I might as well babble a bit about Watermelon Man - named for the characteristic watermelon pattern toward his back end.  It seemed to be more widespread when we acquired him.

I'd seen him on my wall once or twice, and finally decided that an unneutered roughly four-year-old cat either was homeless or didn't have a very good home. So I invited him to stay in September of 1999.  Walking the neighborhood did not reveal anyone familiar with him or any indications of a lost cat.

He's an extraordinarily LONG cat - so long that he's difficult to hold. He can easily look over a table!  Sometimes he'll stretch upward from behind a chair or couch and paw me in the back of the neck - astonishing for a house cat.  I once took him out of his carrier in the waiting room of my vet, and the customer next to me absolutely gasped as more and more cat emerged.

When we first got him, he looked terrifically masculine, almost like a lion. I'm sorry I never got a photo of that. Once neutered, he softened up quite a bit but is still fairly macho looking. Although extremely affectionate, he has always been on the aggressive side toward the others - usually not mean, but he'll chase and corner them such that he's not well liked by most and hated by one- Phunny Face.  At times he crosses over the line into being downright belligerent and hostile toward the others, and I end up screaming at him and breaking up fights.

He loves ice cream, unlike most of the others, and often spurns canned food in favor of the dry.  There is one interesting story to tell about him. About five weeks after we got him, he was sleeping next to me (to Calico's chagrin) and I was just vaguely conscious that his breathing didn't quite sound right. I'm not one to run to the vet for every trifling thing, but something was subtly wrong here.  I made an appointment for the early afternoon, and came home from work, figuring I'd spend an hour, drop him home, and get back to the salt mine.  The vet listened with a stethoscope and agreed something was amiss.  They took him to the back. 

The minutes stretched on, and I was finally told that something was wrong and they were taking X-rays.   Finally, they came back, holding an X-ray, and looking a lot more concerned than might have been expected for what I thought was a routine issue.  There on the X-ray, plain as day, was a sewing needle.  The point was touching one lung, which had collapsed, and the eye was touching his heart!  We tried to photocopy the X-ray, but it just didn't work.  Otherwise I would have loved to have it here on the web site.

I called in for a half day of vacation, and was soon on the phone to my veterinary oncologist/surgeon, perhaps the best in Southern California.  We rushed Watermelon up there for fairly urgent surgery.

It apparently was quite difficult to find the needle, because the X-rays don't show depth very well, but out came a rather blackened needle that  had probably been in there for some time - far, far longer than the five weeks we'd had him.  How a needle ended up inside Watermelon Man is a matter that I'm not prepared to speculate upon.

He spent a couple days at the hospital, charming everyone with incessant purring, and came back home in pretty good shape.  He didn't seem to suffer from the surgery, grew back his hair in a few weeks, and has been his friendly, aggressive self ever since.

Despite being a bully, he's really a coward at heart.  Once he learned that he couldn't push the newly arrived Thalia around, he stopped tormenting her and now disappears quickly if she glares at him.  In 2003, I had the three sliding doors into my house replaced with top-flight units.  Watermelon was terrified of the new doors!  For more than two weeks, I had to carry him in and out through those doors; there was no way he'd go through them on his own.  Eventually he accepted the doors and life returned to normal.

If there's one thing I don't like about him, it's the fact that almost every night he braces against me and grooms for hours, using me for support.  And a cat that big can exert a fair amount of force.  I've gotten fairly good at sleeping through continuous jostling.  Of course, with Watermelon pushing me from one side, and Calico sound asleep on my back keeping me from shifting position, the nights can be fairly interesting.  And often Havoc would sleep on my legs, further restricting motion.  But I guess I'm lucky the owners permit me any use of the bed whatsoever.