Psycho Kitty

Who Me? Nah, man, I was in De-troit

when it went down, I swear!

My wife's sister has come to visit for a few days.

When the girls get together, they like to move furniture around, rearrange the implements on the kitchen countertops, paint rooms, and chat about things that aren't at the top of my hit parade. Whether I am a Summer or a Winter, what the latest fashions are? Why the wooden spoons are better next to the microwave oven instead of the stove? It makes them happy, and who am I to deny them that? I just live here, it's not my house. All the married men I know have learned this lesson. Drives the dogs crazy, but that's their lookout.

We installed my sister-in-law in the sewing room, formerly my son's bedroom, and since we gave the futon to my daughter, we have been using a queen-sized air bed for company.

At least we had been using it. Until we got a cat.

A cat, who thinks that sneaking in when nobody is looking and, unbeknownst to all, sliding his paw underneath the mattress to claw the sucker is great fun.

First night my sister-in-law went to bed, only to wake up on the floor ...

So I upended the mattress and found a couple of tiny punctures. Huh. Must have been a pin on the floor or some such. Ran the vacuum cleaner, checked the carpet, it's okay. So I got out the handy patch kit, fixed the holes, pumped the thing back up. We're good.

I went off to babysit for Nate, the youngest grandson, while the girls went out to shop at the paint store and whatnot. (I have to speak to this: When I was a kid, paint colors were, you know, red, blue, green, brown. Maybe a tan or whatnot. You could modify these with "dark" or "light" or even "fire engine," and nobody had any problem visualizing them. Now, paint comes in "Evening Summer Mist," "Afternoon Tuscany," or, as I discovered only today, "Ancient Relic," which is what color my kitchen cabinets are. No shit. Anybody have a clue what that hue might be? Ancient Relic? Whatever you think, you're wrong.)

I came home a couple hours later, and alas, the air bed again sagged low.

The cat was lying in the middle of the bed mostly-deflated bed.

I still didn't associate the two as to cause-and-effect. Must have, I thought, missed one of the little holes. So I upended the bed, pumped it up again -- and, oh, my, there were four more holes, right next to the ones I patched and they weren't there before I left. More, they were in a -- no two ways about it -- cat-claw-shaped pattern.

Son-of-a-bitch. I patched those, threw the cat out of the room, shut the door.

But somehow, after the girls got home, the door remained ajar long enough to allow the little bastard to sneak in yet again, and I was by then out of repair patches.

Ballou, kitty-moo, has become a bed killer.

So now there is a foam pad where the air bed was.

Never a dull moment.