Pickles & Dimes

My week off was bliss, and in fact, I could have done another three weeks of it and only scratched the surface of my contentment. There’s something about being left alone to my own devices, without interruptions, that makes me absolutely productive. Ridiculously productive. Also, I made banana bread and homemade chicken dumpling soup. (Thanks for the recipe, Nowheymama!) The last batch will be consumed in nine minutes, not that I am at work counting down until lunchtime or anything.

Last night I doomed myself and Jason by commenting on how well-behaved the cats have been at night, with Abby snuggling as close as possible to my side and warming her icy paws on my neck and Sunny taking up 98% of my pillow, purring brokenly into my ear and occasionally grooming my forehead. But then last night I woke to the sound of one of them licking something. Loudly. Lick. Lick. LICK. And it wasn’t Sunny gagging on my hair, as she normally does 37 times a night, but Abby licking the condensation off our bedroom window. Again, LOUDLY. And then, due to some mysterious scientific explanation, she couldn’t gracefully leap down from the window when she was done, but instead, got tangled in the shade, flailed around loudly and knocked my spare pillow off the headboard so it landed on Sunny, who beat a hasty retreat across the bed with her claws extended. And that is why I buy the Garnier Nutritioniste Skin Renew Anti-Puff Dark Circle Reducing Eye Roller. And why I have mysterious scratches all over.

Thankfully, the other pet in the house is a sound sleeper. During my week off, Shorty was in heaven because multiple trips outside to run in the yard! and plenty of long walks to be scared of the geese in the park! Also, plenty of time to run around the house with this:

He used to eat one of those in less than an hour, but now will have the same bone for a few days. He constantly throws it around to pounce on, and will come sprinting up to me, whining, if it gets lost. He’ll then push his nose as far under the furniture as possible, watching me retrieve the bone from under the couch or entertainment center, which he’ll then daintily grab, and then violently toss in the air to chase down and/or lose again.

This weekend, after napping quietly next to the bone, he stretched dramatically from his blanket, looked at Jason and I watching football, and started looking for a place to bury his bone. After glancing back at us to make sure we weren’t watching, he carefully placed it on the bottom of our DVD shelf. As we started laughing, he turned around, glared balefully at us and started nosing at the surrounding DVDs. After much effort, he got the DVD Young Guns II to stand perfectly in front of the bone, blocking our view of it. And then he looked at us as if to say, “I DARE you to find it now, jerks,” curled up on his blanket and went back to sleep.