Well, after over a year of temping at the same company, they've finally made an honest woman out of me and hired me permanently. I must say if you'd told me ten years ago that I would one day live my life running sql queries and making them pretty in Excel... well to tell the truth, I wouldn't have known what either of those things were. Remarkably, I really enjoy it, and am in the process of pursuing my MCDBA. (I realized one week into my C# class that I am definitively NOT cut out to be a developer - I liked making the pretty user interface, but had NO idea how to make the code do anything with it).
As to the cats - they have what can best be described as an armed truce, and occasionally run elaborate running battles with lots of dramatic standing on the hind legs and batting each other, only to curl up in their respective spots in the kitty tower. No pictures yet.