November 2006 was a wild and wacky time! The air was cool, the football was hot and there I was stringing up Christmas lights. Here in Florida the weather is usually pretty mild with the occasional hard freezes so we don't get the really deep winter that shuts down most animal life. Consequently, when this kitty showed up from underneath my shed, I didn't think too much of it. She seemed friendly and didn't get underfoot. For a week plus, I slaved away, stringing hundreds and hundreds of lights. The cat hung around, watching me, stalking the occasional bird and generally just chilling.

Every day I would figure she would have headed home, but she didn't. I began to feel bad for her. She seemed so skinny and always acted hungry. Well, that was it, we began to feed her which of course meant she would stick around. When the nights took a turn for the cool, I began to leave the shed door ajar so she would have a place to curl up out of the elements. Once I got my christmas lights up and operational Denise and I had to make a decision. What to do with the kitten that had taken up residence in our yard.

Leaving her outside was out of the question. Which only left one option, we would have to take her in and try to find her home. We made a vert appointment to get her checked out so we wouldn't infect our other critters with anything nasty and made our plans to catch the kitten.

Catching her was super easy, much to our surprise. While she had been friendly and okay with some petting, she never wanted to be picked up. Honestly, I was expecting a fight with it was time to corral her for the trip to the vet.

That morning I went out with some food and a cat carrier and fed the little girl some breakfast. Once she had eaten I scooped her up and with a bit of complaining got her into the carrier. Then it was off to the vet. When the vet called with the results of the exam we were floored. Denise and I had assumed this whole time that the kitty was indeed a kitten, maybe 6 months to a year old.

This was apparently way off.

She was estimated to be around 3 years old and was de-clawed! We were stunned, all of our cats up to now had been fairly hefty....okay, fat. The fact that she had a clean bill of health and was declawed told us that she had been somene's pet and not a feral as he suspected. Unfortunately she was not microchipped so we had no idea who she belonged to. We placed ads in the paper, none of which were answered. No signs wre ever put up in the neighborhood, no flyers looking for a lost cat.

She was ours. I had originally thought to give her to Denise's sister who was moving out with her new kitty. We thought that her (totally evil) cat could use a friend (possibly to make her less evil). Her cat is named Layla and I worked to come up with a complementary rock-title name to keep the theme. I was leaning toward "Amanda" but that is the name of a friend of our and that would be weird. I don't know who suggested it but someone came up with "Lucy" as in "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds".

Perfect. While Karen didn't take her when she moved it, it's okay. She has made herself quite at home. We will never know who owned her before we did, or why she ran away but to whoever you are, Lucy (or whatever her original name was) had a very nice life.

2009: Lucy had some eye trouble in 2008/09. Her eyes were looking funny, they didn't seem to bother her but we get her into the vet. After several checks and being sent to the Back