A Cat's Tale

(By guest author and friend, Alyson S.)

The Characters:

Fiona

An outdoor farm cat.  Fearless slayer of birds, rabbits, and anything else that dares to encroach on her turf.  Mostly lives outside, comes inside when it's REALLY COLD and when she deigns to allow us to feed her.  I started buying meow mix at sam's club awhile ago and she LOVES IT.  

Sonic

An aging border collie that is a ball of love.  He is total goodness and has determined that his retirement job is to take care of me by following me around.  This role in this story is mostly bystander, but let it be known that HE ALSO loves meow mix.  Sonic and Fiona run a scam on me REGULARLY when there is meow mix in the house.  Fiona meows to come in the door.  I let her in.  She goes to her bowl, meows, I scoop in some food.  Fiona eats ONE BITE and decides to go back outside.  Sonic gets up and eats the rest of the cat food.  10 minutes later...Fiona meows at the door to come in and wants to be fed again.  I now put her bowl on top of the freezer (who is the next character in this tale.)

The Chest Freezer

In the kitchen is a small chest freezer.  I have broken all kitchen rules of a child of my mother (Maggie) and feed the cat on occasion on top of the freezer.  It's the easiest solution and needs must when the devil drives.  The freezer is pulled out from the wall slightly because there is a HEAT REGISTER behind it.  There is also a glue trap for mice from last fall when war against the migrating herds of mice was at it's height.  NB (this means nota bene in latin, or note well.  Just making sure I don't lose anyone due to an obscure reference)...the HEAT REGISTER does not have a cover.

Mark

Mark the tired painter/farmer goes to bed at 7:30ish on a regular basis.  He paints and then comes home and plants these days.  Just for visual purposes...he was asleep with red plaid boxers and a t-shirt.  He is not at his best when he is awakened and has no idea what is going on

Alyson

The Domino's Pizza person who came home and...surprise...got on the phone with the supervisor, Heather, and was outside on the porch around 10pm with her AirPods in.

Alyson had been to Quincy for the first time in like 2 months so she stopped at Sam's Club on Wednesday night.  Brought home MEOW MIX.  We had been out for a couple of weeks and the animals had been suffering through Purina cat chow from the feed store...I think they may have lost weight in protest.

Mark carried the bag in and set it on the floor against the chest freezer in the kitchen.  I usually take the cat food and put it in this plastic pet food container we have but I hadn't done it yet.  Fiona came in the house, smelled the bag, and began caressing the exterior of the bag.  I was not particularly worried as no one is starving to death but Mark decided that he would open the bag and give Fiona a handful to make her (and Sonic, because he was lurking) happy.  Everyone had a taste and life was good.  The bag was picked up off the floor and put on top of the chest freezer awaiting the pet food container.

Fast forward to Thursday night.  Alyson comes home.  It's dark.  Mark is in bed sleeping.  He gets up for a minute, we talk, I say I'm going to do some cleaning/cooking.  Mark goes back to to sleep, Alyson goes in the kitchen.  The phone rings, it's Heather, so I go outside on the porch so I don't talk loudly (like that ever happens) and wake Mark up.

It's maybe 10 pm.

The porch door slams open...Mark took the closer off when we were carrying stuff in and out and we haven't put it back on so it really rips...and Mark is yelling about WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

Alyson has her AirPods in and is looking at him likes he's crazy and saying what?

Mark runs back in the house and Alyson is still going WTH is going on and talking to Heather.

Alyson continues talking to Heather for a minute and says "maybe I should go inside and see what's going on."  She opens the door and Mark is running around the living room and then up the stairs and Fiona is WAILING.  Lots of scuffling and swearing is heard from upstairs.  

Alyson asks "hey, what's going on?"  In her mind all she can think is maybe she woke Mark up from a bad dream?  Maybe?

Mark comes back downstairs.  "Did you not hear what was going on?"

"Umm, no.  I had my earphones in and I was talking to Heather."

It wasn't the best answer.

Fiona had jumped up on top of the chest freezer and CLIMBED INSIDE THE BAG to help herself to some meow mix.  Somehow she managed to TIP THE ENTIRE 25 lb bag over in to the heat register with herself inside of it.  After evidently what was a very loud tussle she managed to climb her way out of the heat register with 15 pounds of meow mix on top of her and escape in to the glue trap.

And then proceeded to perform acrobatics all over the downstairs trying to escape from the sticky embrace.  

Mark awoke at some point and started chasing Fiona around the house.

After cornering her upstairs and having a clawful encounter being her savior (he has battle wounds on his chest) he got the glue trap off.  

I asked what happened.  

I'm not always that smart.

I thought it was the funniest thing in a LONG TIME...in a Jerry Springer sort of fashion...you can't make this stuff up.

Mark didn't think it was quite as funny that I was oblivious and on the phone.

The worst part...Its getting cold again with this storm thing going on and THE WHOLE HOUSE SMELLED LIKE BAKED MEOW MIX.