Chico

I was looking through a bunch of miscellaneous pictures that I have stored up in a "misc" album on my computer today and ran across this picture.

Many of you probably don't remember or may not have even known us at the time. Chico was the cat that Chris had when I met him. He had rescued Chico who was a foster cat living about a block away, but would spend most of his time hanging out under the porch of the house Chris was living in at the time. He would come over and Chris would feed him when he hung out under the porch, so eventually Chris decided to adopt him and take on his care full time.

Chico was always a very independent and slightly "unbalanced" cat - I'm guessing from living so long on his own without being able to know where his next meal was coming from. Still, once in a while, especially when it was cold out, he would come inside and hang out with us. Most of the time, though, even when he was inside he was an independent cat.

One of the "unbalanced" things he would do is every night when he was inside we would be able to lay in bed and watch him pace from the bathroom to the living room and back, meowing the whole time. Back and forth, back and forth. It was never just a single stroll, but genuine pacing. At first I thought I was imagining things, that a cat wouldn't really pace like this (OK, maybe caged lions & tigers do this, but a cat, that has a whole house to roam through?), but then I saw this behavior on more than one occasion and Chris saw it too... even when I wasn't around... so we know that he was doing this intentionally but for what reason, we could never really figure out.

We lost Chico about 3 1/2 years ago to some kind of ailment in his lungs that he never really recovered from. This is one of the only pictures we have of him. I'm really glad now that Chris took it.