Oh, Cats...

Many of you know that we have two cats. We love these kitties; they are a part of our family. And just like any other member of the family, they have their own personalities and quirks. Nutmeg, our younger cat, has an affinity for yarn. I know, most cats do, but I don't know if many of them carry it as far as Nutmeg does. I mean, literally, carry it. Far.

This is Nutmeg. Notice the white yarn next to her. I tried to catch her with it in her mouth, but I wasn't quick enough. She will carry around balls and skeins of yarn, meowing a funny "I've got one" meow. We all know when she's "got one". The problem isn't that she carries them around, its that somehow, she ends up unraveling it throughout the house.



It went around the couch,

Down the upstairs hall,



down the stairs,

down the downstairs hall,

the LONG downstairs hall,

into the spare room,

and you can see that it origionated from the closet in the spare room.

She does this alot. I mean, I hate yarn, she does it that much. I try to tell the girls to put the yarn away and CLOSE the closet door, but they consitently forget to do so, and the yarn calls Nutmegs name. She strings it all over the house. She did it in our old house too. Once, when it was one the market, we left for a showing. The house was spotless, all ready to show. When we came back, there was yarn all OVER the house. It was crisscrossed in so many places and in so many rooms, it looked like we were characters in a Bond movie and had a priceless painting to protect with laser lights. I was mortified. Did it look like that when the people came to look? What must they have thought? That we were some crazy jokesters that didn't really want to sell our house? That it was some misguided attempt to partition some areas off so they couldn't go there? I had a visual of those poor people lifting legs and ducking heads to meander through our yarn carnival. Oh well. They probably had a good laugh.

Our cats have a history with string of any kind, come to think of it. When my old cat, Blackie, was alive, he liked to eat curling ribbon. Ok, no big deal, except he always puked it up, so I was cleaning up piles of puke that looked like they had been wrapped up nice for me. On the off chance that he didn't puke them up, you guessed it, it came out the other side. Fortuneatly, he was a good cat and I didn't see that side of it much. Except for one very memorable time. I remember watching Blackie walk past me, with something interesting trailing behind him. He had passed the string, and it was attached to a piece of poo. The piece of poo was at the end, and the other end of the ribbon was still where the sun don't shine, people. There was about three feet of ribbon in between. I grabbed a paper towel, grabbed hold of the poo, and held still while he walked away. Another two feet came out, and he was very embarrased about it. You should have seen his face!

Nutmeg will eat string as well, although she seems to prefer the minty taste of dental floss. Payden had been playing with hers, and unwound the whole spool. She threw it in the garbage in the bathroom, and there Nutmeg found it. Michaela and I were upstairs, when Nutmeg came running up the stairs, with Poof chasing her. The reason Poof was chasing her was because Nutmeg was trailing about 9 feet of dental floss. It was coming out of her mouth! She had started chewing it down without realizing how long it was. Since they don't have thumbs, there wasn't anything she could do but keep going. To relieve her of her misery, I started pulling it out of her mouth. Keep in mind, the length I pulled out of her was in her stomach. GROSS! It just kept coming and coming. I never knew there was that much floss in one container. I pulled out another 10 feet of slimy floss before Nutmeg was completely purged. Michaela was laughing so hard she was on the floor. I am sure that is something we will never forget.

Cats are sweet and loveable and very good entertainment.