap out of diapers, so it's not like it was all that much different)--but then she started peeing on the floor several times a day, and we decided it was just too much. We felt pretty terrible about it, but we still had one cat left.

Well, sort of. Neither of us really . . . well . . . cared all that much about Typhoon. I mean, she was cute, and we didn't mind her company, but neither of us were particularly attached to her. We inherited her a decade or so ago from my brother Jon when he did a semester of study in Ireland and couldn't take care of her anymore. Then, like a douche, he refused to take her back. So she has been our second cat, and pretty much the red-headed step child in the family (sorry to any red-headed step-kids out there, I just don't have any other common idioms to describe Typhoon's second-class status . . . . Hey, that works, second class status. But I'm not going to take the step-child thing back, so suck it gingers!). We're not talking Harry Potter treatment here. We didn't blame her for everything and lock her in a closet or anything. And we pet her and played with her and cared for her pretty well and all of that. But there just wasn't that much attachment.

Anyway, we still technically HAD one cat left, so my statement is fundamentally true. But Typhoon, apparently, must have drawn some inner strength or other from tormenting Tsunami on a daily basis because, as soon as Tsu was gone, Phoony started to quickly decline. She was always kind of a mess. She had recurring ear mites that we could never get rid of. She always had fleas--somehow, even though our cats never go outside and we treated her all the time. She had bad teeth and had to have half of them removed a few years ago. And she was bulimic--binging and purging all the time all over the house (that was probably our fault. I always wondered if she was trying to pretty herself up so we'd love her more than that aforementioned step-child). So, probably it was a surprise that she lasted as long as she did.

The first few months weren't too bad, but over this past six weeks, she stopped grooming (which, on a longhair cat means thoroughly knotted fur) and eventually she stopped eating. She dropped to about half her healthy weight. And she started breathing really heavy. Eventually, she just looked to emaciated and sad and we couldn't put it off any longer and hope for the best. And this week we put her down.

Yet, you ask, how can you already have two new cats in your house when Typhoon has only been gone for two days?

That's a good question and links directly back to Libby's unique brand of manic-depression. She is in a cat-manic phase right now. For the last five years, while Tsu had been crapping on the floor, Libby lamented that our cats simply wouldn't die and stop making a mess of our house.  Very nearly every day she expressed a wish to never, ever, have cats again. She hated the hair all over the house. She hated the smell. She hated the mess and hassle.

And then, last week, she started shopping online for cats. And her interest was rekindled. She took the kids around to a few different humane societies to visit their cat rooms. I tried to talk her into waiting awhile, to let our house air out and for our appreciation for pets to build back up. I figured the kids were too young still to really care all that much whether we had a pet or not around. And they have the chickens, right?  They're cuddly. And we could take a break from having pets. Specifically, I could take a break from feeding the animals every day and keeping up on the litter and doing pretty much all of the other chores related to keeping pets. I have, after all, been doing it every day for the last 17 years (yeah, that's how old Tsu was).

But no.

So, when it was decided that we were going to be getting a new cat sooner rather than later (one, I hoped, as we could wait awhile and get a second one later, after the first one had some time to settle in), we decided to try getting some input on names from the kids. This was actually a pretty awesome exercise. They came up with some great names. We were over at a friend's house, and the kids were jumping on their trampoline while we asked them for name suggestions. And, just as fast as Libby could type them into her phone to remember, they were spinning out new names.  Here's the list she got down:

Log, Saggy, Boob (seriously, these were the first three words out of their mouths), Pickle (not getting much better), Googoo, Peppers (OK, moving on to something else now, thank goodness), Pee (I guess not), Poopinthepot (my third favorite), Boozle (fourth favorite, and the last ranked name I had.  Interestingly, this was a name that Berke Breathed came up with, for Bloom County, for the little illustrated bubbles that appear above a character's head to signify that they are drunk, but I doubt my kids had read that particular strip yet, so I'm not sure where this came from), Doodle, String, Conner (I loved this odd, actual name that Gabe threw out there--it was the only one he ever gave, and I'm not sure that he even knows a Conner), Gaggy, Blink, Canker, Music, Loser, Squigglympics (this is my absolute favorite in the group--I love the idea of olympics for squiggles more than just about everything), Beaver (here we go again, what are these kids watching?), Jumprun, Cuttinggrass (this was Gabe's experimental, juxtapositional phase), Fighterpod, Firepie (my second favorite name and the one that I was closest to adopting as one of the cat's names, if we hadn't decided to go back to our natural water disaster names), Shooooo, Mutter, Hotjellies, Peanut Butter, Podder, Loggers, Dog, Momma, Sister, and Brother. Obviously, by the end, they were just grasping at straws and naming whatever happened to be close at hand. It happens, eventually, to most of the great artists as they tap their creative reserves and start phoning it in. But their early career was genius!

Libby had one rule that I hoped would work in my favor--the cat would have to choose the kids. Meaning, the cat would have to cuddle up to and appear fond of our children before we would commit to it. Being small children, I liked my odds of all cats pretty much hating to be around them. But it didn't work out that way. There weren't MANY options, but there were some, and that was enough.

And, actually, the first cat that chose them was a pretty good option. It's actually kind of weird. She looks pretty much exactly like Tsunami, only calico. A touch smaller and a touch lighter, and her head is bigger than Tsu's, but they move exactly the same way and have about the exact same fur (length and feel, obviously not color). She's a fat little puff-ball, and she makes me happy. Her original name was Sparrow, but I thought that name was lame, so we worked on some others. Gabe couldn't say Sparrow properly at first and kept calling her Spiral, which I kind of liked. Norah wanted to call her Carrot, which I also kind of liked. And we experimented with Poopinthepot (would have been Pip for short), Firepie, Boozle, and Squigglympics. But none of them seemed quite right, so Libby set out for the internet and found a few natural disaster options.

Jokulhlaup. Now I just have to remember how to spell that.

We settled on Jokulhlaup (huh, spellcheck doesn't recognize it as a word, weird). It's an Icelandic word meaning an ice-flow/mud slide created when the heat from a subterranean volcano melts a glacier. Pretty specifically awesome, right? Plus it has the link to volcanoes for Gabe. But the dealbreaker was coming up with a useable nick-name. Because, let's face it, nobody but Bjork would ever going to use that full word all the time to talk to a cat. I think we're actually still a little up in the air about it. Libby likes Jokul, but it's pronounced Yokel, and I don't really think I like that much. And the kids have a bit of trouble saying it. The other option was Yokie (I didn't even bother with the J thing at the beginning because there's no need for me to be pretentious about those things anymore--I'm not going to impress anybody), and that one has stuck with the kids, so, more than likely, that's what she will end up being.

And I hoped it was going to end with that. For awhile, anyway. Maybe six months or so, then the kids could pick out another cat, maybe a kitten, that would really bond with them and be their cat.

No dice.

Libby did some more shopping online. We ran back to the humane society where they found Yokie to see if she had any cage-mates that she particularly got on with. There weren't, and none of the cats chose us--in fact, they all seemed kind of put-off by us. So things were looking hopeful. Until last night. Libby took the kids by the humane society in Wichita on their way home and I (stupidly) had forgotten to unload the pet carrier from the back of the van. And she found another cat.

And, weirdly, she's pretty much exactly like Typhoon. Skinny, lanky, frisky, almost exactly as much younger than Yokie as Typhoon was younger than Tsunami, and kind of stupid. And kind of annoying. I'm holding out hope that she'll get normal. She's only a year old, so she might age gracefully. I hope. As it is now, she's the new step-child in our house and she'll have to get fat and fluffier if she wants to win me over. Because I, apparently, am a cat bigot. I likes 'em fat and furry and I'm kind of indifferent to them if they aren't. We learn new things about ourselves every day.

Naming this one was a bit faster process, but only because our friend Liz happened upon a good one and we weren't left to the researching on our own. You know, it's actually kind of difficult to find good results with web searches of keywords "natural water disaster names" and similar veins. I was finding very little the first time I looked.

Virvelvind. Slightly easier to spell but just as foreign. Also, she looks like a ferret. But she's MUCH more playful that Yokie, so she's probably going to be the kids' favorite.

But Liz found Virvelvind. Apparently, it means cyclone in Danish. Mmmm, cyclone of danishes, though I can't find any English websites to much back that up right now. Oh, there's one, but it's just a general definition and it appears that it also might mean tornado. Well, tornadoes can happen over water, right? That's what we're going to assume, anyway. And we're calling her Vindy. Virve was too tough to say and, besides, reminded me of that band Verve Pipe, famous for that song on the commercial a decade or so ago that I can for some reason still remember.

So, we have two cats again, less than two days after the last of our old ones died. As I said, when Libby decides she's into something, she's INTO it. And now, for better or worse, we've got two new animals that are going to be living with us for the next fifteen years or so. And I get to change their litter and make sure they are fed and watered. So there's that.