40 Pounds of Ineptitude

I don’t want to say that my 40 pounds of housecat are inept…well…actually I do.

I have written previously about those times when I discovered mice in my house and then tried to be team leader and fetch my pair of 20-pounders onto the rodents.

Always to no avail.

In the end, my cats invariably wound up running off to evade me as I battled the mice with a broom or pots and pans.

Once, I was fully naked, scampering around the living room in the middle of the night, trying to capture a mouse in a spaghetti pot.  On that occasion, my 40 pounds of housecat wasted little time in scuttling off to hide in a distant bedroom.

It gets worse.

About my cats, I mean.

Carmel is an incompetent jumper.  Almost weekly he over-shoots when attempting to jump onto my office workstation to pester me.   He ends up sliding off the far side amid a shower of my papers and pens.  Sometimes, he misses the mark entirely and finds himself all twisted up on the floor.

But the weirdest thing is Splash and his shedding.  He doesn’t shed well.  His hair comes off in baby-bunny-sized clumps.  I have been startled on occasion to walk into a room and find a half dozen of these “sheds” seemingly sleeping on the carpet.

These things immediately catch your eye.

Sometimes the sheds come alive and scoot across the floor, propelled by shifting air.  Yesterday, I captured one of these roving hairballs in my living room.  Posted is a smarter-than-me-phone photograph of the creature.

 --Mitchell Hegman