One of the frustrating things about getting older is the number of faculties that we lose. Take, for example, my short-term memory … wait, never mind, it’s already been taken. These days my attention span and memory retention skills are much akin to an old-fashioned Etch-a-Sketch — one shake of my head and it’s all blank. I’m pretty sure that my memory wasn’t the first thing to go, but I can’t remember what went before it.

Take this morning by way of demonstration. I live with four very large and very bossy felines. They, too, are aging. Two of them are 11 years old and the remainder are 9 years old. One is diabetic, another asthmatic, while a third has chronic constipation. Which means that twice daily, every day for the rest.of.their.lives. I have to administer medication. Which means that one of them always goes into hiding when it’s medication time!! This creates all kinds of family fun and merriment! It’s also a great workout. For my blood pressure. But, as usual, I digress. Back to this morning . . .

I have a houseguest at present and every morning I wake up earlier than my guest. Thus, I try to lure the kats out of the bedroom so that I can close the door and allow my guest to sleep in. Guess which kat always squeezes himself into as far and unreachable a place under the bed as possible? This morning, much to my delight, the kat did not, in fact, hide under the bed! He hid somewhere entirely different. Now, I am presently residing in an apartment and there are very few hiding places for an 18-lb. kat. But still, he managed to secrete himself away for the best part of 15 minutes. I checked under the bed: no kat. I checked all through the rinky-dink little apartment: no kat. I took the hoods off the litter boxes: no kat. I checked behind the sofa and re-checked under the bed to make sure he hadn’t stealthily doubled around in front of my back. No kat. At this point, the other three kats were running interference in and out of the bedroom and around the apartment. Which was very helpful I can assure you. I went back to the den for one final sweep and lo and behold THERE was the kat!! Sitting happily on the middle shelf of the 6-foot tall kat condo. Which is roughly about at my eye level. Some people might think I would have remembered to check there right away. In my defense, I . . . oh, hell with it, I have no defense.

Rather than try to bring him down from his comfie perch and risk getting some involuntary scarification, I decided to simply leave him put and surprise him by injecting the syringes of liquid meds down his throat right where he sat. Brilliant idea! Surprisingly, it worked. Meantime, back at the general floorplan, the other three kats took turns to run in and out of the bedroom while I attempted to herd them out in absolute silence so as not to awaken my guest. Ever tried herding kats? In silence? Try it sometime when you need to amp up your blood pressure.

My point is this . . . I, uh . . . I really can’t remember what I had planned to write about today . . . nor can I remember how I intended to finish this story.

Current Mood: … forgetful

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Humour, Kat Tails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.