A Special Visitor

After a delightful evening with new friends over dinner, we cleaned the house and packed our bags to leave the next day for our 4th of July holiday "up north!" Fast asleep, I am suddenly awakened by a deep moaning sound, like a cat in heat.

Chris, my husband who is blind as a bat without his glasses, got up to see what was going on. Our faithful dog, Rocco, followed behind dutifully.

"What is it?" I shouted from the comfort of my bed

"It's Jordi" - our black cat of 12 years. Rocco (a Bischon who thinks he's a Great Dane) started barking like mad as Chris made his way back to bed. I said "Gee, Jordi must be really sick to sound so awful!"

Rocco kept barking, and suddenly a torpedo passed by my side of the bed, into the office adjacent to our bedroom. Up on the bookshelf flew the cat, down came all my frames! What a racket!

Suddenly, this cat is whizzing back to the other side of the bed, literally up the wall and across our heads, over my nightstand, knocking everything down in its wake.

Chris bolted from bed and ran to the kitchen where the cat has now made it's way to a corner. Rocco is continuing to bark. Then, all of the sudden I hear a loud CRRRAAASSSHHHHH, and then another, and another. The next thing I heard was my husband swearing. "Shit!" "Dammit!" and a few other choice ones I shant put in print.

I knew then that it was serious. You see, Chris rarely swears. He's a firm believer that if you want your swearing to mean something, reserve it for those times when it's called for. This was one of those times!

I jumped out of bed and came out to the kitchen. I saw more glass breaking and flying from the pantry out into the kitchen. That's when I realized...this was not our cat! It was a she-devil of a stray who had snuck into the house. And, of course, this stray had to find the one place where the entire top shelf housed the one thing you put up high so it will be safe. Glass. Glass vases, glass platters, glass bowls. If it was fragile, it was up there.

The crashing went on for about 10 minutes. This was one scared cat (or should I say scaredy cat?). Chris tried and tried to get the animal out of there, rescuing a bowl here and there if he could.

Finally, the cat came down and scurried out through the door we had opened for him. Here is what he left behind:

You're first question is - how did the cat get into the house? That's Kaitlyn's doing. She went to sleep over at a friends accross the street, but she figured she may not want to stay as has happened in the past. Since our door chimes when you open it and she wouldn't want to wake us if she came home in the middle of the night, she left her ground level window open to her bedroom, sans screen.

We stayed up until past midnight cleaning up the glass fragments and shards from the floor. We also discovered that the cat was so scared it peed frequently while hurling glass vases at my husband. What a horrible smelly mess.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that our house is on the market and our realtor was planning an open house while we were up north? Gotta love the fortuitous timing, huh?

So, how was your Fourth of July???