Cat-a-pult: On a day when I needed some comic relief, here's what just happened...
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It's a warm, sunny day. The back door is open (screen door closed), and the sun is streaming in.
Little Cat, who's skittish and none too bright, is sprawled out in the sun, a few feet away from the screen door.
Mudpuppie walks through the living room in a typically clumsy fashion, knocks a glass off of the coffee table and onto the floor. It's loud! It shatters!
Little Cat -- using that prototypically feline
sproingy-ness, but never actually using her feet -- leaves the ground and flies through the air, simultaneously contorting her body so that she's flying feet-first.
And, feet-first, she hits the screen door.... With enough feet-first-force to actually rip the screen out of the moulding.
And so Little Cat finds herself outside -- for the first time, pretty much
ever -- and face to face with
Porkchop, who's at least 6 inches taller than Little Cat.
I race outside to catch the startled Little Cat, shutting the screen door behind me so that Big Cat (who has a temper) doesn't escape as well.
Faced with a Porkchop and an anxious cat mama and more sensory stimulation that she's ever faced, Little Cat is so freaked out that she needs no convincing. She hopped right back through the hole she made in the screen door, and she's been hiding under the bed ever since.