Maggie strikes...

Maggie, our sometimes unruly adolescent cat, loves to chase things. It may be a stray piece of paper, our cat Edwin, Sam's toys, a housefly. If it will move, she will chase it. Which leads me to two events that have happened in our home in the last 48 hours, both leading to a fair amount of frustration.

The first occurrence involves a roll of 100 stamps. I am in the process of writing and sending out thank you notes to all the wonderful people who blessed us with gifts for Sam before and after he was born. Now there isn't 100 cards to send, but there were enough that I figured buying stamps from Costco would be a good plan. Anyway, Wednesday morning I had a stack of about 10 cards to send out, and I went down to our entryway table where I keep the stamps to address them and then I was planning to send them out. On Tuesday morning Tim had done some cleaning, including tidying up the entryway table, so when I went to look for the stamps, the only thing on the table were our car keys. I figured Tim had relocated the stamps and went to ask him. He said he hadn't, which lead to frustration on both our parts (me not totally believing him, he being annoyed with me) and a day's worth of searching. Wednesday evening, after Sam was in bed, Tim and I started talking about the possibilities of where the stamps might have gone. That is when Tim said, "Do you think Maggie could have found them and chased them off somewhere?" To which I replied "It's possible". With that, we started deducing if we were Maggie, and got hold of a roll of stamps, where would we chase it? The first place we thought of was our entryway closet, a long shot we figured, but nonetheless, worth checking. I went down the stairs, and got down on my hands and knees to look in. I found two things that were out of place. 1. Our beloved Maggie and 2. Our missing roll of stamps. Maggie 1 Adults 0.

The second occurrence involves Maggie's love of chasing live creatures, such as flies. Last night, we had our windows open because it was a nice cool evening. Maggie was perched on the window ledge watching something outside. All of a sudden, and with full use of her claws, she began attacking the screen with fervor. I scolded her and immediately chased her off the window ledge. To prevent Maggie from wrecking the screen overnight, I closed the window until there were only a couple inches left, just enough to let the air circulate. Or so I thought. I was wrong. This morning, after feeding Sam, I walked out into the main room. I looked over towards the window, and what should I see, but our juvenile cat squished between the window and the screen. I imagine she had been there for a few hours, because she couldn't turn around, although she was trying. And with each attempt, she was further tearing our screen away from it's frame. I guess I'm lucky that I found her when I did, because if she had been there much longer, she may have torn the screen sufficiently to fall out the window (and a storey and a half to the ground).
Maggie 2 Adults 0

And now Tim has to replace a screen!