Cats and knitting - what's the connection?

I've been fleetingly taking peeks at some knitting blogs all morning (I'm supposed to be working but since it's the week before Christmas, nothing much is happening.. In fact I dont want something to happen cos it's my last day at work for this year!).

One thing I noticed is that quite a number of knit-bloggers have cats! I dont mean to stereotype ppl as there are those few with dogs but the majority of blogs I've seen today also featured the bloggers' cat.. Perhaps I should post pics of my cat too.

Let me share a story about cats and my home.. My mom is NOT a fan of cats. She has never liked them at all despite the fact that the stray cats in the neighbourhood love to "hangout" at my house since we're practically the only house on our cul-de-sac without a dog.

A couple of years ago, my godbrother Edwin brought over a small kitten he found near his home. He couldnt take care of it as he lived alone and worked long hours. The plan was for us to keep the cat in our home for a couple of weeks/months (we never did stipulate how long it was going to stay with us) until he found a decent place to keep it.

As the months went by, we all became fond of this ginger-and-white tomcat (with my mom as the exception of course). My Indonesian maid, Ana, affectionately starting calling him "Ming" and so that name stuck. Ming grew up to become a solid, healthy cat with a slight tendency to be fat (I think we overfed him with too much good stuff). He used to disappear for weeks before coming home hungry and bruised from fighting with other cats. So when he did one of his disappearing stunts again sometime late 2003 - about 2 years after he came to live with us, we hardly took notice.

He came home looking thinner than usual, and rather weak. The next few weeks, he barely ate, didnt move much and didnt even run away when my mom shoo-ed him off. That's when we knew something was not right. We took him to the vet and he got a jab and some medication. Ming was not happy at all about it and at one point he escaped from our clutches and hit in a covered drain for an hour - I was crawling in the drain the whole time with my maid, trying to coax him out. We took him home, fed him the medication as instructed but he didnt get any better.

This was during Christmas time, I remember and I soon had to leave home to go back to London (I was still studying there then). A few days after I left, my dad took Ming to the vet again and the doc said that Ming was having liver failure and didnt have many days left. We had a choice of leaving Ming at the vet where they'd put him to sleep or bring him home. My dad couldnt make the decision especially since my brother was attached to Ming so he brought the cat home. That night, Ming disappeared again and never came back.

Sad as we are, Ming did leave something behind.. one of his "escapades" involved the neighbour's cat and we ended up with 3 kittens. They have grown up now and we occasionally see one of them in our garden.

However, one day this black tabbycat with white patches on its paws and tail showed up and has been living in our garden ever since. She's so far given birth twice - the first time was to 3 kittens but they unfortunately did not survive the first 2 months. She is very secretive of where she hides her kittens so we have no clue where they are kept. We think the first litter may have gotten some sort of food poisoning or somehow became unwell. We finally had sighting of the second litter 2 days ago but that was pretty brief and we have yet to find out where they usually stay..

I shd post pics of the cats soon - they are in my home laptop at the moment. Ta for now!