I'll copy and paste here my response on another similar poll, for the "newbies" :
When I was growing up, my mom and dad got our kitties from people who were moving and couldn't take them with, except for one, Smokey, who we purchased at a farm stand where we stopped to buy some sweet corn. Then when I got married and got a house of my own, fate decided that before we had even moved in to the house, I would get a kitty. She was found in back of the store where I worked, down inside a stack of old car tires. One of the guys came in with the poor little baby and said to me, "you were saying you wanted to get a cat when you bought a house, right? Well, here you go!". She was a lovely tortoiseshell, very tiny and barely weaned, and I named her Leticia Ratt (which was one of the funny names my mom used to call her cat). I ran home from work on my lunch hour with this little baby in a cardboard box and sprung it on my mother-in-law, who was helping paint the inside of the house. The kitty stayed in the empty house for a week, while we were painting and cleaning, until we moved in with her, since our apartment didn't allow cats. (Our apartment was directly across the street from the house, so it was easy to check up on her.) I had her for fifteen years when she died in 2000. My father-in-law passed away in 1998, and my mother-in-law decided to get a cat to keep her company since they are a little bit lower maintenance than dogs. She rescued Dudley, the lovely mackerel tabby (the kitty in my sig), from a shelter, and he was a great companion to her until she passed away in 2000. (Dudley came to us only a month after we lost Leticia.) My husband is an only child, so we "inherited" Dudley. He has been a wonderful gift from a very sad situation.