A few weeks before my fiftieth birthday, mu husband asked what I wanted and I jokingly reminded him that he had promised years ago that if I reached 50 without a tortoiseshell cat, he'd get me one. We had a good laugh but then, just before my birthday, we were awakened in the middle of the night by the most awful, rusty-hinged cat screams we'd ever heard. Thinking there was an injured cat outside, my husband rushed to the back porch to be confronted by a tiny, filthy tortoiseshell kitten who wanted INNNNNNNNNN!

He scooped her up and we examined her, finding no injuries. We judged her to be about four months but discovered to our horror, during a vet visit, that she was an extremely emaciated six month-old, so badly starved that her growth had been stunted.
We called her OOT (aka Aine One Orange Toe), and once she was fed and up to strength, she completely revolutionized our vocabulary by introducing us to the terms, OOTtitude, OOTzilla, and OOTinator, all words that define a unique, cranky, loving cat with a penchant for theft, bossiness and a purr that makes it possible to forgive her all.