Our daughter Margot has been obsessed with cats all her life.  For her fifth birthday her father and I finally capitulated and bought her and her brother a Maine Coon kitten Margot promptly named Cheerio.  Cheerio was a great hunter and rid our house of rats (the real reason we decided to let Margot have a cat), but he wasn’t exactly cuddly.  The following Christmas we decided to get another cat, a proper house cat who would be a real companion to our family.  We decided the ‘Rag Doll’ breed would give us the best shot at the kind of cat we wanted, but the selection in the local paper was very limited.  The only one we could find was a ‘Rag Doll’ type—no papers—the runt of the litter and the only kitten in a house of 36 cats.  He joined our family in December of 1999, a scrawny refugee with ear mites, who won our hearts with his big blue eyes and noisy insistence on full and total inclusion in every aspect of our lives. In hopes that he would be a wonderful cat, I named him after the Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood, “Felix the Cat.”  Felix is a very social cat and has always wanted to be included in whatever activity his people focused on, whether they be reading the newspaper or (in our daughter’s case) playing dress up like a princess.  Felix was also determined to comfort himself for his deprived kitten hood with food.  He weighed 1 ½ pounds when we first meet, and now tips the scales at 24 pounds.  In the meantime, we bought an estate jewelry store and decided to expand the retail side of the business onto the Web with a virtual store and eBay sales.  Felix was fascinated by my photography sessions and just for fun I took a few pictures of him.  He came back the next morning for more.  So that’s the story of Felix, our plus-sized cat model.  I’ll post new pictures of him as long as he keeps insisting I take them.