A Healthy Coating Of Earth
Aug. 22nd, 2009 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyI love the way cat tails shrink when they’re soaking wet. The sudden loss of apparent mass is hilariously pathetic.
Yes, we bathed the cats today. This is a big deal—our cats are the semi-feral Outdoor Cat type who rarely get dunked—except, you know, in extenuating circumstances. And the circumstances have become extenuating—Fern, especially, has spent pretty much the entire summer just sitting around in dirt. It’s her new hobby. Every time I go outside, somewhere in the front garden I can see a big ball of increasingly filthy fuzz just meatloafin’ around.
We were going to let it go till the end of the month, but Fern’s other hobby is meatloafin’ in the clean laundry hampers.
“I think,” Mom said, stepping out of the washroom with a re-washed stack of jeans, “that we should probably not wait any longer.”
Charlotte got a bath too—while she doesn’t trail around a Pigpen-worthy cloud of debris like her sister, she does like to pull off the heads of small woodland creatures, and that deserves some washing.
Anyway, on Bath Day the drawbacks of irregular schedules is made abundantly clear: perhaps if we bathed them more often they’d be more sanguine about it. As it is, however, there’s a reason we refer to it as “waterboarding the cats.” But with Mom and me on actual cat wrangling duty and Dad taking his job of cat taunting very seriously, we got ’em looking more or less halfway decent.
They’ve spent the rest of the day nursing their injured dignity* and, probably, wondering what they did to incur our wrath. As for me, I’ve spent the rest of mine nursing a couple of gashes down my arm.
Pets are great.
*By composure grooming and, of course, rolling around in the dirt.
Yes, we bathed the cats today. This is a big deal—our cats are the semi-feral Outdoor Cat type who rarely get dunked—except, you know, in extenuating circumstances. And the circumstances have become extenuating—Fern, especially, has spent pretty much the entire summer just sitting around in dirt. It’s her new hobby. Every time I go outside, somewhere in the front garden I can see a big ball of increasingly filthy fuzz just meatloafin’ around.
We were going to let it go till the end of the month, but Fern’s other hobby is meatloafin’ in the clean laundry hampers.
“I think,” Mom said, stepping out of the washroom with a re-washed stack of jeans, “that we should probably not wait any longer.”
Charlotte got a bath too—while she doesn’t trail around a Pigpen-worthy cloud of debris like her sister, she does like to pull off the heads of small woodland creatures, and that deserves some washing.
Anyway, on Bath Day the drawbacks of irregular schedules is made abundantly clear: perhaps if we bathed them more often they’d be more sanguine about it. As it is, however, there’s a reason we refer to it as “waterboarding the cats.” But with Mom and me on actual cat wrangling duty and Dad taking his job of cat taunting very seriously, we got ’em looking more or less halfway decent.
They’ve spent the rest of the day nursing their injured dignity* and, probably, wondering what they did to incur our wrath. As for me, I’ve spent the rest of mine nursing a couple of gashes down my arm.
Pets are great.
*By composure grooming and, of course, rolling around in the dirt.
