I'm just as impressed by the XM as I am by the kitties to be honest. I love hearing about your cats and seeing the accompanying photos Atilla; please keep it up! :-)
Cheers -- all of the cats here are wonderful. I like this thread a lot.
That XM was a mess -- it was sat on the driveway for years in a bad state, as a van full of melons struck Mr Attila from behind on the motorway, wrecking it. One of the back windows was smashed, which is how Amy was able to access and live in it for a while.
Keeping it running was a labour of love, I think. The first time I met Mr Attila in the flesh (we'd be in corro via a chat room and phone prior to that, as he was part of a small group of friends of my then-partner), he came up to London to collect me for a weekend visit to the south. He couldn't actually come to the door or help me down four flights of stairs with a bunch of boxes of stuff I needed to give to him from another friend (and it was one of those houses where you could not let the door shut behind you, or you'd be locked out -- my ex had the keys and had gone to work), and it wasn't a street where you wanted to keep the door propped open. But Mr Attila couldn't switch off the XM as the alternator had failed on the drive up to London, and he was afraid if he shut it off, he'd never get the thing started again -- so he was parked up and idling down the street.
It had loads of other issues; there was the night he was driving to a concert and had to take a lot of dark B-roads to get there, and his headlights failed. So he snuggled up as closely behind another car to take advantage of their headlights til he could find a service station. Imagine being in some tiny car and this enormous landshark of a vehicle with no lights glides up behind you on a deserted country lane. They understandbly kept going faster and faster to get away from him. At the time it apparently did not occur to him that he was terrifying the car's occupants.
Then the melon van came along, and that was the end of the XM
Cat photos to make up for the car chat.
Tiny Toast clambering around on a freshly washed, new bedsheet
Tiny Toast after being caught using said bedsheet as a hammock -- that's not a look of regret, but a look of regret that she got caught.
Mr Whiskers, watching me work
Tiny Toast next to the haunted steamer trunk (under the gauze to protect it from cat's claws). She loves that steamer trunk, and bonded with it when I brought it out of storage and back to the house.
Mr Gus, nipped out on fresh catnip earlier this summer
Mr Whiskers & tongue -- these three rarely get caught in that tongue-out pose that some of my other cats had
Tiny upside down and in one of her moods
Susan, who lives exclusively on the windowsill in a plastic bucket. She lives, eats, excretes, and plays on that windowsill. Sometimes she sits on a cushion on Mr Attila's desk, and even more rarely ventures off the sill, but that's her spot.
Tiny sat on my side desk while I work
