Today is a day of celebration! Huge congratulations to Tigress and Fritz, who exactly eight years ago came home from their first successful hunt. And what a hunt it was! They “bagged” not just one, but TWO humans to adore, worship, and serve them for the rest of their lives.

Here are the mighty hunters the evening they arrived:

And here they are a few days ago, snuggled up together:

Fritz still loves his belly rubs:

And Tigress still likes to sleep at the top of shelves. (It’s nice to have friends in high places!)

She’s very Zen, so perhaps she’s engaged in sectarian dialogue with HH the Dalai Lama while she naps?

As a spiritual master, Tigress would be the first to tell you that if you love something, you must let it go free. If you don’t, how could you chase and kill it again???

Yes, it’s been eight wonderful years. Eight years of being sat on, meowed at, mercilessly ordered to hand out the cat treats, and subjected to arbitrary demands from a tyrannical and utterly marvelous pair of cats. Here’s to many more years of “supervision” from our wonderful cats, Fritz and Tigress!

Yes, it’s now been six turns around the wheel with these adorable kittens:

They are now middle-aged kitties, with occasional middle-aged-kitty health issues: Fritz went to the vet earlier this year with a urinary tract blockage, and Tigress needed anesthesia for a periodontal deep-cleaning, though fortunately she didn’t need any teeth removed. We are not looking forward to brushing her teeth for her!

(Fritz’s teeth were just fine – apparently his fetish for chewing on cardboard and packing tape is good for something!)

The cats, however, are still eager studio assistants. Here’s Tigress assisting with a studio shoot, by guarding my samples from would-be sample molesters (i.e., me!):

Of course, every photo looks better with a cat photobombing it, especially if the cat is wrinkling the silly little bits of fabric and getting cat hair all over them! But somehow humans never seem to understand that. Go figure.

Also, sometimes humans get their priorities wrong and need to be reminded of who’s in charge. Here Fritz is laying down the law in the middle of a photo shoot (yes, he did get his belly rub!):

The cats, of course, continue to excel at cat things. Here’s Fritz, practicing the ancient art of Taking Up Enormous Expanses of Bed:

And here’s Tigress, mere moments before the human decided that perhaps all that yarn needed to be relocated:

Lest you think this mere paranoia, this had happened to an innocent skein of yarn earlier in the week:

So yeah, it’s a good thing that our little furry fiend…

….is also infinitely adorable:

Here’s to six wonderful years, and hopefully many more to come!

Five years ago, one of the last bastions of human freedom fell to invading aliens…

…and there was much rejoicing.

Of course they were the kings and queens of all they surveyed:

They were yin to each other’s yang:

They watched TV together:

Napped together:

And hunted self-driving android mice together:

They became expert photobombers:

And, of course, they ruled the household with an iron paw:

Needless to say, we are thoroughly besotted with our despotic alien tyrants adorable cats, and look forward to many more years with both Fritz and Tigress!

Happy cat-iversary to us!!

In November 2014, I helped fund a Kickstarter project to develop Mousr, an autonomous mouse (the cat toy kind). I didn’t seriously expect that the project would succeed in producing a non-lame cat toy, but what the heck, it sounded interesting, so I contributed enough to get one.

(I was hoping it would get me out of my One Job, which is entertaining Tigress in the mornings. We play “chase the birdie” with the feather toy every morning, but because we play on a big padded cat playground, aka our bed, we don’t play until after Mike gets up. Predictably, we have arrived at a situation where 2.5 nanoseconds after Mike gets up, there is a cat in my study glaring at me and meowing loudly and continuously to explain that it is time to play and why am I not doing my One Job, unworthy human?? While I am generally cheerful about my state of abject servitude (I mean, why else would anyone have cats?), it can occasionally be frustrating to get interrupted in the middle of something by a cat who knows her rights and is demanding to play NOW!! Especially since she won’t shut up until she gets what she wants, even if it means meowing for fifteen minutes straight.)

We’ve tried all sorts of automated cat toys but she’s never been interested in a toy unless there is a human on the other end.

Well, 3.6 years went by, punctuated by occasional updates from the Mousr designers, but the end result is impressive: Tigress likes it! She’s fascinated and will play with it. Which is amazing since she generally yawns at automated cat toys.

Fritz, whose cat toy philosophy is “I’m a lover, not a hunter,” is not as impressed but will also play with it, especially once Tigress stops monopolizing it. Also very unusual!

Alas, while the cats find Mousr intriguing and fun, it is still not as fun as hunting a toy that has a human at the other end. (Probably because inconveniencing a human is half the fun.) So 30 seconds after we turned off Mousr, Tigress was bugging me (loudly and continuously) about playing with her.

So, while the autonomous robot mouse is a hit, no worries: No humans were automated out of their One Job by the self-driving mouse!

Here’s a video of Tigress meeting Mousr:

And if you want a Mousr of your very own? Trundle over to Petronics to order one. Warning: they’re not cheap. But they are cool. (I got mine for less because I backed the Kickstarter. And they even threw in the deluxe 5-tail bundle, which includes the catnip tail!)