What the cat dragged in

I was bored last weekend. Meg-boredom is never a good thing to Ozzie. At least, not in his eyes, though it is frequently good for him. It generally results in him getting combed (the big shed-ball). Last weekend I was more bored (or maybe just more mischievous) than that; I gave Ozzie a bath! It was pretty fun, washing the cat. I waited until he was very sound asleep and unable to struggle effectively. Poor Ozzie! He seemed so confused and disoriented being plunked from a nap into a sink of warm water! Just look at him glare! But I still maintain that he needed a bath; he was pretty dirty and was starting to smelly pretty catty. And now he's so clean. And his fur is so soft. And he smells like cucumber melon shampoo (yep, I used people shampoo). I wish that my hair was that soft when I used that shampoo! His fur is clearly much finer than mine...

He's a sweet little sucker though, and seems to have forgiven and forgotten as soon as drying off. Or has he? The lasting trauma might explain why he's been acting troubled lately. Saturday night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I noticed Mitzi scoping something out on the bed. I know enough to be wary of dark objects on my bed, so I turned on the light. It was a big snail (diameter greater than that of a quarter)! The middle of my bed seems like a very strange place for a snail and the likeliest explanation I can come up with is that Ozzie put it there. He's never exhibited a snail fixation before, but he does have a habit of sitting on slugs and then transporting them around when they get stuck to him, so maybe this is just the next step...

Sunday night was even worse. Poor Ozzie. He turned up around bedtime running around like crazy with a 2 foot long, very thorny branch stuck to his booty. It was very tangled in his fur and took a while to liberate once I managed to quell him enough to attempt the operation. Finally he was freed. What I want to know is how it got stuck to him in the first place. Surely you'd notice if you were sitting on a large twig covered in thorns! My theory is that long hair makes cats dumb. (This theory only applies to cats, mind you.) Their clouds of fur are a kind of force field. But rather than preventing external stimuli from reaching them, it merely slows the stimulus, and thus delays any kind of response. It always takes Ozzie a while to notice that it's raining, for instance, since it takes a while for that California drizzle to make it through his fur and reach any neurons. You would think that even with a fur barrier he would notice that he was rolling around on thorns, but you never know. His fur's pretty long. He could be that dumb.