[DrBob]

Cats are great, requiring far less maintenance than a dog. I usually travel alone, in which case my lady friend is home to care for them. If we both go, we fill the litter box with fresh litter, fill a lasagna pan with food, fill another with water, and the little buggers are good for about a week. Any longer than that and a friend comes over every couple of days to scoop and refill the food/ water dishes and play with them. That's why I kept the kitten- one cat gets pretty bored if you leave it alone all day, but the two of them together amuse themselves wonderfully.
They are both calico cats, and are bat-sh*t crazy. The big cat is right at a year old, and I rescued her from a storm drain after he mother got hit by a car. Her brother had already starved to death down in the drain with her, so I fished her out. I nursed her back to health and she is surgically attached to me when I am home. The darn thing is so sweet and loving that I couldn't give it to the cat rescue shelter like I had planned, so I spent the $$$ for shots and to get it fixed and I kept it.
The little one is about four months now, and was found up under the spare tire of my friend Tammy's pick up truck when she got home from work at the oil refinery in Baton Rouge, LA. She hates cats, but this one was about the size of a tea cup and way too young to be away from mamma, so she was going to drop it at the shelter. But the shelters down there are still filled with Katrina rescue pets, so they wouldn't take it. So she drove all the way to Atlanta GA so I could do the eye-dropper thing and nurse it back to health like I did the other one. The two hit it off, and look like mother and daughter, so now I have two cats.