Anyone who owns cats would know that we have felines in residence the moment that they walk into our house. Many signs are evident as soon as you enter the living room, most notably the garbage on the floor. Yes, what other people may deem trash, our cats consider playthings. Paper bags for example. At least one scrunched and thrashed paper bag is almost always lying on the floor somewhere.
Other big clues are the cans sitting on the speakers. A few years ago, one cat decided that speakers make great scratching posts. Since cats don’t get the concept of "no," we put some pennies in a can and balanced it on the edge of the speaker. If the kitty touches it, the can falls off and scares the bee-boops out of the cat. The can is a free, recycled, insto-deterrant.
The bad news is that loud music also causes enough vibration to make the cans fall off. I discover this problem periodically when I jump up and down on my mini-trampoline. About 50% of the time, I forget to remove the cans before I start playing music at high volume (sometimes I gotta blow the dust outta the Bose). So there’s a rude shock when the can falls off.
The cats really get into the whole music scene. Loud music makes them weird. (Okay, maybe it just wakes them up.) But while I am exercising, they often zoom around the room chasing each other. It’s quite entertaining to watch the felines rock out.
Speaking of the ole mini-trampoline, I have a confession to make. A few weeks ago, I pointed out that there’s not much that can go wrong with a mini-tramp.
I was wrong.
My mini-tramp is 10+ years old and it appears that the first thing to die is the thread that is used to sew on the straps that hold the bars, which hold the springs. The thread dies and the strap rips out. Much like the cans falling, the big thunk when the spring clunks off the trampoline is disturbing. (It also doesn’t exactly make you feel svelte.)
Okay sure, I could go spend the $20 to buy a new mini-tramp, but somehow that offends my sensibilities. We live in such a throw-away society and I *can* fix the thing. So I’ve spent quite a bit of quality time hand sewing a circle around the mini-tramp to hold all the straps in. (Upholstry thread is amazing stuff.)
After all that work, today I was rewarded with no crashing and no clunking. Just felines zooming 🙂