Meet Mispickel

Well, we lasted one day without a pet.  

 

 

 When my parents took Diamond in on Wednesday, there was a five-month-old brown tabby in need of a home.  I love brown tabbies.  OK, I like cats, period, and color isn't of much consequence, but brown tabbies are on my short list of slightly-preferred colors.  Besides, I had promised the vet that when we needed a cat, we'd take one from her.  She's been very good to us.

 

Mom and I were pretty sure we wanted a cat ASAP but Dad is still working overseas and hadn't had as much time as we had to process Diamond's decline, so he was against it.  It was too soon, he insisted.  We quibbled awhile over the phone and then said we'd talk about it later.  

 

Then, Mom called me back in the middle of the afternoon when Dad wasn't around and told me to call the vet and ask them to put off transferring the cat to the rescue until I could get up and see her on Friday morning.  Dad left for Nigeria Friday evening so he'd have months to grieve for Diamond on his own.  I called and they said they'd hold her.

 

Wednesday night, though, I told Mom I'd been trolling online for cat names.  I looked at mineral sites, which I will admit was an attempt to soften them on the idea (Diamond was Diamond in part because they're geologists.  Mom studied crystals). 

 

Mom apparently told Dad this because she called me after lunch on Thursday and said he'd gotten out his mineral books and named the cat.  The cat that wasn't even ours.  The cat that he said he didn't want.  So Wednesday was too soon but Thursday apparently wasn't.

 

Thursday was the office Thanksgiving lunch and nobody gets any work done, anyway, so my boss let me leave early so I could go get the cat.  Dad named her Mispickel.  Pickle for short.  Miss Pickle when she's being naughty, which is a lot of the time since she's a five-month-old kitten.

 

It's an old German nickname for a arsenopyrite.

 

She's HILARIOUS.  We have to teach her not to attack feet but aside from that, she's a winner.  There are pix of her on flickr.

 

Mom admits she cried a bit when she came home and didn't see Diamond in the back yard, but that knowing there was a cat waiting upstairs helped a lot.  We need more cat toys, though.  We haven't had a kitten in almost 30 years and we have to re-learn how to entertain them.