Strangely enough, I decided on a name before finding a new cat ... Chiana is a character from the SciFi series "Farscape," so I went looking for a grey tiger-stripe. When I found her, she was seven months old, and although I hated to make her part with her sibling, I knew that I was a "one cat" person. It turns out that Chiana is quite enough of a handful by herself! :-)

After we had been together a few weeks, I began to notice that her fur was changing from grey to brown, and after a few months, she looked an awful lot like FurFace. This was just the first of many things that have led me to the conclusion that Chiana is "possessed" by the spirit of FurFace.

She has a very good "purr motor," which was kind of a new thing for me ... FurFace didn't purr, except for an asthmatic little wheeze that I could only hear if I put my head right next to hers. The next difference I noticed was that Chiana likes to lick my nose, whereas FurFace would always back away whenever I tried to put my face close to hers. I guess it was the second or third day that I noticed Chiana sometimes snores ... that's when I realized that she was finally beginning to feel comfortable with me.

Chiana has an abnormally long tongue, so long in fact that it often sticks out of her mouth after she's been grooming ... she'll leave as much as a half-inch of it sticking out for as long as fifteen minutes, often falling asleep with it sticking out ... seeing her like that always brings a smile to my face, and makes up for all the destruction she's caused with her constant chewing (speaker wires, corners of books, etc.)

She doesn't care much for catnip or popcorn (two of FurFace's favorites), but she really likes to play with balloons, and especially likes to play "fetch" ... if I flick the balloon across the room, she will chase after it, then carry it back in her mouth and drop it near me so that I can flick it again. Sometimes when I reach for it, she will grab my wrist in her front paws, flip over on her back, and while holding the balloon in her mouth, and my wrist in her front paws, she will kick at my forearm with her back legs in that "disembowelling" action that cats do.

On cold nights, FurFace would paw at my face to let her under the covers with me ... Chiana prefers to sleep outside of the covers, curled up at my feet, and I often awaken to find myself pushed to one side of the bed while she sprawls sideways in the middle. After a year, she allows me to bring her under the covers and will snuggle in the crook of my arm, but only when I'm on my right side ... she'll only stay for a very few minutes if I'm on my left side.

She has a very good internal clock ... feeding time is at 4:30 AM and 4:30 PM, and there is no denying her. She gets canned food twice a day, and dry kibble for snacks in between, but I have to set a timer for three minutes ... longer than that, and she starts scooping the kibble onto the floor and starts batting it around. But the weirdest thing she does is when I put the water from a can of tuna into a bowl for her ... instead of just drinking it, she'll stick a paw into it, and then lick her paw ... she'll keep doing that until it's all gone.

When FurFace was circling the drain, and I was giving her an appetite stimulant as well as the pain killers, I would go to the local Chinese take-away just to get egg drop soup for her, it being one of her favorites. Even though I still patronized them two or three times a month after she left, it was over a year before I could bring myself to order the egg drop soup, so Chiana was with me for a year before she got her first taste of it. She's still a bit dubious about it, but she always seems to finish it, as well as the second portion that I set aside for later.

So, even though Chiana was nearly six months old when FurFace passed on, her spirit seems to have possesed my new purr-buddy. Chiana remains very much her own cat in many ways, but there is more of FurFace in her than I ever would have expected ... and to this day, no one has been able to explain how her fur changed color so quickly after such a long time!