I somehow forgot to mention that we've acquired three cats...not all at once, either!

First of all, why: because I am terribly allergic to mice, to the point of having serious difficulty cleaning up their droppings. Rodent feces= skin and underlying tissue itching (intense and prolonged!), difficulty breathing, fatigue, itchy eyes, etc. Also, I don't want to share my food with mice or to have to throw out food because they shit in it. Yech.

The cats:

Carhartt, yellow/orange tabby kitten, so named because his color matches the classic color of the work pants. He's friendly, playful and robust, but definitely an outdoors kind of cat even though he comes inside on occasion. I got him from my friend, who's a phenomenal gardener/farmer/Renaissance woman. I am continually in awe of the stuff she accomplishes! She has high standards for her animals and suffers no nonsense, so Carhartt is fairly certain to be a good mouser as his mother was.

Slash: named more in hopes of his hunting prowess and predation than his temperament, a little gray tabby kitten with symmetrical white facial markings and mittens. Slash is incredibly playful, athletic, acrobatic and lovable. He dances and pounces circles around Carharrt- we got the two of them at roughly the same time. He's one of the sweetest cats I've ever had, which is likely due to having gotten him from my daughter, who works with her kittens from before their eyes even open. She is an absolute wonder when it comes to animals and felines are her favorite. Slash's mother hunts pocket gophers, which are not only big (almost guinea pig size) but fast, as well as living underground. The pocket gophers can wipe out most of a potato crop- when I gardened in a major way I pretty much gave up on root crops because of the gophers. That's how bad they were. I will be thrilled if Slash shares his mother's appetite for pocket gophers.

And last night, we got another one...

Hunter: what I call a teenaged cat, a 9 month old kitten...in what I call a cinnamon tabby because the brown is rich and cinnamony warm, not a grayed brown. He's already as large as many full grown cats and is an accomplished hunter (the name he came with fits). He was sort of freaked at being given away (Freecycle) but the former owners say that he's extremely lovable, mellow and gentle. Also he disappeared for quite a while (3 months I think?) and showed up again in fine form, so is obviously a survivor. I think he'll be a very good fit once he settles down.