Both Vince and I woke up
a little bleary-eyed this morning. Not because we had a wild night out on the
town or anything, although we did stay up rather late watching an episode of
“Bloodline” on Netflix. (Good series, by the way!)
No, the real reason for
our lack of energy this morning was due to our killer kitty, Twinks, who has
developed a penchant for “killing” ballpoint pens. All manner of writing implements, really.
This is good practice in the event there is ever a ballpoint pen uprising in
our household, but I think the possibility is somewhat remote.
You’d think our killer
kitty would prefer being outside stalking creatures smaller than she, say of
the chipmunk or squirrel variety, but I’m not so sure that’s true.
Why? Because whenever there is a bug or ant in our
house that needs to be “handled,” she merely looks at it with a sniff of
disinterest and goes on with the more important tasks of her day. Namely,
grooming, napping or yakking up a hairball.
But just wait until we finish
our evening pre-bed ritual and finally click off the light, give us about a
half hour to j-u-s-t settle into that drifting off to sleep deliciousness, and
Twinks will start up with a meowing so insistent, it’s like Lassie barking to
tell us Timmy’s in trouble and may have fallen into the well.
Egad.
I, personally, can
simply roll over onto my “good ear,” and ignore her, but to Vince, the sound is
like fingernails on a chalkboard. And this is precisely the time when he
decides our cats belong solely to me. Vince refuses to (a) change cat litter,
(b) clean up kitty barf, and (c) get out of bed to investigate the latest
Twinks “kill.” (Please note that if ever
a Twinks kill involves anything in the rodent category, he WILL be the one to
handle that little chore!)
She only stops meowing
when I finally go downstairs to investigate and discover her latest, er, victim.
Last night it was an Ultra Fine Point Sharpie. Twinks was evidently proud of having bagged
the Sharpie since she even put her paw on top of it as if to stop me from
picking it up.
My habit has been to
bring the fallen pen upstairs and place it on top of my dresser, which is the one
piece of furniture I haven’t seen Twinks attempt to climb. The pile of pens got
to be so mountainous, though, I finally put a pen cup on there. But even that
has become rather full lately.
This nightly caterwauling
has gotten so bad, I’ve recently added a task to my evening routine, which is
to walk around the house searching for stray pens that we’ve taken out but have
forgotten to put back in their proper drawers. And I make sure to close the
drawers firmly once I put away the pens because I wouldn’t put it past little
Miss Twinks to use that slight opening to paw open the drawer so she can go on
a pen-killing spree.
Yet despite my attempts
at removing all writing implements from kitty access, she somehow manages to
find a new one every night.
Smart cat, dumb human?
Perhaps. But I’m hoping I’ve managed to crack the case.
This morning I was
downstairs cleaning out the wastebaskets and, out of the corner of my eye, I watched
her leap from the chair to the desk to the table where I have a large
collection of pens that I thought were surely out of her reach. Guess not, since she pulled one out of the
container with her mouth and dropped it on the floor.
Aha! I thought. Her diabolical plan is to let it lie there all day and ignore it – until
late this evening after we’ve gone to bed when she will carry it to the stairs
and start her meowing.
So later today when she
was catnapping (which is cat speak for “basically all day long”) I snuck downstairs
and picked up tonight’s “victim” and put it back in the box. And then put the
box in the closet. And firmly shut the door.
So we’re keeping our
fingers crossed for a full night of restful sleep without a Twinks Pen Killing
Incident.
But in the event she has another stash somewhere, we're planning to wear ear plugs tonight. Just in case.
