The Cats: Secret Geniuses

Okay, so you know how ever since we got the cats, I've kind of thought they were, shall we say, a little cerebrally singular? I mean, Flyboy headbutts people nonstop, Cady was afraid of everything IN THE WORLD until we bought a new bed at which point she grew a personality overnight, Flyboy has been seen running headfirst into solid objects, Cady ate yarn, like, need we continue?


Well, turns out maybe I need to take back all the times I told them they were retarded.

A while back I was at the Pet Barn, which is a great local pet store here in Holden, and I picked up this toy as an afterthought. It's not anything revolutionary...it's a bunch of feathers, firmly attached to a little plastic plug which in turn connects to a cord of that plastic lanyard stuff my Mom never let me call "gimp" which of course is what every other child in the world called it, thus limiting my communicative abilities...ANYWAY, the whole thing is mounted on a nice, whippy kind of plastic rod that has little beads in it which make a kitty-friendly noise...kind of like a low-rent rainstick. In any case, Cady, in particular, FREAKING LOVES this thing. We have to hide it in the vaccuum cleaner closet when it's not in action, and Cady sits outside the door and verbally assaults you if you so much as poke your head around the hallway, whinging and crying for you to take out the toy, with her eyeballs dilated to within an inch of their lives and generally acting insane.


When her time isn't taken up by this valuable pursuit, she and Flyboy team up to remove the access panel from the jacuzzi tub. They primarily like to do this at two or three in the morning. The panel is held on by velcro, so it's not necessarily hard to get off, but it is designed to be unobtrusive, so it's surprising that they even figured out that it came off. Here's kind of what it looks like, but the panel's on the other side on ours.

All right, so Cady's in the hallway freaking out, the Goober is in the bathroom removing the access panel...did I happen to mention that a.) the only way to stop them from removing the panel is to lock them out of the bathroom and b.) the baseboard in the bathroom isn't working, so when you lock them out, it gets to about negative three degrees just in time for your morning pee? Because a.) it is, and b.) it isn't. Now, recently, we had some issues with the hot water...we like our showers so hot the skin starts blistering, but the hot water was only reaching "tea left out for about 10 minutes," so we had to take off the access panel for the pipes. I drew a TOTALLY FABULOUS picture here for you.


So one morning I wake up and go in for said morning pee to the soothing sounds of stampeding cat feet of guilt (not unusual for the household), and I see feathers strewn around and the jacuzzi access panel is off, again. I blink a couple times, and look a little closer.


The toy is trailing out of the access panel.


At some point, when Speed and I were dreaming sweet dreams of a life without obnoxious and possibly retarded cats, those little bastards took the access panel off the jacuzzi, then CLIMBED INTO the tub, snuck around amongst the pipes and wires under the tub shell, crawled THROUGH the access panel for the pipes, grabbed the toy, and dragged it back THROUGH the tub and out into the bathroom.


Do you see? Secret geniuses?