So here's the sitch:

My mother, up until recently, shared her part of the house, which is fully airlocked from my part of the house, with two cats: Hercules and Lizzy.

Sadly for Hercules but happily for Lizzy, my sister's situation finally stabilized enough for her to take her cat home. This is probably saving her sanity during the lockdown. Unfortunately, this left Herc alone.

We can't integrate him with the upstairs cats: he's terrified of Thomas and takes his existence as a dominance challenge which Must Be Met. So it's blood and claws any time they meet. But he's never been alone before, and started getting squirrelly very fast.

When he started physically attacking my mother, we knew it was kitten time. Kitten, specifically: he's too cat-aggressive to accept an adult cat. But he can accept kittens.

Maine Coons are not Mom's speed. I did some research, asked a lot of questions about what cats she's liked best, and started looking for local Ragdoll breeders.

We found Longfellow Ragdolls in Olympia, where we were lucky enough to get a slot for one of the spring litters, and secured Tinkerbell. But quarantine makes the normal parts of getting kittens much harder. We couldn't visit the cattery, for one thing.

When Kristie, the breeder, handed Tink to me today, she said this was the first time she'd had someone commit to a kitten without meeting it first. Since that's how I got Elsie, I feel pretty good about this choice.

So this morning, we drove from Seattle to Olympia, did our kitten drug deal (no contact, lots of Lysol, even the kitten was washed first), and just finished driving home.

Tinkerbell is now in isolation in Mom's guest room, where she has found an old Starbucks bag and moved into it, presumably forever. Tink + Bag = TRUE LOVE.

The worst-case scenario possible here is that Hercules has become too cat-reactive to accept even a marshmallow baby, and then Tink comes to live upstairs with me. And this is a worst-case only because my housemate is allergic.