We received a beautiful and serendipitous gift today for our 20th wedding anniversary (which was a couple weeks ago, but shipping is more complicated during a pandemic). The serendipity requires backstory:

A few years ago, in a year of big design changes, Stack Overflow had a contest with SO-branded cheese boards as prizes. I won one. Recently I've been divesting myself of some of my SO swag and packing most of the rest away, because of the pain and also because I'm not very interested in promoting that company by, say, wearing those t-shirts in public any more.

I offered some of my Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange swag to folks on Mi Yodeya, with the price being a torah teaching of the recipient's choice. I got some thoughtful torah, and a taker for the cheese board. I sent it off to its new home a couple months ago.

We eat cheese not infrequently, by the way.

And then today, somebody who knows nothing of Stack Overflow, recent events there, or swag, sent us this:

It's beautiful and well-crafted, and I look forward to using it with much fondness. Yay, 20 years of marriage! Yay, nice gift from someone who didn't know about the extra niceness!

Orlando had a couple of teeth pulled today. When I picked him up this afternoon, the vet tech warned me that because of the anesthesia he wouldn't be hungry. I said "Orlando not interested in food??". Orlando said "challenge accepted".

When we got home he raced to where the food dish should have been and glared at me until I corrected that. I gave him a small spoonful, and he gobbled it up and looked at me as if to say "oh, we're doing appetizers now before the entrees? Well, I'm ready for the meal now". So I gave him more and he happily ate it. (And kept it down. :-) )

Overachiever.

Life with cats: the loud protestations of outrage over my betrayal -- picking them up only to put them in those boxes,¹ to go to that place, hmpf! -- ended as soon as we reached dinner-time. As I suspected. :-)

And now Giovanni is extremely interested in my mug of chai. Previous cats were only interested in mint tea (mint being, I'm told, a member of the catnip family). Silly cat; you can't get your head far-enough into the mug to get that. (Please let that be true. Here, let me make sure you can't...)

¹ Well, in Giovanni's case, more like a duffel bag. He does very badly in a conventional carrier ("bad" meaning "scratched his claws bloody on his first vet visit"), so I have a soft-sided, padded, zippered carrier for him and he likes that much better.

Orlando has gone into hiding...somewhere in the subset of the house that is available to him. I last saw him Monday morning, when he was happy to eat canned food from (a dish in) my hand. He's around -- the food and water are being consumed and the litter boxes are being used -- but he's found a good spot and doesn't want to come out yet. Sigh.

There've been no feline hostilities that I'm aware of. These seems to be "new environment, scary!" anxiety.

I wonder if I need to postpone tomorrow night's vet appointment. How long does this phase usually last? (Giovanni seems to have skipped it, at least so far.)

Edit 11PM: Got him! The way to Orlando's heart is through his stomach; I used bowls of food behind closed doors to gradually narrow the search until I had it down to one room. Actually catching him in that room was a bit of a challenge, but he and Giovanni are now in my office together, where I plan to keep both of them until the vet appointment tomorrow night. After that they can have their freedom back.

This will require more evaluation, but it's possible that, after watching my new cats in action for a couple days, they are Felix and Oscar.

I've been using wet food to try to lure them out of hiding and into my lap (or at least into petting range). Gumbo sees the food, stuffs his face as far into the tub as possible, and starts slurping it down. And when he eats the dry food, he manages to scatter some of it around on the floor. And the paper under the water bowl is wet. He totally seems like the kind of cat who would, if he had opposable thumbs and enough strength, drink the milk straight from the bottle and not notice that it's a few days past its expiration date besides.

Beanie, on the other hand, delicately licks up the food, moving slowly and deliberately. He washes up after meals (and at other times). If he could talk, he gives every impression of a cat who would ask for a tablecloth, cutlery, and a flower in a vase to bring his dining experience up to an acceptable level. He is also fastidious in using the litter box, covering completely and then knocking his paws on the edge of the box to avoid tracking litter.

But it's too soon to tell if these are their usual behaviors or the result of being in a strange environment. Their default positions are still "in hiding", though Beanie actually explored my office with me in it to watch today, so that's progress.

Both of them purr at length and fairly loudly, by the way. The medical notes I got said, for both of them, that the vet couldn't clearly listen to their lungs because of the noise.

Later update:

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)