My How Time Flies (Warning - Heavy on Pet Pics)

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since we went to the shelter to look at Echo and came home with both of these cuties:

We had lost our 19 1/2 year old cat two days previously and he was the second cat we lost in 2009, so I was already scoping out the shelters by the afternoon of his passing.  I finally found Echo on the Arizona Humane Society site and decided to go down and look at him.  Sassy ended up being in the cage right next to him, so the next thing you know we are coming home with both of them.  We had started the year with four cats, so it wasn't really a stretch to consider going back to being a four cat household.

Both Sassy and Echo had to be in quarantine for two weeks due to kitty colds.  We set up a dog crate in my office and Echo stayed in there at night and had the run of the office during the day, while Sassy took up residence in the guest bathroom, which didn't make her very happy at all.  We used the two weeks to introduce them to the dogs since they weren't contagious to them, just the other cats.

Here's Sassy in her temporary room, showing off her bald little belly.  She had been just been spayed a few days before we adopted her.

Sassy didn't care for the dogs too much at first, but Echo took to them right away.  Here's him meeting Koda.  Is that not too cute how he put his little paw on Koda's?  He does that to me when he lays on my desk while I'm working...rests his little paw on my hand.  I think it's to make sure that I don't forget he's there.  Like I could miss him laying across my desk LOL.

He was equally friendly with Maya:



Once she was free from the bathroom, Sassy pretty much took over the place and apparently no longer had any concerns about the dogs:



Sassy hard at work on the laptop:

And a few more random Sassy pictures from her first month with us:



Here is what Echo's head looked like after his first unsupervised play date with Koda.  Don't worry, he was fine!

And more random Echo photos from his first month with us:



And finally, this is why we didn't put up a Christmas tree last year.  We did a test run with it up for a couple of days with no decorations.  In previous years, the top of the tree was not bent at a 90 degree angle, nor did it include a cat as a topper, so down it came after we found this one day.  The tree is 8 feet tall, so Echo was about 6 feet up.  We thought taking it down was the best move for everyone's sanity at that point, but mainly ours.