This is Fancy. She's about fourteen years old. Her favorite activities are sleeping, eating raw hamburger and being petted. My mother is her favorite person. She can be a whiner when she doesn't get her way, but she's also well behaved and very sweet.
Fancy is of no particular breed, and has always been an odd one from birth. Her mother was an adopted tabby named Winky who was affectionate, grumpy and dominant in personality and her father was an orange and white tabby named Pumpkin. Her grandparents were Freckles the stray that just showed up and we adopted and Zeke, the blue-eyed dark Siamese that they had adopted from a litter in Oklahoma and brought back home after a visit with my Aunt Joyce. We have two others descended from the line of Zeke and Freckles still alive and well. We don't know what happened to Freckles, but we kept her three kittens with us for their whole lives and the two calico sisters lived to be very old and their grandfather Zeke stayed with us until he died of old age and was buried in our backyard with Winky and a small number of others as they too succumbed to old age. As for Pumpkin, because my parents hadn't yet learned the dangers of letting cats wander outside, Pumpkin's hind leg was first broken deliberately and then after he had fully mended and was let out again, was poisoned and died soon after. He never got to be old because people were mean and my parents were ignorant at the time. We never let our cats outside anymore.
What made Fancy the odd one from birth was her color pattern. We never let Winky breed on purpose and at the time couldn't afford to get any of our cats fixed (these days most of them are fixed, especially the males and none are let outside, so no more unwanted litters to care for and adopt out), she always gave birth to blues, blacks and tabbies. Indeed all of Fancy's siblings had those colors, only she was different and the only calico Winky ever had. When she was younger, she liked to play with the other cats, but got upset and whined when she didn't get her way about the games they were playing, especially wrestling. She did have a couple of litters of her own before we managed to get that problem under control and all of them got homes except for the one single kitten that had been still born. (I highly recommend fixing cats, I've already had to live through the trouble of not doing that and I had no say in the matter at the time. Fancy got fixed eventually because she had a uterine infection and we have had enough experience with that particular problem to know the signs. It was fix her or let the infection slowly kill her, so she got fixed).
These days she mostly sleeps and relaxes on the couch. I often pause to pet her on my way down to the basement where I clean up every day and where most of the cats sleep at night and she loves the attention. I have to carry everyone down except her, who will go down herself if asked. My mother is her favorite person and will often sit next to her on the floor when my mother watches TV. Her favorite foods are cooked chicken and raw hamburger, which she will often carry out of the dishes in the kitchen to eat messily on the carpet just outside of the kitchen door and we have to clean it up. Honestly I don't know how she eats the chicken, even when it's cut up because she only has one canine left, but she manages just fine.
We let her do what she wants and spoil her. She spends her days with both human and feline company, and has plenty of both.
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