Happy birthday, Nerms

I might be the worst pet-owner of all time.

Today, Nermal turned 5, and I didn’t even remember until my old roommate GChatted me to tell me to wish him a happy birthday on her behalf. “How could you forget? It’s on Facebook!” she said. Answer: He and I aren’t Facebook friends anymore. (I took to using his Facebook to see how much information friends of friends could see on my page. Freakin’ confusing privacy settings.)

When I first adopted Nermal, I was the kind of doting owner who would make a Facebook page for her cat. (I was also 20 years old, and since he’s 5, that makes me almost 25, which is a topic worthy of its own post.)

I’ve taken it down a notch, but in honor of the big 0-5, I decided to dedicate this post to Great Moments in Nermaldom:

When he used to be tiny. Nermal is so huge now that it’s hard to remember him ever not being huge. But he used to fit into my hanging shoe organizer. See?

Evidence that Nermal was not always "big boned" and/or "husky."

The day he managed to get stuck in the back of a chair and stuck under my dresser within hours of each other. They say pets resemble their owners. Do they also inherit their owners’ predisposition to clumsiness? I think so.

The day Alexis took this picture of me and Nermal. He was being awfully forward. Probably the funniest picture I have of the two of us.

Coppin' a feel. Nermal, that's rude.

The day he took a giant dump on the floor of my South Campus apartment. It was a few days after he was neutered, and he held it in, day after day, instead of going in the shredded paper I had to put in his litter box. That takes determination. And really, the resulting dump was almost as big as he was. Admirable.

The “My Fuzzy Friend” debacle. I signed up to help a friend at the local newspaper with some silly puff piece the higher-ups had ordered. I ended up on the front page, above the fold, with an alarmed-looking Nermal. Rebecca’s dad refers to me as “the cat lady” for it. No one will let me live it down. And I’ve rarely seen Nermal as calamity-causing as he was in the newspaper’s photo studio the day we got our picture taken. So, without further ado, the front page:

Yes, I still have the copy I stole from our company cafeteria in the hopes my friends wouldn't see it.

If I had a glass of something right now, I’d raise it to Nermal. Here’s to you, buddy, and to many more years of you both amusing me and causing me great embarrassment.