Competition Is Pure Catnip, Says County Owner of Nine Times Nine Lives

Joselyne Aalbu spends her working hours at Los Angeles International Airport and sometimes at borders and seaports enforcing quarantine laws for the Department of Agriculture and the Customs Service.

But after her workday as a plant protection and quarantine officer, the Huntington Beach resident has to scoot home to care for her family of nine cats, especially Katja.

The others are named Ragna, Dakota, Noric, Nikita, Justin, Mandy, Temka and Drisana. Only Katja and Ragna are pure bred; the others would fit into the household domestic cat category.

“I love them all and try to treat them equally,” said Aalbu, 36, “but Katja may be the only legitimate champion I have.”

Katja, almost 2 years old, is a Norwegian forest cat and will compete in the July 15-17 International Cat Assn. competition in Anaheim. Katja and Ragna may be the only Norwegian forest cats living in the county, according to Aalbu: “I don’t know of any others.”

She plans to mate the female pair with a male Norwegian forest cat who is entered in the cat show. It lives in New York.

Aalbu’s prize cats, originally bred from short-haired cats from England and long-haired cats from the Middle East and dating back to the Vikings, will be taking another step along the oftentimes difficult route for a cat to become a supreme grand champion, the highest feline honor.

Until a couple of years ago, Aalbu was content to be a cat owner, but she decided that Katja looked and acted like a champion, so she entered her in a cat show. “She won, and that stirred my interest to see how far she could go,” said Aalbu, who has a degree in zoology from Cal State Long Beach.

Competition has become an obsession. “It’s amazing how addictive it is,” she said about entering cat shows. “And it can be stressful preparing them for competition and watching them during the judging. But the competition is a lot of fun, and you get to be with people who like cats.”

Beside the competition and their role as pets, “they are my friends,” she said. “It’s like having a lot of children, and you have to have the time.”

She said when people ask why she has nine cats, she answers, “The same reason a woman would have nine children.”

Aalbu said she picked the Norwegian forest cat “not only because they are very pretty and very affectionate” but because her father, Olaf Aalbu, is a native of Norway and now a Huntington Beach resident.

“Sometimes he comes over to see them,” she said, “and talks to them in Norwegian.”

For some, turning 40 is a downer, but Debbie Wilkinson has a different view.

“I wouldn’t change my age now,” she said. “I’m in good shape and in a good point in my life. I’m happy to be 40.”

So Saturday starting at 5 a.m., Wilkinson--the cross-country coach at Laguna Hills High School--is going to run 40 miles from her Mission Viejo home, down the bike trails and streets to Coast Highway and then to San Onofre--and back--to celebrate each year of her life.

A bunch of friends and family, including two of her three children, will accompany Wilkinson, who has run the Boston Marathon and about 30 other marathons. Some will be running and others will be riding bicycles for part of the 40 miles.

Husband Frank Wilkinson, who turned 40 earlier this year and went skiing to celebrate, will be setting up a beach party at which she will stop on the way back to celebrate the run and her birthday, which actually fell on July 8.

The only proper way of “retiring” tattered or old American flags, according to Kenneth Huffman, district Americanism chairman for the Elks Lodge, is to burn them at an official ceremony.

He said the Garden Grove Elks Lodge is accepting flags for its third annual flag retirement rite on Aug. 12. The other 10 lodges in the Orange Coast District are also participating.

After a ceremony in the Garden Grove lodge, the flags will be taken to a mortuary, where they will be burned.

Sharleen Osborn is 5 feet, 3 inches tall and never could see over people, which is why she decided to collect giraffes. “They never get blocked out,” she said. “And besides, they’re beautiful animals.”

And since she didn’t have a place for real ones, Osborn started a giraffe collection made from glass, china and pewter. Some are pins and stuffed animals.

Now she has 55 of them, which are being displayed at the Placentia Library.

But her collection is small in contrast with the elephants collected by her daughter, Caren, 21. “She has hundreds of them,” the mother said.

On the other hand, another daughter, Shelley, 19, has managed to collect just 40 zebras. The daughters, both Cal State Fullerton students, will follow their mother by showing their collections at the library in August and September. Mother’s giraffes are on display until the end of July.