I love cats. When I was a kid, my dearest wish was to have a cat of my own... but my mother is one of those people who thinks that cats are out to get her (she spent a lot of time shooing cats away from her because they made her itch) so I was never allowed to have one. One day a little Siamese followed me home from school and it scampered into the house behind me - I was delighted, but you would have thought it was carrying bubonic plague from the way my mother carried on! She chased it out of the house with a broom, and it never came back again. I had to be content with my relatives' cats. Grandma had a very big, very fat, and very lazy white cat named Miffy, my aunt had a venerable if slightly erratic black longhair named Scratchy Boy (if he got annoyed he'd live up to his name and lash out at you!) who was almost as old as me, and my other aunt always had a pair of cats. There was Bubble and Squeak, and when Squeak got out and had a run-in with a car she got Bartholomew (Barthy). Bubble and Bath both lived to a ripe old age, and then she got another pair of kittens named Splash and Stripe.
Needless to say, I was always determined that the first thing I'd do when I moved out on my own would be to get a cat. So when I moved to Florida to marry my fiance, John took me down to the animal shelter to visit the cats on my second or third day in the country. We were planning to wait awhile and settle in together before enlarging our family, but there was a pair of six-month old tabby sisters sitting in a cage in the office and they said 'we love you!' We went away to consider our options, and next weekend we went back for a second look - and the shelter lady said 'they're ready to come home now!' I'd really wanted an older cat/s who were hard to place, and I'd hoped for one of them to be a ginger tabby, but how could I resist? So we ended up with two grey tabbycats before we even had furniture.
A year later I was downstairs doing my laundry and I saw a tiny little black kitten following people around looking very plaintive. I went to say hellow to it and it mewed at me and said 'please help me!' So I picked it up and it snuggled and purred, and when I took it over to the office, the manager had never seen it before and had no idea where it came from. So I took it upstairs to figure out what to do about it. Being a feisty little thing, the first thing it did was to hiss at Scouty and Silver, and they took an instant loathing to it! For a few days we had the little black cat shut in the craftroom while Scouty and Silver paced outside the door hissing and snarling, and then we decided it just wasn't feasible because it was making everyone miserable. So John called around to the various shelters until he found someone who said they could take the kitten, and we took it over to the shelter. We hoped that they'd give the little black kitten a good home... but the first thing they said was that if nobody claimed it in 72 hours it would be PTS. I burst into tears and fled to the car feeling like a murderer... and I sat there crying while John dealt with the paperwork. John asked the guy what we could do and he basically said 'adopt her!' So we did. They fixed her and vetted her, and we took her home permanently a few days later. The girls were totally disgusted... but they didn't get a choice. As for the little black kitten, we called her Tessie because Scouty and Silver definitely thought she was The Evil Stranger. She spent a few days shut in the craftroom alone, but she didn't like that one little bit - she spent half the night mewing and scratching at the door, so we let her out much sooner than we'd intended, and she took her chances with the others. Tessie still annoys the heck out of Scouty, because she wants to play chasey and wrestle and Scouty just wants to be left alone. But generally they get on fairly peacefully.
Our cats all have very different personalities. So let me break them down for you briefly.
Our last cat isn't really 'ours' at all... Stripy Thing lives outside our building and he is determined to be an 'outdoor cat'. He's the sweetest kitty on earth, but he hates other cats with a passion so he's never going to agree to come inside and live with us, much as I wish he would. He's been living at our building for at least two years... the first six months he lurked around by the lake and he wouldn't come out of the bushes unless he was sure that he was safe (which pretty much meant for me and nobody else). Then he moved over to the main part of the complex and settled into the bushes there... and now he runs around like he owns the place. Which he pretty much does. He has to share with a couple of indoor-outdoor cats (when he runs into them you can hear the snarling and hiss-spitting from upstairs!) but he's pretty much king of the roost. There was somebody in the other building who used to feed him, and when she moved out he started to get super-skinny, so I took over because he's such a sweety and he already knew and trusted me. He comes up to my door to be fed once a day, and he follows me around when I go outside for anything. He'll let me pick him up for about 30 seconds at a time, and he'll roll over and let me pet his tummy without trying to turn me into mincemeat. He even likes to play, which is VERY unusual for a street-kitty. The only thing he won't do is come inside - he stuck his head around our doorframe once, met the three cats, and said 'okay, I guess that's YOUR territory, I'll stay out' and he's never set paw inside again. If I pick him up and put him down inside the door he walks right out again.I worry about him living outside in case anything bad happens to him. But he's very determined and independant, and he's obviously quite happy with the status-quo.