Love the little beasties; always have. Currently, my husband and I are owned by Mrs. Pedecaris (Carrie for short). She was a neighborhood stray who was hanging around my husband's back yard, driving off all of the other neighborhood cats. She was clearly hungry, but very wary. Starvation finally drove her to accept my husband's offer of food, whereupon she decided that maybe he wasn't a cat-eating monster after all. He didn't particularly want to be adopted, but Carrie had made up her mind -- and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is Bernie, who graced my life for seventeen years, from 1982 to 1999. An adoptee from the local Humane Society at the tender age of four weeks, she imprinted on me in the biological sense; I was never sure if she thought that she was an oddly-shaped human, or that I was an oddly-shaped cat. A very small cat, she made up in sheer feistiness what she lacked in size. I still miss her sorely.