Ten Glorious Minutes

Mama Cat came to visit over the holidays, and today – quite possibly because of a carbon monoxide leak – she and Mrs. Cat decided to take Kitten with them and hit the after-Christmas sales. So after making sure everyone had money, sensible shoes, store cards, cell phones, extra ammo, the portable Jaws of Life, and a Marine escort, they joined the madding crowd.

After settling Cub down in front of some flashy, cartoony thing, I attacked the house, rectifying the chaos that comes with the holidays: gift wrapping detritus, pieces of new toys that weren’t quite as sturdy as the commercials made them out to be, piles of dishes from extra-special, extra-large holiday meals, baskets of laundry because the weather keeps pendulum-ing from Winter to Spring, and the inevitable paper scraps, leaf pieces, dust bunnies and other unidentifiable oorts on the carpet that the visitors bring in.

It took a while, but that was okay. I’m not really anal about the housework, but I am clumsy, and if I can avoid breaking an ankle on one of Cub’s Matchbox cars, all the better.

So I finished up everything, and just had time to get through the opening credits on one of my new DVDs before Josie and the rest of the Pussycats returned, their hunting trophies carefully wrapped in variously-logoed plastic bags and clutched with a vehemence usually only seen in the more rabid NRA members.

Five minutes later, there were discarded coats, shoes, and socks piled on chairs and the floor, I had tomato sauce on my shirt and the kitchen floor from Cub’s kibble, camo fatigues were piled on the washing machine, having been swapped for more sensible jeans and T-shirts, and the dishes and bowls had been snatched from the rack by Mrs. Cat so she could start fixing supper. Mrs. Cat is genetically incapable of fixing any meal – from stir-fry to cereal – without using every single measuring cup we own. On the plus side, everything Mrs. Cat fixes is really fucking good, so I generally don’t mind washing up, as long as I have a few minutes alone in the caloric coma before I have to start processing higher brain functions.

All of that was really just a build up to brag that my wife fixed two homemade sweet potato pies tonight, topped with homemade whipped cream, and I am having to type by randomly whacking the keyboard with a single finger because the rest of me is totally occupied in licking the plate clean and making yummy sounds.