| The term "cat burglar" has taken on a whole new meaning at the home of Joy and Glenna Sanders in Rosenberg.
Merry Christy, a black, short-haired cat with gigantic yellow eyes, has her own kitty in the Sanders' kitchen, thanks to a nasty habit of stealing coins off the table.
The Merry Miser has amassed quite a fortune - $20.27 at last count - and the pot is always growing.
With money mysteriously disappearing right and left in the house, Joy decided to keep an eye on Merry one day, and to her surprise, the funny feline "very cunningly" pushed under the 6-foot by 8-foot rug some coins that had fallen off the microwave.
A quick check under the rug revealed Merry to be quite the pirate, small piles of coins lined up all along the edge.
"From time to time, she picks up the corner of the rug and appears to be counting her stash," Joy said with a laugh.
Any time there are coins on the kitchen table, Merry sneaks her way onto a chair and "accidentally" knocks them onto the floor. Then, once she makes sure no one's watching, she lifts the corner of the rug with her paw and slides her latest booty underneath.
Her buried treasure runs along the entire 8-foot side of the rug, and she appears to have graduated to greenbacks as well.
"One day, she started to go after a dollar bill and I said, 'No you don't,'" said Joy. "She's a character."
In addition to her penchant for "gold," this coin-collecting cat likes to style Glenna's hair, taking great care to arrange it just so.
She also has unusual taste in food, with a hankering for tortillas, enchiladas, peanut butter and cake.
"Every time we're eating something, she wants to see what it is," Joy said.
"This morning, I was eating a Pop Tart and she wanted a bite of it," Glenna added.
Merry's just a little spoiled, sleeping in a doll bed complete with sheets, and turning Glenna's bathroom into what the Sanders call "the cattery."
"She wants her breakfast at 8 o'clock every morning and she wants to go to bed at 9 o'clock every night," Glenna said.
And Merry always gets what she wants. She lays on her back with all four feet in the air when she wants something, and Glenna is quick to oblige.
"One day, we had a laundry basket out here and Merry Christy was sitting in it so pretty," Joy recalled. "We were pushing her back and forth across the living room floor for about 10 minutes, and when we stopped, she got out and put her little head against it and pushed it all the way across the floor. When she reached the other side of the room, she got on the other side and out her head down again and pushed it right back. I can't believe how she thinks up things to do."
Merry came to the Sanders home quite by accident when they went to a local store a couple of weeks before Christmas, 2004.
"There was a sign in the window that said, 'Kitty needs good home,'" Joy remembered. "Glenna says it was divine appointment. We had lost our cat of 15 years, and we decided we didn't want any more cats - it hurt too bad to lose them. But she looked at us with those big, golden eyes and we fell in love. Glenna said, 'This is the greatest Merry Christmas present I could have,' so she named her Merry Christy. She's really Glenna's cat - there's no two ways about it."
In addition to all her other strange habits, Merry sleeps with her tongue out and shares her food and water with her toy mice, which she places in her bowls so they can eat. She also grabs Glenna's arms if she gets too close to the infamous buried treasure.
"She is just he funniest little thing," Joy said. "She definitely keeps us entertained"
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