Cat-Tastrophe

My friend K., whom I work with, is a really great guy. He's 20, and cute and (unfortunately) very straight, and he was one of a few people who actually raised a hand to help me when I was homeless. He lives in a two-bedroom walk-up in Tigerland, a huge ghetto of student apartments North of LSU campus, along Nicholson Dr. Since has been living there (which is about 7 months) he has gone through a veritable menagerie of pets, including two dogs, two cats and a snake.

The story of the snake is a sad and convoluted one. K. kept his snake in a large aquarium tank with some bedding stuff and an electric rock in it, to keep him warm, since snakes are cold-blooded and require external heat in order to function. He initially told me that the two cats had killed the snake. I said I really didn't see how they could have, since they are small cats (about 6 months old) and the snake was probably more capable of killing them. Well, he said, they didn't actually kill the snake but were complicit in its demise.

It seemed that his original dog, which was large, had torn the blinds down in the living room, and that K. had kind of put them back up. Exit dog #1, since his roommate had recently acquired a Pit Bull (in an apartment?), and it was getting crowded, with two dogs, a snake and two cats. Apparently, the cats, eager to look out the window (which cats love to do), pulled the already damaged blinds down, which stuck the aquarium, breaking the top to it.

"So," I asked. "The blinds fell on the snake, killing it?"

"Not exactly," he said. "I had to put him in a smaller aquarium, until I got a new top for the big one, and I didn't put his rock in it, and he froze to death."

"So," I asked. "What you're saying is that you neglected to provide your snake with a suitable heat source and it snuffed it as a result?"

"Well, yeah," he admitted.

What is behind all this is that he had been twisting my arm for an entire week, begging me to take his two cats (a matched set, black with white markings), as he had recently acquired yet another large dog, this time a Husky, a breed well-suited by it's diminutive size for apartment life (what is it with straight boys and immense dogs in small flats?), and wanted to get rid of the cats, only K., being very soft-hearted, didn't want to just give them away to just anyone, or break them up, as they were happy together. Hence his campaign to get me to take them.

Now, remember, I have just been in my new apartment for a month, having spent six months on the streets, homeless, and I barely have furniture yet. I told him that I could not possibly take on two young, fully intact cats, as two would very quickly become six or seven, and I would be up to my ass in cats, and have to find friends to foist them off on, as well. He thought about this and told me that he would talk to his girlfriend, who knew a place that would neuter pets cheaply, and get back to me.

So, the other night, he texted me to tell me that, if I took his two cats, he would pay for their medical expenses and throw in a bag of cat food, litter, and their litter box and food bowls. I said, okay: if he would do all that, I would take them. He showed up at work the next night with cats and cat stuff, bought an huge bag of cat food and two containers of litter, and we installed both cats that evening, which was two nights ago.

So now, I have two cats, whom I have named Yin and Yang. They have settled in famously and made themselves quite to home. Today was my day off, and they woke me about 7 AM, chasing each other all around the place (even across me) for about two hours before eating breakfast and settling back to sleep on my chair. They are very affectionate and compete for lap space (even though Yang seems to prefer the back of my ugly green chair, from where he can look out of the window. They are currently asleep in the closet, on top of my storage bin in which I keep my clothes. I am not really unhappy to have cats, since I have kept them all of my life. Besides, there is alwys someone here when I come home, which is nice. Oh, well: here we go again.