Cats cruising for a fatal beating

I think my cats are conspiring against me.

Saturday morning my husband BikerDude had to go to work (as usual) and I had a choir practice at the church at 8:30. After choir I went to the grocery store. When I got home, it was around 1:00. It was pouring down rain and I was tired and hungry and ready to make myself some lunch and put my feet up for awhile. Hah!

The first thing I discovered upon opening the door was my floor lamp (note the past tense) laying in pieces on the floor. With the bulb still burning. Ok, we have five cats, three of whom are Bengals. Accidents happen. I spent a few minutes turning off the lamp and determining whether or not it could be salvaged (maybe), then went to finish unloading the car. When I was carrying in my last load, including two large bags of kitty litter, our year old former-feral tuxedo kitty darted out the door and danced down the sidewalk. I uttered a few choice words that would probably have gotten me kicked out of choir practice, grabbed a jar of treats and headed out in pursuit. Normally I’d just let her have her fun and find her way home, but Tweak’s update shots are overdue, so I didn’t want to risk her running loose with the neighborhood fauna.

She proceeded to lead me on a merry chase for about 10-15 minutes, even going so far as to climb a tree at one point, which was impressive when you consider that she has approximately the dimensions of fur-covered bowling ball. Once she got about 7 or 8 feet off the ground, she seemed to realize that this wasn’t a great idea, and that it had been a lot easier when she was, oh, half her current weight, so she gingerly eased down the tree. She kept galloping ahead of me, tail straight up in the air, ignoring the treats and clearly enjoying herself (did I mention that it was raining??) until I finally got her cornered in a neighbors back yard four houses down and scooped her up. She proceeded to growl and snarl and generally use all matter of foul language at me as I carried her back home (although she wisely didn’t try to bite or scratch me).

Once we got back inside and I had dumped her in the living room, she immediately began circling me and begging for the treats that she was so totally ignoring while we were outside, even when I was pinging them off of her head. I don’t think so, you little doink.

I went to the kitchen to begin to put the groceries away and discovered that I had been had. Apparently, Tweak was in cahoots with Kaos, one of my Bengal boys/circus monkeys, and she had been the diversionary tactic. Kaos had fished into one of the grocery bags and dragged out the package of petite boneless sirloin steaks. He had ripped open the Styrofoam and plastic wrap and was happily chewing away on one end of one of the steaks that he had pulled out through a hole in the plastic.

I relieved him of his raw meat treat, cut the chewed end off and put the rest in the freezer.

Some time later, I went downstairs to do laundry and clean the cat boxes. I was introducing a new type of litter-- silica based. I forgot, in the heat of the moment, I suppose, Kaos’s attraction to bags and anything in a sealed container. When I came back downstairs after taking the dirty litter out to the trash can, I found that he had ripped open one of the bags of silica litter and was proceeding to make Navajo sand paintings on the laundry room floor.

Showing total disregard for his religious ceremony, I swept up the mess and sealed the rest of the litter in a Rubbermaid container. When I got upstairs, Tweak and Kaos were both curled up on the couch, looking totally innocent (the other three had wisely kept their distance during all of this). I informed both of them that while they were, indeed, beautiful cats, they would be just as beautiful stuffed and mounted on the mantle piece.