For Mia and me, our happiest moments are those that are also the quietest.

I love all my cats, each for their wonderfully distinct personalities, but I share a special affinity for my sweet Mia, a cat who most vividly mirrors me if I were a cat and she a human. We both have our moments of strength and boldness, but for the most part, we are introverts at heart, rather unbothered by our frequent desire for peace and solitude. Read more

Then and now. Our Jazmine has matured into such a beautiful adult cat.

Seven years. Our precious, beautiful, and loving ginger baby, Jazmine, is seven years old today. When Dan and I first came upon her at Global Pet Expo in March of 2014 at the Imperial Cat booth as a rescue kitten up for adoption, there was an initial internal struggle of “do we,” or “don’t we,” despite her melting our hearts instantly upon looking at her sweet face. It wasn’t so much because we didn’t want to, it was more a matter of me specifically. We had recently lost our beloved Ragdoll, Jazz, in 2013 and I didn’t know if I was mentally ready for another cat in my life or acclimating it to our seven other residing cats in an already fragile cat dynamic, no matter how ridiculously adorable this kitten was. Read more

Happy Birthday to a very special and extraordinary cat.

I’m nearly 60 years old and cats have been a part of my life all of those years, probably totaling at least a couple dozen during that timeframe. And I love them all – past and present – each with their wonderfully unique personalities. I won’t say I have favorites, that’s not my style, but I can say every once in a while one of them really stands out, having an extraordinarily special nature. Kizmet is one of those cats. He’s a cat in which the earth revolves on a very special axis – one that is exceptionally kind, tolerant, intuitive, loving, patient, and accepting. In other words, he’s what’s good and pure about this world and a cat we could learn from. Read more

There are a couple of facts when it comes to cats – one being, unfortunately, that there are millions of them at any given moment living in shelters in need of a good home, and two, that it’s been proven cats can decrease our depression, stress and anxiety levels, lower our blood pressure, and decrease the risk of heart attack and stroke by having them around. With our current COVID-19 landscape, defined by stress and anxiety, and June Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, it seems the purr-fect time to bring that feline shelter companion to your life and household. Save a cat’s life and they save yours. Seems fair to me. Read more

Staying in and working from home is becoming the new normal for many of us.

Like many, I’ve had to reinvent myself numerous times. I’ve been a child of divorce and a child who was bullied. I’ve been divorced myself, resulting in me being a single mom of two boys, struggling to keep us afloat. I’ve also been unemployed several times over the years, wondering how I’d ever pay my bills – all circumstances giving me the resilience and fortitude to survive. With the coronavirus epidemic, I’m reinventing myself again, only this time it’s not just me, it’s the whole world reinventing themselves and the planet we live in. Read more