Our 4 cats at feeding time!
From left to Right.
Bernie, Ozzy, Suki and Sooty.
So, Sooty looks a lot like our Little Bob.
She was the first cat, so I'll start with her story. She belonged to my girlfriend before we ever met. She lived with her parents at the time and Little Bob as a kitten would come around for food and eventually they got her inside. They named her before knowing the she was not a girl. She is named after Sergei Bobrovsky who played for the Flyers at the time. Pictured here is one of the few times she does not have her collar with the Flyers tag on it. One strange thing about her is I've given her the opportunity multiple times to live without her collar but she always drags it out and lays near it. For whatever reason she actually likes having it on, seemingly.
Our next cat came after we were together. My aunt has a chunk of land and a barn and a litter of kittens took to staying there at one point. Xanadu was by far the smallest and unhealthiest of the bunch, and also pitch black which we love. Several trips to the vet and medicines later Xanadu was very healthy and while she was and is still a tiny cat, got to be a much healthier weight. She is definitely the most mischievous of the cats. Getting into the dryer, refrigerator, open drawers, etc. She is also by far the one who wants to play the most.
Then there is our third rescue, Bagheera. He was both an omen and a perfect example of a cat adopting his humans. We were looking for a new house and on our first visit to the place we ended up buying we saw Bagheera, another all black cat. The house happened to be the one we liked the most of everything we initially saw, so every time we would come back with family to get more opinions on it he would be there. Two months or so later we would close, and we had two weeks of "soft" moving before the final moving day and would start leaving food and water out for him. We came to learn that the previous "real" resident (the guy we bought it from fixed/improved/flipped it) had the cat and ended up kicking it out of the house. From all account she was a drug addict and had a slew of mental health issues. It's oddly not noticeable in the picture I have here, but Bagheera's one eye is screwed up (thankfully the vet says he still has sight out of it, but no clue how good it is), and we don't know if that happened in his time outside or inside, as we've always had the fear based on how he reacts to certain things that he was abused in some way previously. He would eventually come to lay on my lap outside, then would come inside just to eat and then ask to be let back out again, then would start spending the coldest nights inside, and is now firmly our cat. He goes out every morning, and sometimes comes back in an hour later when my girlfriend leaves, and sometimes stays out till one of us gets home from work. And he'll sometimes take some evening hours outside too, but always spends the overnight in with us. I love having a cat that is free, is let out whenever he wants, but stays for the most part on our property and always comes back home. I feel bad for Little Bob who often wants to go out, but for a variety of reasons we can never let out alone.
Will post some more stuff shortly.