New Cat

So, a cat showed up on our back balcony a few weeks ago. We live on the second floor of a house, and we have a 2 long balconies - one that stretches in front of the living room and dining room, and another that stretches behind the kitchen, bathroom, and 'study.'

While Johanne, my temporary summer roommate, was at home for the first week, the long skinny kitten meowed constantly, and was insistent enough to jump on the grille outside of our bathroom windows (if you can imagine painted metal bars winding in decorative patterns outside of a window). The kitten clinged to the bars and meowed constantly, scratching at the French style balcony doors, and traipsing back and forth along the balcony railing. So of course, Johanne fed her. It's hard to resist the cats in Tunisia; like everywhere in the Mediterranean, cats are omnipresent. Spaying and neutering seems to be considered by most both too expensive and too imposing ("cats have their lives too" - which is true).

Johanne and I took the cat to the vet for the first time last week, where she got her rabies vaccine along with some worm medicine and a prescription for a flea spray called 'frontline.'

And we gave her a bath!

We also spent quite a lot of time on baby name search engines along with wikipedia pages on the various Tunisian heritages. We ultimately ended up with three names that we really liked: Cardea (the Roman Goddess of doors and protectress of children), Adonia (a Punic name adoring God), and Thiyya (a Berber or Amazigh name meaning 'beauty'). Of course, the Romans, Pheonicians, and Imazighen (plural) have all resided in modern-day Tunisia at some point in history. The Pheonicians even almost made the Roman Empire fall, led by the general Hannibal.

As we struggled to decide between these 3, Johanne's boyfriend Marcel pointed out that the first letter of each name spelled... cat! So, of course, we gave her all three names: Cardea Adonia Thiyya, and her initials are CAT.