I have been involved since childhood, but started on my own in 2016.
The cats came first
I entered the breed through my parents. My mother, Janice, founded Temeluphil. Barbara Levitan taught her the breed and, along the way, taught ten-year-old me sportsmanship. I showed cats with my mother from 1979 to 1986.
Temeluphil's Bradykininogen was the first cat I showed myself to Grand Champion. No one else could handle him.
I returned to showing as an adult and started UltraVires on my own in 2016. Temeluphil was my mother's cattery. UltraVires is mine. The continuity is in the breed memory, the relationships, and the education that followed me back into the ring.
The training shows
I earned a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley and a J.D., cum laude, from the William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV. I clerked at the Nevada Supreme Court, tried criminal cases, wrote and argued appeals, and spent seventeen years volunteering with the Alameda County Bar Association's Lawyers in the Library program.
My professional life has involved reading records that are too long, finding the important fact inside them, separating what is known from what is merely claimed, and writing under unforgiving deadlines. It is not a surprising background for a breeder who documents the good, the bad, the uncertain, and the ridiculous.
Lots of people have beautiful cats. The trained writer is what turns the next photograph into part of an ongoing story.
More hobbies than the Dos Equis guy
I scuba dive, keep a reef tank, grow citrus, play left-handed guitar, go to the opera, lift weights, and acquire side projects at a rate the cats consider imprudent. The cattery exists alongside legal deadlines, dive gear, pumps, guitar strings, and queens who believe my calendar exists only because they have not yet corrected it.
The last thing my mother said to me, a week before she died, was that she never understood why I did not play an instrument given how important music was to me. I started guitar lessons. I was terrible. I continued.
Why make any of this public?
A beautiful photograph cannot carry the whole truth about a cat. It cannot explain how a queen mothers, why one placement works, what a loss changes, how temperament becomes visible, or what remains uncertain after everyone has done the best they can.
That requires narrative, memory, and a willingness to say what happened. It also requires Emma's towel jurisprudence, Ollie's inviolable breakfast rituals, kittens whose principal achievement is escaping containment, and a household governed largely by animals weighing less than twelve pounds.
A cat should not be reduced to its mortality. Neither should the breeder.