Well, it’s time to celebrate #Caturday again. These two villains live next door, and I get to borrow them when their people foresake them. This is Greybear, the supermodel. It’s not just his visage, he has the personality to match. He needs to be cuddled like a baby on your shoulder (always the left one) and he has quite the vocabulary around summoning food. But he will also pose for the camera, staying in one place for 20 minutes at a time, but changing position and expression at just the right pace. A single photo shoot with Greybear could fill a magazine.

He’s not all cuteness, either. He’s got attitude and brings it to the runway, like any good supermodel.

Diego, the Dark Lord of Destruction, is the black one, and takes a different approach to life. He has two methods of getting attention: lie on the most vital and/or vulnerable piece of equipment on my desk; play increasingly aggressively with the lowest pieces of a huge stack of papers. He actually asks very politely for attention first, but if you’re busy, you’ll miss it. He looks evil, especially with eyes lit up, but he never uses his claws in anger. However, I did once make the mistake of tickling the corner of a cardboard box with my bare finger while he was inside. The blood loss was significant, but we agreed the injury was my own fault. I always use a stick now, at least a foot long.

The first few times they fell under my care, I visited them in their home, but that always left them starved for attention and me wracked with guilt. So we switched to bringing them over to my place, and that turned out to be a winner. They complained a bit the first time, but by the third or fourth, they knew what to expect. Mind you, they prefer being home with their people, which they make quite clear by running into their respective carrying cases when it is time to go home. Sometimes they get so excited, they squeeze into the same one.

And I like having them visit, because it is rather like what grandparents say: I’m happy to have them come stay, and happy to see them go home.