4-21-11

After a progressive downhill bout with old age, Shane and I had to say goodbye to our first fur baby. Harley was 16 1/2 and was really like a second child. My mom and grandma brought her to Raleigh when she was not even a handful after her mom died. The vet told them then that he doubted she would make it. She spent all of our college years on Shane's books, refusing to move while he tried to study. Each morning she sat on the toilet until Shane got out of the shower and waited for him to brush her. She was truly a daddy's girl. She lived through eating a sewing needle, from which she had to have an experimental surgery that entailed all of her guts being laid out on a table to remove the needle, and survived a dog attack that left her without a tooth, a punctured lung, a broken sternum and 3 broken ribs. I don;t know if she used all nine lives, but she must have had close to that many. She was the only cat in the house that let the boys pet her (most likely because she was deaf in the last few years) and they really miss her, as do we.