Names

Here is an explanation of the nicknames I've given the kittens, since I know *somebody* is going to ask. :-)

For the origin, you'd have to go back to their recent vet visit at the Humane.Society. When they were originally entered into the records, some poor soul had had to make notes in the computer as to what the differences between the kittens were, so that they could later record that this kitten weighed that, or had this problem, etc. So when I took the kittens to the vet, they got weighed, got their vaccines, and then I waited to make sure that they were able to correlate their notes with what was in the computer and figure out which kitten had which ID number.

As you might imagine, with four grey tabbies, we had some scenes with myself and two of the ladies who work in the vet's office, each holding up a kitten face in a sort of police line-up and wondering "okay...*which* one supposedly has the white around the eyes?...gah, they all do!"

Fortunately, one of the kittens is actually an almost-solid dark grey with grey tabby markings on top of that (quite pretty, actually), so they recorded her as "Gray on gray", and she thus got the imaginative nickname in my head of "Grey". I put a reddish collar on her when I got home.

One of the remaining three grey tabbies has ever-so-slight warm grey overtones (a hint of brown), and that found a rough match in the notes, so she was checked off. I put a blue collar on her when I got home.

The other two seemed visually identical, and the vet helper lady had trouble trying to find a defining difference until I pointed out that one of them weighed in 3oz less than the other, and that she was probably the lightest on intake, too, so sure enough, the two identical kittens had different weights, and they were able to go by that.

With an exasperated sigh and a grin, the lady popped into the vet exam room and came back with two paper "girl" collars, on which she wrote their number and something I'd also noticed (but which wasn't in the computer, so hadn't been useful) -- that one had more striping on her back, while the other's back stripes were harder to see because of the solid grey coloring there -- and thus they were given ID collars for the sanity of the vets on future visits.

And hence the names Grey, Blue (for the collar), Stripes and Solid.

:-)