Svava

Dear Son,

I hope you get a chance to meet Svava. She's our big, fat, obnoxious, loud, won't-shut-the-hell-up cat. But we love her anyway.

I'm posting this in part to test out the picture function on this blog.

That worked pretty well. Sweet.

Your mom and I picked up Svava and her sister Freya when we were first dating. They really were my cats - she more went with me to get them for myself, all the while insisting she was a dog person. But the kittens won her over. Kind of.

I wouldn't have gotten them had I known I was going to go on another deployment, but I didn't, and I did, so Alicia wound up taking care of them during their formative years. She never got proper credit from the cats for it, either. Ingrates.

I named them after Valkyries in tribute to our Nordic heritage. It was harder than you think. Freya was easy - she was almost pure white as a kitten, and had blue eyes, just as Freya, Queen of the Valyries is sometimes described. But most of the other names of Valkyries were either ugly or unpronouncable. Most of them were probably both. But I thought Svava was cool, and it seems to fit her. (I stuggled for a bit with their names. I think they were almost 6 months before I figured it out. I just called them Poopy 1 and Poopy 2, since that's what they did. On the rug I bought in Bahrain. Grrr.)

Freya disapeared one day - I don't know if a coyote got her, or a car, or just what. I like to think that some little girl picked her up and got her mommy to agree to take her home. But that's the danger of cats. They're not really tame, and they need to come and go as they please. It's why I respect them, as a matter of fact.

When I dig them out of my old computer, I'll put up a picture of them with your mom when they were tiny kittens. They were about the size of one of Svava's current rolls of belly fat.

I think Svava senses what I'm typing about her. Better go...

Love, Dad.