Pat and I have been posting these little stories since my first Geocities page in 1996.  Here's the first one.  It was re-posted in 1998, 2000 and 2003, and each time the cartoon and story were touched up (and improved, I hope).  This time, I enlarged the cartoon and added this bit of background info to the post.  Otherwise, it's the same as it was in 2003, and that's kind of appropriate because we just got six inches of snow this week.  And yes, the cats still wanted to go outside anyway.

   It hasn't been a good week for the weather forecasters in our part of the country.  Last Friday, they predicted 1 to 3 inches of snow would fall in our area, but the weather did what it was going to do no matter what anybody said (a lot like the way cats behave, when you think about it) and dropped 7 inches of the white stuff on us.

   Did that stop our cats?  Did they look outside, shiver, and thank their lucky stars they could stay in?  Not our Good Cats -- first they insisted that we take them out, and then, after they got their way, five minutes later they were doing the hokey-pokey, shaking their freezing paws all about and looking for a way back in.

   Since they're not getting much exercise this winter, we have to be careful not to overfeed them.  This especially goes for the two oldest, Kelly and Lizzie, who have a tendency to put on weight.

   One night, Lizzie was on the bed with us while I looked for diet tips in the book "Cat Love" by Pam Johnson.  As I read aloud from the recommendations, the normally sweet and shy cat walked up behind the book, put her nose under it and tossed her head back, flipping the book out of my hands.  I took the hint -- that was the end of diet talk in front of Lizzie for that night!