Not much of a cat person

Friday night, I went to sleep — peace and calm reigned supreme in my house. There was no noise, nothing to disturb my slumber. And it went this way until about 4:30, when I heard some purring. Well, I tried to ignore it, and instead of getting up and finding out where it was coming from, I decided to toss and turn for the next two and half hours until I got out of bed and made breakfast. I did some figuring and thought that it was my neighbor’s cat who might have gotten locked out or something like that.

Then I started making eggs for breakfast. I went for the peanut butter— the special ingredient in my peanut butter, banana, and chocolate chip omellete, I noticed a tiny little feline on the ground in front of my shelves. This is not normal, I thought.

So after doing a double take and realizing that this wasn’t some half-awake delusion, I thought about my options. Well, if it found its way into my closed kitchen during the middle of the night, there had to be a way for it to get out.

I don’t really like the cats too much. So keeping it was out of the question (And unlike, say, a goat, cat manure isn’t that great for compost). So I put it out on the street (I don’t think we have a humane society down here, and she wasn’t wearing a



Even though there was no chance I kept it, I obviously started thinking of names I would my pet cat. Pet names here are generally unimpressive. There are normally either niño, niña, princesa, or a TV character. American pet names are probably not much more interesting, but compared to some of the names I have come across down here (In one family they have two daughters named Karla, except that one spells it with a “C” and the other with a “K”). I think Khatuli would have been a good name for my cat, if I would have kept it and not put it out on the street.

But because I’m not much of a cat person, I’m not very good at coming up with cat names.