~JcZw

Okay.. just came back from watching Channel News Asia at 4 o'clock... Heh.... featuring Tharman Sharmugaratnam, part of the programme was a sequence on VJC, esp on Mrs Chan as well as the TSD people... Guess who else I saw inside? haha.... =X

Alright, so much for that. Must finish this quick.

Some people say that owning a pet can help you relax, reflect etcetra. Maybe so. Maybe not.

My interactions with pets first started in about primary 2. I had a cat... a stray, mind... I only remember she was really fierce, a grey cat whom we called Cucumber for the white vertical stripes on her body. She died shortly after we got her of food poisoning. Wonder what she ate... at that time we only fed her cat food. That without question was one of the really traumatic incidents when I was younger... The death of a pet. Other traumatic incidents include having to squeeze into my stiff and starchy new primary 1 uniform.

Well..... Primary 5 was then the start of my family's adoption of various cats. My father came home from work telling us that there had been meowing noises from the wheel well of the car the whole way home from Ngee Ann Poly to our home. So with the help of our church friend, he dismantled the wheel and was peering inside.

We were watching TV in the living room when a yell of incredulity split the air. "A CAT!" Apparently a little kitten had trapped itself inside and clung on to its precarious perch on the axle of the wheel all the long journey home. So for 2 hours they tried to extract the feller who was simply too terrified to emerge. We were hearing shouts of "Here he comes! Here he comes.... There he goes.... Bah!"

For the record it was not a "he" but a "she".

We got 2 new cats after that within two days. Also kittens. One followed my aunt home from the MRT station. Another was rescued by my sister from the drain outside the house.

But cats have a notoriously poor safety record in our home. The three of them fell sick. They went to the vet. The one which we had rescued from the wheel ran and hid, despite its weak physical strength. We gave it up for loss. And this vet.... apparently didn't know very well abt our cats. Or maybe he was simply inexperienced. He administered an injection. The 2 cats developed an allergic reaction.

One died.
The other ran away

The smart one was the one which had ran away from us to take it to the vet.

So we had one cat. But a productive cat it was. In primary 6 it had 3 kittens. Harsh reality was that if we didn't get them neutralized, and x cats would provide 3x kittens, we would soon be snowed under. So we did neutralize them. I mean, the vet did. Obviously we couldn't.

Disaster whacked a third time in sec. 1. I was watching a debate, AHS vs River Valley. I had run into my sister from the RG team while I was there. For the record, we lost the debate.

When I came back, I discovered that the guy cat had been killed by a passing car. It hadn't run over him and caused a messy injury as first imagined. But it was a glancing hit. When they found him he was lying on the road as if sleeping, a single drop of blood on his head. That was the only sign of injury.

Last in this long tale (I shall abstain for the oft-used pun of "tail") was our last cat. The only one with a proper official name actually... called "Kit". Odd name for a guy, but there you have it.

He was given to us by one of my sister's VJ friends. Apparently he had been found in the preimises of the college (Obviously, she was an animal welfare person), diseased, weak and dying. So she rushed him to the vet, who dewormed, deloused, de-malnutritioned and thoroughly cured him.

Then he just grew bigger and bigger and bigger. Until when he reached us he was a giantic fluffy FAT CAT.... some might say.... Kit Cat. Okay, bad pun I know.

Kit was without a doubt a house cat. Many were the times when he would creep into the house, making everyone chase after him. Once I had to extract him from under my bed early in the morning when he ran up, stood outside my door waiting for me to open it. Unfortunately for me, I was wearing my AH uniform, which had 5 notoriously painful metal buttons. Add to that the fact the bed was dusty and my uniform was white.

Yeah, but the four of them have brought a lot of enjoyment to us.

The lucky cat who escaped death twice, our original one, is now 7 years old, reaching the midlife of a cat so to speak. The others are all slightly younger. But I think they should still be around for sometime yeah... haha

=)