National Cat Day

Today, October 29th, 2024, is a very special day; It’s national cat day!

Even if you are not a cat person, you have to admit that cats are pretty dang adorable.

Time for a personal story-I have never been a cat person. If we’re being completely honest, I wanted nothing to do with them. If I was visiting a friend who had a cat, I wanted them to stay as far away from me as possible. My spouse had begged me for months to get a cat, and I can only estimate that the amount of times I had said no was in the high 500’s.

But then, the unthinkable happened. One Saturday afternoon, I came home from work with a 3 week old kitten. Let’s preface this with the fact that I did not seek out this kitten. I was doing my usual short day at the car dealership I had worked at for a few years, and walked out of my office to find at least four of my colleagues surrounding a car, one sales manager eagerly holding a pack of tuna. To say I was full of confusion was an understatement. After assessing what was going on, I quickly learned that our customer had heard a cat in her car and could not find the source of the meowing. I then made it my personal mission to find the cat. 

After around 30 minutes of crawling under the front of the car, searching the engine bay, and the inside of the car, I decided that we had to bring in the big guns… The lifts in the shop. Once we slowly drove the car into the shop and got it in the air, the group of big burly mechanic men got to work in searching for the tiny fluffball. This was the most quiet I had ever heard in the usually chaotic garage, as the team was intently listening for the next series of meowing. A newer mechanic, Dutch, had finally found the kitten stuck in the spare tire well underneath the car! 

After asking everybody in the building, including customers, if they wanted a kitten, there was absolutely zero luck. But obviously I couldn’t just let this 3 week old kitten out on the busy main road in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So, she came home with me until I could find a family for her. Little did I know, that would be MY family. 

So here we are with our one surprise cat, but the universal cat distribution system did not think that one was enough. About 4 months later, a new fluff ball showed up on our porch on 12 acres, in the middle-of-nowhere-country-North Carolina. Only this time, this cat was much more feral.

The odds of him choosing our porch were already next to nothing, so obviously we had to keep him. He made his entrance a very known one- biting my (active-duty service member) spouse on Veterans Day, resulting in rabies shots in each limb, with 4 follow up rounds. We knew that this cat was something else! He settled in nicely. After scouring the internet to find out what kind of cat he was, we finally came across a rare breed called the Nebelung Cat. This breed is often referred to as the “Long-haired Russian Blue” due to the multiple similarities the two share.

All in all, I would not change a thing about having these two crazy cats. They quickly became best friends and enjoy doing everything together. They fit in perfectly with our two dogs and complete our mini zoo. If this blog teaches you anything, it's that A)you can change your mind on how you feel about things. I changed my mind on how I feel about cats. And B) The cat distribution system chooses you and does what it wants!