Welcome to the new, souped up cats page. For those of us who can never get enough furry cuteness. Click on an image to get to the new galleries.

Item: My cats are named Xylem and Phloem. Get over it.

Non-cat people never understand the gooey paroxysims in which cat-people wallow over the mere sight of a humble domestic shorthair. I admit it's probably a character flaw. If I were the sort to indulge in elaborate fantasies and pin them on quasi-religious beliefs I'd say that I was surely a Priestess of Bastet in ancient Egypt. But hey, back here in the real world, I'm simply a captive of the icy insouciance and unapologetically self-serving nature of these creatures. Perhaps it's something vicarious: my fiance says that heaven is being one of my cats. In any case I'm naming my next cat Krycek, because that encapsulates the cat character: Gorgeous, seductive, inscrutable, nearly impossible to kill, able to more or less materialize and dematerialize at will in the most unlikely of places, utterly, totally and completely selfish.

Xylem and Phloem are from New York City. There are only two kinds of NYC cats that show up in the shelter: black & white and tiger. So Xylem is my 20lbs. tom, the b&w cow cat, and Phloem is the relatively small female tiger.

Both these kids are 11 now, and I've had them since they were 8 weeks old.