Are My Psycho Kitties From Another Planet? by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

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On the evening of June 24^th, 2025, I arrived home in Edmonton, Alberta, from a dragon boat festival in Vancouver, B.C, just in time to celebrate my husband’s and my anniversary on August 25^th. I found a message from my son about two ten-year-old cats whose owner had died unexpectedly. No one in the family wanted them and they were going to be euthanized if no one else took them. My husband and I had put our eighteen-year-old cat to sleep a month before and had decided we wouldn’t be getting any more pets because it is so hard to say goodbye to them. However, it didn’t seem right that these sisters should die through no fault of their own. So hubby and I decided our anniversary gift would be to adopt them and I called the number. It was arranged that we would pick them up on August 26^th.

For our anniversary we decided to go out for dinner but he had to go help our daughter and didn’t make it back in time so we went to pick up KFC. While we waited for our order I tried to fill up our drinks but the Pepsi syrup ran out and I only got carbonated water. I waited while the tanks were changed. Carbonated water came out for the first bit and I kept dumping it out while waiting for the syrup. Then the power went out. Luckily, we did get our chicken order but our drinks were kind of anaemic.

When we got home, we found our power was out also, so we had a romantic meal by twilight. The power came on about an hour later and we had to reset our clocks. My husband couldn’t get the one on our gas stove to work and somehow he locked the oven door while trying.

We picked up our cats on the 26th. One, renamed Lovey, snooped around and settled in. The other, renamed Trixie, went and hid under the bed. Over the next few weeks, Lovely adopted me and Trixie adopted hubby. After spending their lives in an apartment, it took them a while to venture out into our back yard. But once they were comfortable, they wanted to go out every morning and we had to leave the door open all day so they could come and go as they pleased. They weren't impressed when the cold and snow came.

Lovely likes to sit with me on my chair and she purrs loudly and sleeps soundly. She follows me around the house and waits at the top of the stairs when I go down to the basement. Sometimes she goes down with me. At night she sleeps against my legs or face to face and she licks my arms and purrs. Trixie likes to purr on hubby's lap in the evening and rubs his face with hers. She goes out to the garage with him and sleeps on the chair. At night she sleeps with her head against his.

We naturally thought, that being sisters, they would get along. But no. They growl and hiss at each other when they walk by, they swipe at each other if one gets too close, they tease by blocking the door so the other one can’t leave or come back in the house. They hiss at each other from across the room.

And we are not safe. As I said, Lovely likes to sit on my knee when I am in my chair. However, if I want to move her so I can stand up, she hisses and growls at me then walks across the living room hissing and growling at anything she sees. Trixie will let hubby pet her for a while and then swats his hand or claws him when she has had enough. If we walk too fast past them, they growl, grab at our legs, and even chase us while yowling.

So, the questions are: have they been taken over by aliens from another planet? has some evil entity taken possession of them? or are they just psycho? After all, we only have the word of a person we met for half an hour, while picking them up, that their owner had died, that they were ten-year-old sisters, and that they'd lived in an apartment all their lives. We really know nothing about their previous life. And they aren't telling us anything. Lol 

Canadian Authors-Quebec by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

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      I am a proud Canadian author of over twenty fiction and non-fiction books in my long writing career. But I am just one of thousands of published writers from this huge country. Canada has had a long and illustrious history of producing world renown authors and books going all the way back to the 18^th century.

     Frances Moore was born in England in 1724. She was a well-known poet and playwright in England before she and her husband, Reverend John Brooke moved to Quebec City in 1763, for John to take up the post of army chaplain. During her time there Frances wrote The History of Emily Montague, a love story set in the newly formed Quebec province.

     The story is told through the voices of her characters by way of personal letters between the two. This is known as epistolary (of letters) type of writing and it was popular during the1700s in Europe. The Brookes’ returned to England in 1768 and the novel was published in 1769 the London bookseller, James Dodsley. The History of Emily Montague was the first novel written in what is now Canada and the first with a Canadian setting. Frances died in 1789.

 

Quebec

Marie-Rose-Emma-Gabrielle Roy was born on March 22, 1909, in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, which is now part of Winnipeg. After her early education she took teacher training at the Winnipeg Normal School. She taught in rural schools in Manitoba until she was appointed to the Institut Collegial Provencher in Saint Boniface. She saved her money and moved to France and England to study drama but after two years returned to Canada when WWII broke out in 1939. She settled in Montreal and earned a living as a sketch artist while writing. She became a freelance journalist for La Revue Moderne and Le Bulletin des agriculteurs.

     Ms. Roy’s first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945) was an accurate portrayal of Saint-Henri, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Montreal. It was published in French, earning her the Prix Femina award in 1947. The book was also published in English under the title The Tin Flute and won the Governor General Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal. It was the first major Canadian urban novel.

     The novel sold almost a million copies in the United States and the Literary Guild of America made the novel a feature book of the month in 1947. Because of all the attention the book received, Gabrielle moved to Saint Boniface to escape the publicity. There she met a doctor, Marcel Carbotte and three months later, in August, they married. They headed to Paris for the next three years where Carbotte studied gynecology and Roy wrote. On their return to Canada in 1950, they settled in Montreal for a couple of years and then moved to Quebec City. Carbotte took up a position at the Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement and they lived in an apartment. Wanting a quiet place to write, Grabrielle bought a cottage in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, Charlevoix County. There she wrote the bulk of her work. In total, she wrote twenty books.

     Gabrielle and her husband didn’t have any children. Besides writing she travelled around the world and spent time visiting her family.

     Gabrielle Roy is considered to be one of the most important Francophone writers in Canadian history and one of the most influential Canadian authors. She became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967 and won many awards, including the Governor General Award three times. She was on the panel in 1963 that gave the Expo ’67, Montreal World's Fair and Canada’s 100^th birthday celebration, its theme: Man and His World (Terre des hommes).

     Gabrielle Roy died of a heart attack on July 13, 1983, at the age of seventy-four. Her autobiography, La Détresse et l'enchantement, was published posthumously in 1984 and the English translation, Enchantment and Sorrow won the Governor General Award in 1987.

In 2004 the Government issued a $20.00 bank note in its Canadian Journey Series which had a quotation from her 1961 novel, The Hidden Mountain: Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?

 

Mordecai Richler was born on January 27, 1931, in Montreal, QC. He was raised on St. Urbain Street and learned how to speak English, French, and Yiddish. He studied at Sir George Will College (Concordia University) but left before getting a degree. He moved to Paris at nineteen and lived there for two years before returning to Montreal. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) for a short time then moved to London, England in 1954 where he married Catherine Boudreau. She was a non-Jewish French-Canadian divorcee who was nine years older. Just before their wedding he met and was infatuated by another non-Jewish woman Florence Wood Mann, who was the wife on his close friend, Stanley Mann.

     While in England he wrote and had published seven novels, the most well-known one being The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). The story was about Richler’s favourite theme: the hardships of Jewish life around St. Urbain Street in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. He wrote a screen play for the novel and it was made into a film in 1974 starring Richard Dreyfuss. In 1960 Richler divorced his wife and Florence divorced her husband and they were married in 1961. Mordecai adopted her son and they had four more children.

     Richler and his family returned to Montreal in 1972. A compilation of his humorous essays was collected into Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974). He also wrote the Jacob Two-Two series of children’s fantasy books (1975, 1987, and 1995). His novel Joshua Then and Now was published in 1980 and made into a film in 1985.

     Besides writing novels, Richler also contributed articles to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Look, The New Yorker, and The American Spectator. He wrote a column for The National Post and Montreal’s The Gazette and wrote book reviews for Gentleman’s Quarterly.

His last novel, Barney’s Version (1997) was based on the events surrounding his divorce and remarriage. Barney’s Version was made into a film in 2010.

     Richler was awarded the Order of Canada in 1999. He died of cancer on July 3, 2001, at the age of 70.