If you are destined to have cats, sometimes you get to choose which cat you'll have, and sometimes the world chooses one for you. My friend did not know she was supposed to have a cat until the world gave her one. It seems a feral cat had been moving her litter to a new location and as she was carrying one of them along the top of their fence, she accidently dropped it and it fell down behind an oil drum that had been pushed into a corner of the fence. The space where it fell was large enough for a kitten to fall through but too small for the family's pet Labrador to get into; Unfortunately, it was also too small for the mother to get into either. My friend's daughters saw the dog barking frantically at the oil drum and when they went out to investigate, they found the kitten, rescued it from its predicament, and adopted it. It was a female kitten and the girls christened her "Angel" because "she fell from above." There were four kittens in Angel's first litter. The first two kittens, a male and and female, were born on 03/21/1997; the second two, both females, were born almost 24 hours later.
My friend was quite willing to let me take half of Angel's litter off her hands at one fell swoop. I definitely wanted the male, and the female I chose was the eldest one, the one who had been born at the same time as the little male. I based my choice on the rationale that since they were born together, they should stay together. All four kittens were black and grey mackerel tabbies like their mother, and the only way I could tell my two apart without getting rudely personal was that the little female had three white toes on her left forepaw. I named the male Jett and the female Shadow. Fortunately, as the kitties grew older, it became much easier to tell them apart.
The one I named Jett (at left and below right) proved to be high strung and skittish. He had a "hair trigger," and between one instant and the next, he could kick in his afterburner and vanish in a puff of cat hair. He was a high flyer and thought nothing of scaling my china cabinet, which is 7 feet tall, and would leap from the bathroom counter to the top of the bathroom door and perch there. He was a long, tall boy, on the large end of the size spectrum, and his normal, healthy weight was around 15 lbs.One day, I had gone to a colleague's house to talk to her about the national service she was working for, with the idea of helping her do some work for them on a part time basis. On my way over, I picked up a pair of Josie's burritos for our lunch. As she was eating hers, a red bean (the kind Mexican refried beans are made from) fell out of it onto the floor. Before it had bounced once, one of her cats caught it and snarfed it. Turned out her cats loved red beans. The next time I had refried beans, I offered my two kitties a little dollop. Sure enough, once they'd gotten a good sniff of it, down the hatch it went. From then on, I couldn't open a can of refried beans or bean dip without them begging for their "share." Jett also had a "sweet tooth" for margerine.
The apartment had a "shotgun" style layout, with a hall that started just to the left of the front door and went past a closet, the bathroom and the first bedroom, and dead-ended about 20 feet later at the back bedroom door. My dad is not a cat lover, and is firmly convinced that every loose cat hair in the place immedately seeks him out and gets on him the minute he walks in the front door of my abode. I ended up putting a bifold door at the front end of the hall to keep the kitties out of the living/dining room area. That way, when I had company, I wouldn't worry about the kitties slipping out the open front door, and when my folks came over, my dad would not have to deal with the kitties. It got to the point that whenever the doorbell rang, the kitties would go hide in the bedroom and I could just shut the bifold door behind them. However, on one occasion, I had a cable guy come to put a second cable outlet in my bedroom. He was in and out several times and once he left, I couldn't find Sister. I searched the apartment from top to bottom, looking everywhere for her. I called and called for her. She was completely declawed, she had never been out of the apartment except in a carrier, and she was very distrustful of
The back bedroom was my "office." When I wasn't working, that door stayed shut. But on the days when I worked, they would go back to the office with me and keep me company. The apartments had been built in the 1960s, and the electrical outlets were the original ones. There was one outlet where I had plugged in the UPS device I plugged my computer equipment into. One day, I noticed Sister sniffing around the faceplate of that outlet. Something about it had attracted and held her attention. This went on for several days. Finally, I got down and smelled it for myself, and caught the distinctive odor of ozone. Not the sort of smell one likes to have coming from an electrical outlet! I mentioned it to my landlord's daughter-in-law, who was managing the apartments for him, and she had an electrician come out to check the outlet. Turned out the source of the ozone was a pair of bare wires inside the outlet that were arcing! The electrician said it was a good thing I noticed the ozone smell and recognized it for the danger signal it was. Those arcing wires could very easily have started a fire. Now, my mother's sense of smell is quite acute, -- she's got a nose like a beagle -- but my sense of smell is not very good at all. I had to practically stick my nose in the outlet in order to smell the ozone. I'd have never been aware of it if Sister hadn't noticed it first and shown such a persistent interest in it.
I was quite happy with the two kitties I had. I had neither plans nor desire to get any more and for a little over two years, it was just the two kitties and me. I might also note that instead of requiring a pet deposit, my landlord simply raised the rent $20 a month per pet, and two was all I could afford.

