When Deb handed me her book last summer in June, hoping it would get me inspired to design a book cover for it, I had no idea what a great journey I was embarking on. Granted, there were no mountains to climb and monsters to fight (but the metaphoric ones, of course), this was rather one of those extraordinarily ordinary experiences, perfectly in tune with the book’s subtitle.

And the journey began with, well… a journey, a real one. I was boarding a plane to go visit my family in Romania for three weeks, so I figured – what better reading material than something light and easy? The story managed to captivate me and I often found myself laughing out loud and reading pieces of it to my family.

No spoiler alert necessary – I won’t be telling you of the book, that’s yours to discover when the time comes.  But I’d like to share a little story that truly impressed us and it so happens that it happened while I was reading the book (but there are no coincidences, right?).

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In Madalina’s design studio discussing the Zee/Zoey site

By now, you have heard me mention the name Madalina numerous times. Not only is she the enormously talented and gifted graphic designer who helped me create Zee and Zoey’s Chronicle Connection and my book, “The Chronicles of Zee & Zoey – a Journey of the Extraordinarily Ordinary,” but she has become a dear friend of mine, which is a wonderful bonus. When I first met her, it was a business relationship – client and designer. But, as time has gone by and we have spent countless hours in person, through emails, and on the phone perfecting our Zee/Zoey visions, she has become part of our family and we all adore her, both human and feline!

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One cat, one dish. Two cats, two dishes. Three cats, threes dishes. Certainly seems logical, simple, and very manageable. Anything after that, the game starts to change. In our house, we have seven cats, so you do the math… feeding time for our gang is anything but logical, simple, and manageable.

How cats can tell time is beyond me, but trust me, they can. I get home at approximately 6:00 pm every weekday. The cats are already waiting for me at the door, several minutes BEFORE I get home and make they make it all but impossible for me to get inside the house, as I have to try to walk through a sea of hungry cats. They talk and chatter excitedly to me to tell me about their day, allowing me approximately 2.3 seconds to catch my breathe and relax before they remind me that I have already taken too much time and it is time to feed them dinner. Never mind that I religiously feed them every single day at approximately the same time. They feel they MUST tell me in a very loud chorus of seven unique and loud meows, that IT IS DINNER TIME, lest this is the one time I might possibly forget them.  As if…

Dan will have their clean dishes waiting on the counter for me and the dizzying ordeal begins as I mix together a special concoction of canned food and dry kibble into each dish. Peanut will jump up and try to steal a piece or two of kibble to my left, while Zoey will distract me and jump to the right. Dan will tell them to “get down,” grab Peanut and put her on the floor. Peanut will jump back up. Dan will grab Peanut and yell at Zoey to get down. The cats will circle me in a walking swarm, twenty-eight collective legs of perpetual energy, causing me to constantly be inches away from tripping over them and falling to the floor. This ritual will continue in secession until the food dishes hit the floor. If anyone but me feeds them, the meal is considered null and void and merely a “snack.” In their minds, unless it is me who feeds them, they have not been fed.

After all of this pomp and circumstance, just like Thanksgiving dinner, they will be done eating in about two minutes and calm will return to our world for another 24 hours. The weekends are no exception to the phenonium of their uncanny ability to tell time and the chaos level and need to remind me to feed them remains on a steady course, even on Holidays. You can set you alarm to this, I assure you…

Our architectural masterpiece - Rolz on top shelf, Mia (left) and Peanut (right) on "arms," Zee on perch, and Zoey inside the heart shaped doorway

On the surface, it would appear that Dan and I are a bit crazy when it comes to our cats. However, it turns out you don’t have to dig much further to find out crazy is only the tip of the iceberg with us and a very polite word for our over the top behavior. Point in fact – we determined our cats were “bored” and outgrowing their current four-story cat condo and decided it was critical we build them a custom created, five story unit, lest we be condemned for mistreating our cats to live such a life of woe and cramped misery. 

Truthfully, the old condo was a bit worse for the wear. We had gotten it prior to Zoey and it was showing extreme signs of neglect due to its many years of use. The bottom, or ground floor was an open area with four carpeted columns supporting the rest of the condo and was almost bare to the plywood from all the cat scratching. The second floor had a barn type of housing enclosure and had a very small front door opening with very ordinary square windows. The next floor was a tiny rectangular resting shelf and the top floor was also a rectangular piece that had  upright sides about 4 inches high that gave it  the feeling of a carpeted box and it was Rolz’s primary place of residence during his afternoon naps. Based on this boring description, clearly this would not do. This is Zee and Zoey folks…. Nothing ordinary allowed, remember? Read more

I don’t like to be selfish, so I waited until everyone else had a turn on Mom and Dad’s blog to write my story. And now, I am so excited, because I get to meet all of you! You all can be my BFF’s!! I want to give all of you hugs. I am just so happy to be writing to you! My name is Peanut and I am just so sweet and friendly and I would be so sad if you did not want to be my friend! You do like me, don’t you?
 
First of all, I just want to tell you how much I love my family. You already know my smart and awesome brother Zeuss from Boston and I know you met my beautiful sister Mia and my good looking brother Rolz the other day. You know my Mom and Dad – Zee and Zoey – who are the best cat parents in the whole world and my humans – Deb and Dan – who write such great stories for this blog and take all kinds of amazing pictures of us. I love all of them so much and they are all just so wonderful. I am just so excited to wake up each morning to start a wonderful new day with all of them. Everybody says that they don’t understand how I could be the daughter of Zee and Zoey because I am just so ultra sugary sweet and nice. I literally don’t have a mean bone in my body. My Mom can be a touch cranky and irritable and my Dad used to be really aloof, so no one knows why I am always just so HAPPY!!! As a matter of fact, I want to hug all of you right now! I love all of you! Everyday, no matter what mood anyone is in, what they are doing, whether it is convenient or not, I come for my daily loving, hugging, purring and love fest. If human Mom or Dad are on the computer, I come sit on their laps anyway and get in the way of everything they are doing until they pet me. I will even jump on human Dad’s head or shoulder to get his attention in case he forgets it’s my loving time. Read more