I am not a pet person. I never have been, and I never will be. My wife, on the other hand, loves pets, cats in particular. She works for a vet clinic, so she gets to be around them all the time. She had three cats when we got married. Never having lived with cats before, I was not aware of the havoc they would wreak in my life once we got married and I had to share an apartment with them. For instance, one of them was a cranky old witch who shed white hair all over the place and howled at you and scratched you (or at least tried - she had no claws any more) when you just walked by her.

Over time, due to old age and disease, two of the three had to be put to sleep. A friend of my wife's had found a bunch of kittens that a feral cat had near her house, and we took one of them, so we've been up to two for a while (which is still two too many for me).

I say all of this so you understand this story a little better. Over the past couple months, there has been a stray cat around our neighborhood. Our neighbor across the street would feed it sometimes, and other times it would be on our porch looking in the window (of course, our cats took notice). My wife started asking me if we could take it, and I was resistant. The cat seemed pretty nice, because it would come right up to my wife when she called it. Then, when the weather got pretty nasty last week, my wife put a box with a blanket on the front porch, and when it really got cold, she would put the cat in our van at night with a litter box. Needless to say, I wasn't real happy about that, since I didn't want the van to stink. She took it down to work to scan it (to see if it had a chip implanted that would tell who it's owner was), but alas, no chip. It is a neutered male, so it's obvious that at some point he belonged to somebody and was taken care of. My wife really started putting the pressure on, and she even asked my daughter if she wanted one, so of course my daughter started asking me, too. She loves cats like my wife does, and she's always wanted one of her own.

So finally, in the face of unrelenting pressure, I gave in and said we could keep it. My wife took it to work and got tests done, gave it medicine (for things like intestinal worms), and brought it home Friday. My daughter named him Isaiah, because she had a list of Bible memory verses from school, and she happened to see the name Isaiah on the list.

The biggest thing has been getting the other two cats to accept him. We have to be careful to keep them apart and let them get used to the smells of each other. The couple times that they have been together, Sid and Kiwi (the other two) have hissed at Isaiah, but he just sort of ignores them (which to me is pretty funny). He's been gravitating to my daughters bed when he sleeps, which she just loves. My wife keeps taking pictures of the cat with me, with my daughter, by himself (I'm very thankful for digital cameras).

The point of this long story is that sometimes you have to "take one for the team", i.e. do something for the family, no matter how much you don't want to do it. My wife told me she really appreciates it because she knows how much I really didn't want to do it, and my daughter just loves him, so I know at least somebody is getting pleasure from the cat. I may not be enjoying the cat itself, but I enjoy my daughters pleasure with it, and the brownie points I scored with my wife are good.