Our cats have totally lost their minds. I mean, all animals are crazy, but ours seem to be getting more so by the day. Last night is a good example. It started out with me irritating them by setting up a massage table in the middle of the living room and then refusing to let them lay on it. To make matters worse, when Doug came home, he layed on that table and I gave him a massage and neither of us paid the least bit of attention to the cats until we decided it was bedtime.

At that point, we finally fed them a bit of canned food, which didn't really make them happy because they felt we were very tardy in doing so. Then Doug and I got ready and got in bed. It has now become the nightly routine for the two of us to play a game with Cordy and a paper ball for a little while before we go to sleep. We throw the ball and she makes wild leaps into the air to catch it or bat it back at us. It's very entertaining for all three of us, but Charlie finds it detestable.

So, when we started up the game last night, the first throw of the ball ended up in the floor. Charlie darted over and started viciously attacking it. This is extremely out of character. Normally he just lies in the floor and looks at us disdainfully. Since he was actually participating, we tried throwing the ball between them to see who would go after it. This, apparently, pissed Cordelia off.

We threw the ball and it landed in the bathroom doorway. Doug and Charlie and I were all sitting and staring at it when Cordy suddenly threw herself off of the bed and attacked Charlie. After she felt she'd done a decent job of roughing him up, she placed herself between him and us so that she could intercept any further throws. From this point on, the game went on somewhat normally because Charlie quickly lost interest anyway.

After we turned out the lights, I made the mistake of moving. Now, back when Charlie was a "kitten", he was very good at killing monsters. When I went to bed, he would hang out by my feet and keep an eye out for anything dangerous that might be coming to harm me. The problem with this was that he tended to mistake my feet for one of these dangerous beasts. Nothing that moved under the covers was safe.

As he got older, his need for sleep increased to 23 hours per day and hasn't been nearly as useful at killing monsters for the past few years. However, within the past couple of weeks he seems to have found new inspiration. And, as I said before, last night I made the mistake of moving. I stretched out my legs and encountered something that I thought was Doug's foot near the end of the bed.

I quickly discovered that it was not Doug however because it was very sharp. It was, in fact, Charlie the Monster Killer. I pulled my foot back up a few feet and he dove across the bed and attacked it. I could not move my feet for about five minutes because he would grab them and bite them if I did. On the positive side, neither of us was bothered by dangerous beasts while we tried to sleep.