We got two new kittens about a month and a half ago, and they are integrating nicely with our madness household. Today, however, they really got into hot water.

You see Trevor was in the middle of his toaster waffles, and got up to tell me something while I was reading through my morning email in the office. This is normal behavior for him, the getting up part, so much so that in ten years I don’t think the verbs “sit” and “eat” have ever been used in the same sentence to describe him. After he told me his joke, he left the office, and in doing so left the office door open. The reason I knew he left the office door open was that not much longer after his exit one of the kittens climbed up the back of my office chair, and proceeded to stroll out onto the desk looking for trouble. The reason why we keep the office door closed is precisely to keep the cats out of trouble, otherwise known as the drifts of stuff in the office all of which must be amazingly tempting to a kitten based upon their behavior.

As I was putting the cat out, Trevor came by again, so I called him in to show him a web page I had up on the screen. It was a report of the recent invasion of our local waters of Humbolt Squid. Since the lad is a budding Marine Biologist (as has been since he was in kindergarten) we like to point out things like this which might be of interest to him. The photos led to a discussion, which led to some wild imagining on both our parts of an invasion of giant squid and robots, and such. Little did we know a real invasion was going on while we were talking.

We stepped out of the office, and while I was closing the door I heard Trevor give a shout. Walking into the living room I found the two kittens on top of the dinning room table happily eating his waffles. They leapt off the table at our shouts, but were soon up on it again while we were preparing more waffles that were not “ruined” by the cats. The second time they were removed by the more effective method of a water bottle spray shot into the face. This lead to a discussion of the idea (presented for the one-thousandth time) of sitting and eating, (the key idea being the two are done simultaneously) as well as the idea of putting one’s chair back under the table when one is not sitting in it so it doesn’t make an excellent cat ladder.

Over all, I suspect little was learned today, except that the kittens now know that human breakfast foods, especially those dripping in syrup, are especially delicious and usually left unprotected in a place they can quickly get to.