I don’t know if the rest of you do this, but when I go shopping for presents for other people, I often find the perfect gift for me. And then, sometimes, I’ll buy it.
So it was with some cutey-patootie cubic zirconia earrings I saw at Francesca’s. Which I can’t find on the website to link, but they’re nothing special, really. Little gold teardrops with some sparkle, maybe $12. Just the thing to scoop up when you’re shopping for your daughters and end up with an odd number of accessories and a buy-one-get-one-50%-off sale. When it comes to earrings, I’m a simple lady. On those rare occasions when I’m not wearing my Ed Levin earrings with an extra set of backings for insurance, I’m often wearing super-cheap studs so that the pain of loss won’t be too great.
Anyway, the earrings were in my stocking for Christmas morning, and I’d managed to lose one of them by Boxing Day. I had noticed that the backings were a smidgen loose, and I should have corrected that immediately, but I didn’t. Oh, was I sad! Sure, I could buy another pair, but that would require going to the mall, which you know I hate.
Cute W tried to help, arriving home from Target with earrings that were also sparkly, but they were otherwise inferior to my recent loss in every way. I tried to recover and thank him for his thoughtfulness, but it was tough to miss my immediate visceral lip curl of disgust.
It made me downright cranky that day. And then, just shortly after I’d hit the Acceptance stage of grief, I went to get Isis some fresh water, and:
Ta Da!!
I was not only glad to see my lost earring, but I was grateful that Isis didn’t suck it up and swallow it and die. A win-win!
When I said this to my family, J pointed out that cats drink by scooping up water with the back of their tongues, which would make accidental earring ingestion almost impossible. I don’t really think that a cat’s drinking method necessarily prevents such a tragedy, but hey, if it helps J sleep at night, I’m not going to argue with her.
All of this talk about how a cat drinks made me Google it, just in case there was a demonstration for you, lovely readers. I got way more than I bargained for with this little beauty:
Okay, take a moment to watch it. Make sure the volume is up enough to hear it.
So. . .
I took a look at this video and my first though was, “This seems really porny to me. . . .”
Then I thought, is it just me? And I scrolled down to the comments, and the very top comment, I kid you not, was: “dammit I got a boner”.
It was at this moment that Cute W returned from doing some soccer at the SJCC. Right away Cute W recognized my suppressed hilarity and asked, “What? What’s going on?”
“Remember we were talking about how a cat drinks? Just take a look at this video for a minute.”
Ten or fifteen seconds in, Cute W said, “That seems. . . sexual. . . .” At which point I started laughing and then we were both laughing and I scrolled down so he could see the first comment, and at this point we were laughing so raucously that the girls came running to see what was so funny. We settled down and told them it was nothing, really. They were sure we were holding back on them (possibly because we were, but if we’d explained it, that would have been worse). Anyway, they insisted on hitting “play” to watch the video, and they were (luckily) mystified about what could be funny and mildly irritated that their weird parents have such a ridiculous sense of humor.
