For the whole two of you out there in the world who haven’t been told, texted, e-mailed, or seen it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or our Tumblr account, we are new parents.

Yeah, okay. So this really only shows the male cat and not much of his sister. But you can see more of them if you hit the link at the bottom of the three pictures on the right. But I’ll offer up the complete story here.

So it’s been pretty quiet and a little lonely around here without Pippin. It’s the first time since I was three that I haven’t had a cat in my life. We’d decided a while back that we’d like to have more cats, but just needed to wait for the right time.

Friday night, we headed out to the same Humane Society location where I’d bought Pippin 21-plus years ago.

I only had a couple of wants in getting new cats: a sibling pair, preferably boy-girl; and they need to have some personality. When we got there, there were only two sets of kittens, and one of them had two of the three already on hold. So I looked at the other set.

Our new additions were two of a six cat litter, and only three of the litter were still available. They’d just had their sterilization surgery Friday, so they couldn’t be handled, but I still stuck my finger in the cage to see what they were like.

And one of them rubbed up against my index finger and immediately started purring. Loudly. I was done. And I don’t think we had been there for 10 minutes yet. So all that was actually left was choosing which sibling. We put them on hold since they couldn’t be adopted until the next day.

Normally, most families would then need some time to come up with a name for their new pets. Not us. We’d had the names picked out for a few months. So formally, for all of you out there who haven’t heard yet, we present our new cats: Dr. Henrietta von Flufflebutt (Etta for short), and her companion And Guest (yes, And is part of the name, and his is Gus for short). All of us contributed something to the naming.

Etta is a forceful, friendly girl who has the loudest purr I’ve ever heard. And Gus was initially pretty skittish, but late today, he’s really come out of his shell and even started purring loudly when I had him on my lap for a while.

But one of the highlights so far has been having the announcement made at the Humane Society that they were going home to their forever homes. And yes, they used their new names. Their new full names.

So stay tuned. More kitten hijinks and stories to come, I’m sure.

See you tomorrow.