Not *that* Maru Kitteh!

I scoured the merchants of this dot on the plains, vainly hoping to find a LitterMaid litterbox that would accommodate my crew of kittehs.  I have four (they all made me take them home, I swear) and two of them are... um... jolly-sized?  Nobody in town has the jumbo model of mechanized cat crap removal I desire, so it's off to Amazon.

This is my Maru.  He was a big guy when this was taken, and now there's even more of him to love.  My daughter named him before we stumbled onto the famous Maru of YouTube fame.  Except for the ears and a couple of extra pounds, they look alot alike!

I found my Maru as a very tiny kitten, crouched behind the rear wheels of a vehicle that was getting ready to back out of a driveway on a very dark, -5F night.  I dove out of my car and scooped him up.  The poor little guy was completely blind in both eyes from a rather severe bilateral infection of the conjunctivae and he had a deep gash on his left side.  He was freezing, and starving.  He was instantly mine.  Maru gets whatever he wants.

The other substantial cat citizen of the house is Buddy.  Should have called him Buddha I guess, but his previous benefactor called him Buddy, and it seemed to fit.  We rescued Buddy from a houseful of five small kids who seemed to have mistaken him for a large kinetic/windup monkey.  He was safe no hour of the day from becoming an action hero, or a tiny pack animal, or whatever the game of the hour might be.

Buddy was SO grateful when he came to live with us. 

In the featherweight category we have Jack (the stripped one)  and Chessie.  Jack was a shelter cat.  He's the only cat we have ever purposefully sought out.   Although he was pretty young when we got him, he had already been neutered and he was very familiar with what a can of cat food was for, so we figure wherever he was - he was loved.  He had been hit by a car though, and he had a broken rib, and a broken tooth, and his mandible had been snapped in two.  That is why you need to keep your pets inside.

Chessie wandered into our lives as a lost kitten.  Dehydrated and subsisting only on bugs, she became my personal body guard the day I found her and gave her some cool water and a dish of 5-star cat cuisine.  That was 12 years ago, and she's been no more than a breath away from me when I'm at home every since.  I think she would love it if I just carried her in a papoose all day.

Four is a generous number of cats, by any measure.  With school coming up rapidly on the horizon, I'd like for my house not to smell like cat ass.  We'll see how the LitterMaid does when it gets here.