Dear Royal Family,

Queen Prescott and I hope you are having a sweet and peaceful summer. In fact, we hope this month will go down in your personal history as Awesome August. You are very dear to us.

It brought Prescott pleasure to hear that several of you planned to take her up on the challenge to get yourself an ice cream sundae. If you would like a more difficult project this month, Prescott challenges you to get an ice cream sundae every Monday.

This is an order from your Queen, you know.

But in all seriousness, Prescott is not feeling very “serious” these days. Her health is impeccable, her spirits are high, and there is just so much to be excited about in August.

For starters, all the high school and college volunteers are back, and Prescott loves them even more than last semester. She is maximizing her time in their laps before they leave again.

She would rather they stayed, and she reminds them that Tabby’s Place is an accredited institute of higher learning, at least in the fields of Frolic and Shenanigans. These areas have great earning potential in the currency of head-bonks.

But Prescott understands some of her friends want to study Art History or Chemistry, so she will just make the most of summer recess.

August is also the time of the Perseids, our hemisphere’s most sensational meteor shower. Or at least, they used to hold that title. Prescott is a longtime connoisseur of comets.

But while some of us lay on our picnic blankets and stare at the sky, Prescott aims higher. Why admire celestial beings when you can be a shooting star yourself?

Prescott has been training for the Perseids for much of her life. Why else do you think she sprints down the Quinn’s Corner hallway every time the doors open?

She is not following the wet food cart back to the kitchen. She is not expanding her territory. (She already owns everything.)

She is certainly not having fun at slowpoke humans’ expense. (Queen Prescott the Great and Good would never do such a thing.)

She is being a comet, so everyone can make a wish as she shimmers through their orbit. (Wishes made on Prescott all come true.)

But when you are a cat turned comet, not even Quinn’s Corner is a wide enough sky. Which brings us to the most exciting element of Awesome August.

Prescott has secured citizenship to another universe.

No one witnessed first contact. It appeared to be an ordinary day. But if something looks “ordinary” at Tabby’s Place, that just means you are not looking hard enough.

And soon, everyone was looking for Prescott. Our moonshadow has many nooks and nestling-beds in the Lobby, but she was not in any of them. She was not lovestruck in a lap. The Quinn’s Corner hallway was quiet, with no Prescott pitter-patter.

Dear sponsors, to tell the truth, we were getting worried.

But just when it seemed Prescott had turned to pixie dust, our Administrative Assistant gasped. The Queen was fine; long live the Queen!

The Queen was just … on top of the 6′ filing cabinet in the Community Room.

If this were an “ordinary” cat, everyone would ask how it happened. Since this was Prescott, nobody was surprised. She is a genius. She is a miracle. She is a scholar of the extraordinary (and working on getting Tabby’s Place accredited in that area).

She is now also hooked on hopping between universes.

And can you blame her? Although she weighs less than ten pounds, Prescott is larger than the entire world by any measure that matters. The Lobby is hardly enough for her.

Don’t get her wrong. The Lobby is lovely, even luscious. There are skylights and turrets and people prepared to stop everything and snuggle.

There is giddy Berry and gushy Peabody and whatever one should call the massive mirth-mammal called Bello. (If only Tabby’s Place could get accredited in Marine Biology, Prescott could finally prove that Bello is 49% walrus.) There is Hips, in all his excellent excess.

But the Community Room offers a respite from Hips’s excessive excellence.

The Community Room also offers … snacks.

While the Lobby cats enjoy a prescription diet to treat their gastrointestinal festivities, the Community Room cats enjoy everything edible without exception.

(OK. Technically the Community Room is also on a prescription diet to treat gastrointestinal festivities. But it is a different prescription diet, and that is interesting, and “interesting” is close enough to “everything” to be worth Prescott’s efforts.)

As Prescott sees it, there are treats shaped like stars and treats shaped like hearts. There are kibbles that taste like kabobs and niblets that taste like giblets and that one wet food with itty-bitty salad shrimps more beautiful than anything Michelangelo ever painted.

There is even a rumor that the cats in the Community Room get Oysters Rockefeller on platinum platters every Sunday night, but Prescott is still fact-checking that one.

If only we would let her.

Dear sponsors, I’m afraid I will have to leave you on a cliffhanger.

Will Prescott be permitted to streak into the Community Room with impunity, or will we have to crack down on her snack sprints? I won’t say that the fate of the entire universe is at stake … but I won’t say it isn’t.

Either way, rest assured that Prescott is indeed having an Awesome August. That has everything to do with you! Thank you for loving her so generously, and being her family.

Love, your correspondent,
Angela