A cat, a cat-carrier and my bike; Friday I tried something new - strapping my cat carrier to the back of my bike and riding to work. This is a tricky task because the carrier doesn't really have anything easy to bungee around. There were three failed attempts to secure the carrier to the bike, all of which involved me jumping off the bike inelegantly (I was wearing a skirt) and grabbing the carrier before it went flying into traffic. If you try hard enough and are creative, you can secure anything to a bike!

Riding around Sandy Hill with the cat-carrier strapped to the back of my bike got me to thinking about Mao, my cat. Mao means "cat" in Chinese and reminds me of my Chinese roots. Mao is a tiny little cat, I have hand-bags bigger than this beast, he is a picky eater who doesn't like fresh shrimp (tired that on him last night - the results were returned about 30 minutes later on the carpet) and he is a charmer. I affectionately call him slut-cat because he will instantly make nine out of ten visitors his new best friend. He likes to ignore me to remind me that he could be taken home by anyone, so I should be nice to him, but when it is just the two of us, he is very snugly.

I adopted him from the Ottawa Humane Society two and a half years ago to replace an ex-boyfriend. January there is often a surge of animals at the shelter after Christmas when a lot of people "up-grade" from cat-to-kitten, or cat-to-dog, my mother says that I too was up-grading; boyfriend-to-cat. I also said I wanted an older animal because I am too lazy to train a kitten and these are often the hardest animals to place. I suppose I didn't really think this through ... animals are often abandoned because they are not trained or have behavior issues, with older animals there are also often health issues. When I saw this little Tabby-cat, curled up at the back of his cage, battling with depression (he had been there for six weeks) I knew this was the one. He did have some health issues, but they turned out to be due to the stress of being in the shelter for so long. No one knew who he was or what happened to him - he had been found in early December wandering around 1m tall snowbanks. He had no collar, no chip, no identification, no front-claws, and no one ever claimed him - so I did.

I have to say that in the bingo-game of pet adoption, I hit the jack-pot. My little beast is amazing (apart from reminders that he is hungry or didn't like what I fed him moments earlier). He was fully litter-trained, doesn't jump up onto any hard surfaces (think cat-free kitchen counters), doesn't shed too much, ignores my plants and my fish and he often also comes when called. I can do the drive from Ottawa to Orillia without too much grief and he has settled into life with the occasional visit from dogs.Apart from an unfortunate event involving his feline instincts and a chickadee, he isn't much of a hunter and prefers hanging out on the deck enjoying the sunshine and munching the cat-grass that I grow. If I were to every adopt another animal, the Humane Society would be the first place I would go - although I will not ... I am half a cat away from being the crazy-cat lady. But if you choose to adopt a cat, or need a carrier, I will strap it back onto my bike and lend it to you as well, inclusive of a can of food, some treats and maybe even a toy.

PS: the cat was NOT in the carrier when I biked to work ... I am not that crazy!