"Let meh be blunt. Ah does not trust teh hoominoidz. Especially teh one with teh black click-box. Unless they bringz me fuud."

Lucy, a.k.a. El Gato, regards me with a certain amount of suspicion. She knows that I'm more of a dog person, and Boxers at that. This is unforgivable, but may be temporarily pardoned in exchange for lamb.

Edit December 2023: This essentially became Lucy's definitive portrait. Come February it will be 12 years since it was taken. As of the time of writing Lucy is still with us, having had her 18th birthday last October.

She is, however, quite a different cat from the one we see here. She was once quite a large cat, reaching over 8kg at her zenith, though I don't think she was quite that at this time. Her size didn't stop her from leaping over fences to harass the neighbouring cats though since she used the railings on our side to leap over we sometimes needed to mount rescue missions to get her back.

She has lost a lot of weight, and is down around 5kg. She has a surfeit of medical issues now. Many of her teeth had become infected over the years and had to be removed, and I'll bet you didn't know that when cats reach a certain (very advanced age) some of them start being reabsorbed into their jaw, did you? Neither did I. She has arthritis which means no more climbing or jumping and requires a twice daily dose of medicine in her food, plus a monthly injection. She's been diabetic for years and requires two shots of insulin along with a cream inserted into her ears to help with thyroid imbalances. She's becoming blind; I often have to gesture to the food so that the movement of my hand can lead what sight she has left toward the bowl, but since she has lived here all her life and can still see shapes she can still find her way around her home and can still see large objects (including the neighbours' cat who came in to raid her food bowl a few months back); it's smaller things like bowls that she has to be guided to. And she has become very vocal (and possibly a bit senile), sometimes meowing demandingly for food and sometimes meowing demandingly for... I know not what. Nor, it seems, does she.

The down side is that having such a high maintenance pet makes travel functionally impossible. The up side is... she's still with us. Having lost her canine companion earlier this year I'm well aware that the time for that is ticking down... but not yet. Not yet.

Last Year