Just (another) one of those things - or - Sunday-Floody-Sunday

I'm not quite sure how to begin this entry, really.

It was around 10am and, while my wife was getting ready for work, I was putting the cats in their rooms and trying to get the day going.

The "normal" (nothing is normal) routine these days is:
- after several hours of being out in the main section of the house, by 9 or 10am, Buddy & Spanky need to go to their rooms for sleep.

- then we let Abbott and Cissy out of their room to have the run of the house until about 5 or 6 pm, at which time, they go back to their rooms and the other two guys come back out (until 10pm, when the rooms are switched again)

It gets a bit complicated at times (especially since there are three different diets going on and juggling feeding times and medicines can get a bit crazy), but as of late, I've developed a fairly smooth rhythm to it all.

Today, however, no such luck.

As I was saying, I was getting the day going, so around 10am it's time for Buddy and Spanky to go to bed. I gathered up all of Spanky's stuff (bed, turbo-scratcher, food, water, litter box) and headed up with him to his "apartment" in the upstairs bathroom.
By now, I'd have liked for him to be living in the same room full-time with Buddy, but alas, Spanky is still in kitten-mode where he just attacks Buddy and won't let up.
Despite Buddy really being a trooper about the whole thing and putting up with it as best he can, it's not fair to him to make him endure the constant abuse (or looming threat thereof) and so, until Spanky is a bit older and more mellow, they'll still be in separate day-time rooms.

Anyway, I got Spanky all settled in, and then got Buddy settled but heard Spanky starting to jump around in his room, and it sounded suspicious.

So, I ran up to investigate.

Opening the door, my eyes perform a quick scan of the room. Much like a cop entering a possibly hazardous situation, I'm on the lookout for "the perp". I look around the corner at the far end of the room, and see him behind the bathtub wall where the toilet sits (with all of the boxes and barricades tat I set up to prevent Spanky from getting behind it or in, under the lid).

All I see is him chewing something and as I reach to grab it from his mouth... he swallows it.

I do a quick search of surfaces to see what he might have bitten off; boxes, a cardboard sheet that blocks his tearing at a plastic "insulation screen" (one of those "shrink-wrap" type clear plastic sheets that you place over windows for added insulation - but in this case in front of an access panel that allows entry to the area behind the shower's waterworks)...etc...

What he had in his mouth was light brown in color. The same shade as a corrugated cardboard box -or- his Hill's Rx l/d food.
From his location, it HAD to be a piece of box.
So, I started to examine the boxes for tooth-marks and then I saw that wasn't all he had started to chew.

That bathroom has a "cushy" toilet seat. One of those soft, stuffed vinyl units. And along the edge of it were tears and bite marks.

Great. I can't have him running the risk of choking to death on a piece of vinyl or the foam filling.

So, gathering him up, I decided that TODAY was the day for him to get indoctrinated into the "two cats - one room brotherhood".

Needless to say, it didn't go well.
No matter WHAT I did, it was chaos.

So, acquiescing to this, I figured the only other recourse open to me (aside from my running away and joining the circus) was to swap out the toilet seat from the downstairs bathroom, which has a normal resin one.

After I removed both seats, I went up to install the normal one there and had to move a few of the barricade boxes and a water jug (also present for barricade purposes).

Now, have you ever done something, that in the exact moment you did it, a little voice in your head tells you NOT to do that - or to do it differently?
It's that voice that tries to warn you (an instant too late) that you're about to lock the keys in the car or lock yourself out of the house. You always "hear" it, but too late to fully react in time.
It was that voice which warned me that I maybe had placed the water jug on an insecure footing.

As the warning filtered through my mind, and just before I turned my head to check, I heard the sound of the jug falling over. And then the sound of water gushing out.

In the split-second between my head starting to turn and finally seeing what had happened, most of the jug's contents had spilled out all over the comforter that lined the floor as bedding, and the floor itself. The cap had popped off the wide-mouthed jug and about two gallons of water was EVERYWHERE.

Shouting assorted sub-lingual phrases (i.e: GAH!!! RRRAAAGHHH!!! ...etc...) and a few well-versed curses, my wife shouted up the stairs to see what had (now) gone wrong, although I could hear in her voice that she was afraid to find out.

Explaining the situation in a garbled, hurried and butchered version of English (that I have recently begun to adopt in my old age when frazzled), I told her where the mop and bucket were and she quickly retrieved them as well as some towels for clearing up the mess.

Of course, Buddy had ALSO decided to investigate and kept getting into the room to see what was going on. Nothing like a cat underfoot while trying to clean up a flood.
I shoo'd him out of the room, closed the door and finished the mop-up.

As for the comforter that was now soaked thru-and-thru, she brought a replacement and I draped the wet one over the shower-door.

After all of the copious amounts of water was soaked up, (it was strange how much water came from that jug in such a short span of a few seconds, but since the mouth of the just is about 4 inches in diameter, it shouldn't be too much of a mystery,) I still had to install the toilet seat(s) and get the cats back into their rooms.

It is stuff like this that happens here on a daily basis.
Luckily, this was a minor instance.
So much so, that I could tell that my wife was laughing a little as she had brought the mop and towels up to me. Under our "usual" def-com situations, laughter isn't an option (unless it's the "...they're coming to take me away - ha-ha! ho-ho! hee-hee! - to the funny-farm..." kind of laughing.)

It was nice to see her smile - even a little, and helped turn this one minor situation into an amusing one.
(at least until the next one)