Earning their keep

For all intents and purposes the cats are entirely superfluous beings.  They make no contribution to our household at all, and consume quite a bit in food and litter.  And we shall not mention their diabolical need to sweat us out whilst lounging on our prone bodies.

But every once in a while they do something that causes such hilarity that it almost makes up for their lives of infinite slack.

I went grocery shopping last week.  And in typical post-trip form, I forgot my cloth bags, so I brought home the plastic store-bags.  I had put the groceries away but the bags I just tossed in the floor of our bedroom (I use them for cleaning out the litterbox, and so I store them in our bathroom where the litterbox is kept).  I didn't feel a need to hurry to put them away...sooner or later they'd make it into the bathroom.

But the cats?  They are curious, and the whole time I was trying to nap they were sniffing around and poking in and out of those bags.  I didn't think much of it.  I bought a lot of vegetables and vegetable smell like dirt and the cats, they love dirt.  So I went about the rest of my day.

I had made the Boy dinner and was sitting in the kitchen with him while he ate...attempting to persuade my child to eat the delicious vegetables while he was attempting to convince me that he could live by banana bread alone.  When I hear this terrible clawing and see Agnes Cat tearing into the dining room at break-neck speed.  She avoids hitting the wall, turns and runs as fast as she can into the sunroom, where she avoids running into another wall and turns and runs as fast as she can back into our bedroom and under the bed!

How do I know this?  Because on top of Agnes Cat was a plastic grocery store bag.  She had been snooping around and caught her head in the handles and couldn't get it off and in attempting to free herself had scared herself witless by the NOISE of the plastic bag.

Needless to say that all of this rucus scared the living daylights out of Leike Cat as well, so now I have two freaked out and totally neurotic cats on my hands.  What does one do?  What does one do when one had two totally freaked out cats on one's hands whilst feeding one's child dinner?

I laughed.  (You saw that one coming, right?)  I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks.  I laughed until I thought bladder failure was imminent.  I laughed until the Boy looked at me like I'd lost what little was left of my mind.  I laughed until I couldn't breathe and my cheeks hurt.

And then I went and reached under the bed and freed Agnes cat.  Because sometimes she does something that is so bizarre, so unexpected and so hilarious that it makes up for all the other times when she mauls me like I'm made out of bread dough.


But then...maybe this was something you had to see to fully appreciate.