That Darn Cat

Sadly, people are dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in Washington.

This recalls an odd little tale I'll call "Kim's brush with death, 2004."

It was December, and I had just moved into a rental house in Livermore with my best friend at the time and her 3-year-old son. I broke my ankle moving a mattress, too, but that's neither here nor there. Just remember that I was a cripple at the time. ;)

Anyway, my roommate had been talking about wanting a cat, so I thought it would be a nice present for her and her son for Christmas. I searched high and low for this cat, because I wanted to make sure it would be somewhat compatible with my cat.

So I spent days and days scouring all over the place for the perfect cat. I finally found what I was looking for on craigslist. So I think it was Dec. 24 when I drove out to SSF to pick up the kitty, Rusty. He was pudgy and cute, pretty much what my roommate liked and wanted in a cat. I brought him home and the cats promptly hid from each other.

Well, I think it was that night or maybe 2-3 nights later that Rusty started coming out more and we discovered he really likes to meow. And by really likes to meow, I mean he would MARRY meowing if it were another cat. He liked to meow more than Britney Spears likes not wearing underwear. Y'catch my drift. So this constant dangnabbed meowing would keep us up at night.

Meanwhile, the heater was on the fritz. The freaking thing had been installed in 1978, when the house was built, and was never replaced since. The pilot light kept going out, and my friend's boyfriend would relight it to make the heater work for a little while. My friend called PG&E to come look at it, but they couldn't come right away. They told us we just had to wait a few days...or weeks, I don't remember which, either way it didn't really help us out and it was freezing because we had hardwood floors...but we had to deal with it.

So anyway, that 2-3 nights later, Rusty's constant meowing kept waking us up every couple hours. It was so frustrating because we were already cold, and I also kept waking up feeling mysteriously nauseous. We were getting mad at the cat because he wouldn't shut up, and it just wasn't a fun night all around.

Finally, the next day, PG&E agreed to come out and look at the heater, because we had a little kid in the house and told them we couldn't risk him getting sick from being cold. Well guess what? The idiot heater had apparently been spewing some form of carbon monoxide (started with an "a," I don't remember the exact name) into the house the night before. The heater was red-tagged and the landlords had to put in a new one (which took frustratingly long, but that's not really relevant to the story). What saved us was...the darn cat! Seriously, if the cat had not been waking us up every few hours, we would have stayed asleep and began to deeply breath in all the bad stuff, doing a lot of damage.

I ended up giving Rusty to my ex-boyfriend, and yes, he still meows a ton (Rusty, not the ex. The ex whines, but I don't know that it's a form of meowing. Maybe.). Weird how things like that work out, huh? So thanks, Rusty, for saving us!