I just couldn't resist...

When a story about me and my 21-year-old cat ran on the front page of the local newspaper recently, one of the comments to the online version said, "There's nothing worse than an old maid Cat Lady."

After initially feeling insulted, I started to see the humor in the moniker. I mean, seriously, who uses the term "old maid" any more to refer to a single lady of a certain age? Certainly nobody I know. Now we're "cougars" in high-profile careers, wearing power suits and driving luxury sports cars. Only the shallowest of the shallow would think that there's anything wrong with being a single woman in today's society.

As for being a "cat lady", I hardly think that owning one cat qualifies me as such. If it does, then so be it. I have had exactly three cats in my lifetime, never more than two at a time. I'm not one who buys T-shirts with cats on them or decorates my entire house in an all-cats motif. Can't say that other people haven't given me a fair amount of that stuff through the years, but you won't see it on display. So I don't think the idiot who posted that little slam really knew anything about me, or much about life, for that matter.

But I still chuckle at the term, so I decided to name my new blog just that. I see it as an empowering term. (Isn't everything "empowering" these days?) I have learned a few things about cat care and cat behavior in my time of being a "cat lady", so I'll share some of that on this blog. Hopefully, others will also share their cat wisdom and we can get a whole community of "old maid cat ladies" into the discussion. Won't that be fun? And wouldn't that guy who posted his nasty little comment on my news story be miffed to know that we'd turned his little insult into this? I certainly hope so.