The other day, I was sitting in the kitchen, minding my own business, reading the newspaper. Troi, the fat cat, was staring at me. She stares at me regularly within two hours of her feeding times. Sometimes she has a tiny kitty hunger pang and can’t contain herself any more, so she whines. These cries of starvation are not met with sympathy or enthusiasm from me.
In any case, I was reading and Troi was staring and starving (at least in her mind). Troi was not, however, tending to her feline duty as chief mouse warden. It was quiet with all that reading and staring, and suddenly there was a loud "THWAP" sound. I leaped out of my chair and looked down at Troi. She looked at the kitchen stove because the big noise seemed to have come from that direction.
And then I knew what the noise was. A mouse trap. Eeww.
For some reason, the area behind the drawer of the stove is the mouse superhighway. I don’t know how they get inside, but that’s inevitably where mice meet their doom. At our house, we all have our responsibilities. Removing slow rodents from traps is not one of mine, so I wrote James a note and told him that it was time to pull out the stove drawer and check the trap.
As I went downstairs to go to work, I realized that the chief mouse warden should be fired. Any cat that doesn’t notice a mouse less than 6 feet away is a disgrace to felinekind.