This isn't my story, it's Jeff's. But Jeff doesn't really have a webpage anymore, so he said I could tell it.

At New Year's, Jeff acquired a seven-month-old kitten from Colleen. He named the kitten Trouble - which was either prophetic or else it gave the little thing a lot of ideas - but in any case, Trouble was a relatively normal active kitten.

Shortly after he got the kitten, he took him to a veterinarian, for routine shots and to get him neutered. However, the vet told Jeff that Trouble's testicles hadn't dropped yet, so he couldn't be neutered. The vet didn't seem terribly concerned, and suggested that Jeff bring the kitten back in a few months.

So Jeff waited. Puttered around, took care of his life, finished his doctoral thesis... You know, little things like that.

This morning, he took Trouble to the vet. Dropped him off for the Snipping and promised to pick him up after work.

Jeff was in the middle of instructing some other students in the use of Terribly Expensive Laboratory Equipment when one of the summer school students came in with a phone message: "The vet called. There's an emergency with your cat. They said to call back immediately."

Jeff, panicking somewhat, called the vet, wondering what the problem could possibly be. An allergy to the anasthaesia? Some terrible internal disease? An intern surgeon who'd cut the wrong thing?

None of the above. When the vet got on the phone, he explained that they'd put Trouble under and gone to remove his Bits... only to discover that Trouble doesn't have any Bits. To use the analogy from the link in my previous post: No Sam, no Frodo, and no Peter. None of it.

Trouble's a girl.

(But then... we already knew that, didn't we?)