Now that GoldFest is over, it is time to introduce the last of our cats. This is Lili.



As you can see, she is the third reason I included Ronya in this gallery. Lili is very like Ronya in many ways, but she also has a much sweeter nature. We have finally gotten over calling her Ronya out of reflex and, while she does patch the Ronya-shaped hole, she is very much herself.

The very first day we went outside with the kittens, Lili shot into the very tall damson tree and climbed all the way to the top, before realizing she didn’t know how to get back down.



This isn’t quite as high as it looks; the base of the tree is just slightly lower than the line of the roof. Still she got all the way to the top and that is a good 30 to 35 feet. She managed to get a little lower by herself and we were able to get to her with a ladder. (For some reason, my family screams and throws things at me when I say that this picture should be titled “Damson in Distress”.)

She yelled a lot when she was stuck in the tree, but since then she hardly makes a peep. In fact, when she tries to talk, all that comes out is a peep or a croak. That is a big difference to Morris, who likes to sing whenever he is feeling happy. Not caterwauling, he just walks around going mrrrp, mrrrp, mrrrp.

She is also a little shier about coming up to people than Morris. She likes to be near people and will place herself where she can be petted, but she is less likely to crawl into a lap. One of her favorite places is on my wife’s desk, although the others have also discovered it now too and she often can’t find any room.



She and Morris are proving to be really good mousers. (Not just the sort of mice in that picture.) Up until a week ago, they were catching 4 or 5 mice a day, each. Mostly voles, but the occasional shrew or regular house mouse. That has tapered off, since they both had the “operation” last week. Both are back in form now, but go outside less often since it is getting cold. They say that long-tailed cats make good mousers, and these two have very long tails. We thought they were a lot longer than the other two and, being sciency geeks, we measured. At just over 5 months, they both had tails a couple of inches longer than either of the adults. (Morris is going to be huge. He is already almost as big as the adults. Lili is small and delicate.)

One more just so.