Suite B is approximately 8 feet from Suite C.

If you are a human, this means 1.3 Jimmy Fallons laid end-to-end. If you are a cat, this means the distance from New Jersey to Paris Zanzibar The Andromeda Galaxy.

Go ahead and call Violet and Daisy “Buzz” and “Neil,” because our whippiest torbies have gone on a fantastic voyage.

As the story goes, the tricolor sisters were being a bit too whippy for their neighbors’ liking in Suite C. This, in itself, may be a towering achievement. It’s very hard to out-crazy Suite C.

It’s also very hard to outweigh Suite C. If you put all the humans in Ringoes, NJ on one side of the seesaw, then put all the cats in Suite C on the other side, the humans would be catapulted up into the Andromeda Galaxy. (And the cats would eat you alive. Cats don’t do seesaws. Do not want.)

Suite C’s largest lads and ladies are legendary. When Virginia‘s incredible girth prevented her from cleaning her own tortoiseshell tuckus; when Trey appeared on the verge of actually ‘sploding out of his own stripes; and when Violet herself tripled in size…something had to be done. Something serious.

It’s times like this that Tabby’s Place resembles an Aaron Sorkin drama. “Walk and talk with me,” says our President/Chief Newsman/Founder and Executive Director (let’s call him Ronathan). He’s a Busy Man, so he walks and talks and bids his minions do the same. “We need a plan. We need to save the nation/station/cats from starvation exploding.”

“Let’s put them on a diet,” suggests Ronathan’s chief of staff/producer/Sanctuary Operations Manager (let’s call her Fanielle).

“Let’s stop giving them wet food 800 times a day,” suggests Ronathan’s press secretary/reporter/Development Director (let’s call her Flangela). Everyone looks at Flangela in horror. Stop feeding the cats wet food 800 times a day? What are you, some kind of war criminal?

Flangela laughs. “Just kidding!” Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. You can’t just say things like that.

Ultimately, the bumbling humans select a moderate approach: they will continue appeasing the elephantine cats with wet food…but they will cut off the all-day smorgasbord of Calorie-Bomb Cousins Of Kix. It’s a plan whose time has come.

Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed that dry cat food looks like nothing so much as dark brown Kix. (You know, the cereal that’s kid-tested and mother-approved.) But unlike those harmless balls of Kixy corn, every kibble of cat food contains a galaxy of calories, capable of causing cats to turn into furry beach balls. Between their caloric punch and the way Virginia and company inhale these nuclear kibbles, it would appear that dry cat food contains only two ingredients: lard + crack.

Yes, I am exaggerating. It’s actually made of margarine + crack.

With an all day supply of their pound-packing addiction, the cats in Suite C could only do one thing: expand. And so we agreed: we would relocate the calorie-bomb balls to the ramps. It seemed the perfect solution. The nimbler cats, weighing <300 lbs. each, could still reach their chow. Meanwhile, the more bovine-bodied felines could wait for their wet food feedings. (Despite being verifiably cracklike in its own right, Fancy Feast and such are generally lower in calories than kitty Kix.)

But “perfect solutions” aren’t in the reach of humans, even though humans are dim and tend to forget this. So, somehow, the land of the large continued to expand. It was time for a drastic option.

Take a deep breath before reading this extreme plan. We decided would pick up the dry food in the morning, give the cats their wet food, give them more wet food 6 hours later, and then put the dry food down again before leaving for the night. If you’re doing your math, you know that means the cats would have only 16 hours of access to dry food per day.

I know: we are a bunch of martinets. Stalin, Idi Amin and Dr. Evil would all tremble in terror contemplating the steely strictness of the Tabby’s Place staff. Deny the cats dry food for 8 entire hours at a time? I’m not even sure such drastic measures are legal, and we fully expect animal cruelty officers to investigate. But we live on the edge that way.

For cats at risk of rotundity beyond belief, it was a solution. And it was about to be a rather ultimate solution, if two hungry torbies had their way. Which brings me back to Violet and Daisy.

The last of the Georgia flower girls have always been firecrackers. They will love you with all they’ve got, and then they will slap you, and you’ll like it, or they’ll slap you again. They’ll head-bonk other cats, then scream and beat them. Wild flowers can’t be tamed.

Or, apparently, put on a diet. Not without annihilating all of their neighbors. The violence was epic, and these girls were going to launch a Suite C Spring even if it killed them all their roommates.

Suite C without dry food was not the place for our flowers, and so it was off to Suite B.

Yes, that Suite B: home to more than a few whippy women in its own right. Violet + Daisy + Natalie + Jackie = one zoo-ie brew of attitudes.

But it’s also home to an all-day smorgasbord. We’re counting on full bellies making for détente. Then again, we are humans, and humans count on a lot of silly things. We’ll just have to see how our latest crazy scheme works out.

Meantime, walk and talk with me. And stay tuned for the latest on our voyage into the unknown.

Photo credits from top: Heather, Heather, Mark, Heather, Heather, Jess, Mark. Do ya love these people or what? One of these days National Geographic is going to try to steal them. And on that day, National Geographic will face the wrath of Jackie. You don’t take away cats’ favorite photographers.

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