However, The Wife (whose birthday was on Thursday) said she wanted a new kitty for her main b-day present, so we all took the day off. I'm still "processing" this, as the time we didn't even have Dusty's "cremains" back when we went looking for a replacement.
Anyway ... here are Jackson and Lilly ...
We had started the morning going down to the ASPCA (where we'd gotten Dusty) but they weren't open for adoptions yet when we got there, and looking in the window into the "cat rooms" there weren't any cats that particularly said "take me!". Both Nikki and Dusty were calico cats, and The Wife sort of wanted to stay with that. Since it was very hot and we had an hour or so to kill, we opted to take the El north and start at PAWS. We got there just as they were opening, and went through their extensive vetting process, and then finally got a "pass" to go in to look at the cats. I've never had much exposure to kittens, but this is what everybody else was focusing in on (I would have probably picked a "senior" cat that was a beautiful calico), and of those, Lilly was the most attractive calico. However, she had a brother, and they were the last of their litter, and had been fostered together for the past few weeks. Rather than split them up, the consensus was to take both of them.
These kitties have had a bunch of names, they were "Gail" and "Justin" at the shelter, and their (evidently rather Leftist) foster family had named them after a couple of historical radicals (supposedly their 6-year-old had picked the names, so you can imagine how that kid is going to turn out!). Needless to say, between The Girls, a tumble of names were bouncing back and forth, and somehow they settled on "Lilly" (I'm guessing following up on Dusty "Rose"), and "Jackson" (notably not named for the dead President on the $20 nor the recently deceased pop star ... although, creepily, the name did get stuck on the kitty right about the time the latter died!).
So ... there are our new family members. I'm still trying to convince them that my office is NOT the most cat-friendly place in the house (Jackson likes climbing up stacks of books until they start falling over on him!), but I'm thinking I'm going to have to clear the doorway enough to get the door closed.