Life - Promoting Rest Day

The day before the third Bethel race, the March 20th Tour de Kirche, I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon in bed. Fatigued to the bone, I could barely move. I roused myself out because I knew I had to get registration set up at Navone's; if I had no race the next day I'd probably have spent all day in bed.

Warning: for those that don't like cats, don't bother reading further.

As such, the kitties reveled in the unusual occurrence of being able to share the bed with one of the humans in the day time. I had a camera so I got to capture some of those moments.

Bella, under the covers. She's weighing in at just over 10 pounds and has the second longest tail of the bunch.

She curls up between my knees whenever I'm laying in bed. After 10 minutes or so she pokes her nose out and zips off. Usually she'll meander by a few minutes after I lay down. She also greets us before the others, when we come in from the garage. When she was a tiny kitten, she was the one that stood her ground, hissing and spitting ferociously.

Of course, when she was the size of my fist, that hissing and spitting only made me smile. She chomped on my glove the whole way in from the driveway out back to the office.

Tiger, carefree. He's about 5 years old now, and weighs a tad under 10 pounds.
If he were a racer he'd make a good climber. His tail can hit the back of his head, it's that long.
He's also a feral kitten rescue cat.

The cats at about 10 AM.
Clockwise from the bottom: Lilly (about 10 years old now, 15 lbs), Mike, Riley, Bella, Tiger
Hal is under the covers to Bella's right.

Hal prefers sub-surface naps. Here I'm bugging him by exposing him to light.
Hal weighs about 15 pounds.

Hal (white male with blue collar), Riley (white female with pink collar), Bella (tabby female with gold collar), and Mike (tabby male with coon cat ears) all came from the same litter. They're about 3 years old now. They all came from "under the store" where I work, caught when about 4 or 5 weeks old.

(Their mom and dad are still under the store. The male, White, looks just like Hal, and is ferociously wild - when we caught him to fix him, he was smashing his face into the cage. The female, Grey, is all grey with a white patch on her chest. She'd probably make a nice house cat but I didn't want to separate her from White. She follows him around as evident on the store security cameras. When she got fixed the staff could pet her.)

Estelle, who prefers to sleep on her own and who interacts with us humans when we're sitting in chairs or couches, is missing from these pictures. She's about 3.5 or 4 years old, taken in from the same "under the store" cat colony. She's full grown, about 9 pounds, and is the only long haired cat in the bunch.

Riley in a perfect pike position.
She's tiny, under 9 pounds.

Hal is now on Bella's favorite bed.
Clockwise from bottom: Tiger, Riley, Bella, Hal.

Riley curled up next to Mike.
She really likes Mike, or maybe it's vice versa. They usually hang out together.
Mike weighs in at 15 lbs.

Based on the pictures' time stamps, I spent about 5 hours in bed. After seeing off the missus at about 9 AM I went back to sleep, waking up at 10 AM, again at about noon, and finally getting up at about 2 PM.

Fortunately Frank was still at the studio when I got there, I got registration set up, and the race went well on Sunday.