Our status quo for years has been having three cats. They all get along well, they all behave well, it’s been our baseline. We did babysit two cats for 3 months, then again for another month a few years later, for a total of five cats in the house. Ironically there really is no difference between five cats and three cats. You may not believe it, but if you’ve ever lived it, you will understand that you don’t even notice the difference.

Why does this matter? Well, mailing lists are evil. I have been getting email notifications from our local animal shelter for weeks now about how overwhelmed they are, and seeing desperate pleas on Facebook as well. We can’t possibly take on another dog. Especially the dogs that they have available, which are all quite large and outside of our range of feasibility.

But a cat? Yes, I suppose we could do another cat. Because we’ve had five cats and that was okay, so what is four cats? Four cats would be FINE…

As an adult, I have always wanted an orange cat. I don’t know why. I don’t know why this seems important to me. But I figured, they have a ton of cats available and at least one of them must be orange. We shall adopt an orange cat!

So our first attempt… There was an orange cat in foster care we signed up to meet. He was adorable. Shy to be sure, but he let us pet him and seem like a great match. EXCEPT, he needed a special diet, which was not in his description. Unfortunately, we free feed our cats, so to have a cat who ate special food was never going to work. We loved on him so much but we had to walk away and allow him to find a home that was better suited to his needs.

And the emails about the emergency situation at the shelter continued to come into my inbox. So fine, let’s go to the shelter and see who we can find. According to the website there were multiple orangy kitty options, so it was all going to work out. But when we got there there was only one orange kitty still there that wasn’t in foster care. But hey we only need one kitty right, so it’s all good…

But you can’t avoid walking around to see ALL the kitties. And they had several tortie girls who were ADORABLE. And torties have orange in them, so it still counts, right? I’ve always wanted a tortie or calico too. We ended up with our heart set on one in particular, but she was on a medical hold so we weren’t able to meet/adopt her. That was kinda heartbreaking. But there was that orange kitty, right? We had a plan – orange kitty it would be.

But you know what they say – best plans of mice and men. Eli set his sights on a completely different cat from what we were “looking for.” A random grey and white boy who meowed sweetly when we went by. Originally a stray, this guy clearly had a great personality despite his tough beginnings. But ORANGE cat, we were getting an orange cat.

So we met said orange kitty. And she was beautiful, but completely shy and relatively terrified of people. And then it was like, we are here – might was well meet Eli’s choice too. And WHAT A HONEY! We all got to give pets as he soaked up the all the attention.

So despite our original plans, there was no orange cat for us. But one beautiful grey and white kitty found his way into our lives. We named him Jonas, and we love him too pieces already!