Ok, I admit it… I’ve lost.  I’ve lost and I’m befuddled… well confused, that’s a better choice.  And my coffee isn’t really working yet, what’s that about?  Dammit.

Back to the point… ever since the domestic violence unleashed on my Christmas tree, not that long ago, robbing it of its tree skirt and exacting what can only be described as acts of unholy, godless violence upon it, it’s been a question of what these two idiots would do next.  Not really a matter of “whether”, you see, just “when” and “to what”?  These are cats, after all… Lords of the Idiot Animal Kingdom… like, if there was a pet equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys, these fools would be the lion with the little crowns, except they’d never let the crown stay on their head for more than a second, because that would be cute… and they don’t play like that.  They make their own damn rules… and… ok, I’m a little off topic.  I have two cats.  They are idiots.  Enough said right?  Well.. and my coffee isn’t working quite yet.  Could be some weird form of Columbian revenge, since I spilled a small amount of coffee grounds on the counter this morning… and now I’m paying the price to Juan Valdez and his Columbian brothers… and… shit.  Off topic.  Let’s focus here.

The cats.  Morons.  Start with that.  Add a great room and a fireplace… Now, you’re probably thinking… “Ok, I see where this is going.”   No, you don’t.  You don’t see where it’s going.  Set aside your basic assumptions of normal pet stupidity and assume some hallucinogenic-level stupid, and you’re starting to get warm.  Dora couldn’t find the level of stupid my cats are able to muster with the map in her backpack and the entire audience of one million five year olds shouting directions three times, over and over at every step of the damn trip.  That kind of stupid.  And by the way… Jesus Dora… get to Benny’s barn already, its right on the other side of Crocodile Lake, and over Strawberry Mountain.  Who makes a mountain out of strawberries anyway?  I highly doubt that could support the weight of a person… you’d sink like you were in strawberry quicksand.  You’d sink and then you’d be dead… and that would suck.  And no one wants to eat the number of strawberries necessary to get out, whether you like strawberries or not… You’re done.  Anyway… I hope when she finally gets to Benny’s Barn the bull kicks her in the head, so MAYBE she starts remembering the damn directions and saves her entire audience the hassle of repeating that shit forever.  She clearly needs electroshock, or some kind of mental reset… like in that one Avengers movie where Scarlett Johansson bangs Jeremy Renner’s head into a pipe and all the evil mental stuff is gone… THAT kind of reset.  What?  Off topic?  Blame the coffee… I’m just a victim in this.  Ok… I’ll get another cup.  Hold please…

Ok, where were we?  Right.  The idiots and the fireplace.  Now, I must clarify, this has been an ongoing thing.  A war that has been being waged between me and the miniature morons who live in my home for months now.  I thought I had gotten somewhere safe, but clearly I was wrong, and I’m stupid… and I’m a grown up… and I can accept that shit.  Doesn’t mean I like it though, so take two steps back bro.

So… to go back to the beginning, here’s the basic thing: the cats have a fascination with the fireplace.  I don’t know why.  I’m not a cat psychologist or a cat whisperer… I’m just the big idiot who feeds the smaller idiots and cleans up after them every once in a while.  They want in there.  It’s a thing.  It doesn’t seem to be the case that they want to roll around in the ashes and then spread that shit on the carpet, thank god… it’s just like they don’t like being excluded from the little three foot by one foot area right in front of where the ashes are.  It’s like they have a fixation on not being allowed in there.  This is where the grate comes into play.  It’s always been there, and they are not happy about it.  To the point they have pulled it down, moved it aside… basically everything to communicate the cat version of “you’re not the boss of me”, which in cat speak, would probably sound like “meow”, but they don’t have a lot of vocabulary, and thank god, because a smack talking cat wouldn’t live in this house for three minutes.  Sarcasm is restricted to the Italians in residence and the cats need to know their place in the hierarchy.

Ok, so the grate has had many things done to it to establish its general irrelevance and annoyance to the cats.  Where this all started was that they would become interested in the fireplace, I wouldn’t be paying much attention, I wouldn’t hear a THING, and suddenly I’d look over and notice one of the cats walking back and forth ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GRATE, with the other cat normally sitting on this side of the grate, on the carpet, admiring the ability of his brother to walk in the forbidden zone.  I don’t really get the point of any of it, but they would reach up with their paw, slide the grate out a little, and then march on in.  Simple enough, right?  No, not right.  Not good.  Not ok.  That’s a mess of ashes waiting to get on my carpet and I’m not up for cleaning that, because anyone who has had ashes on their carpet knows how bad that sucks to clean.

Now, being an engineer… and half Sicilian… I figured this was easy enough to solve, so I placed a piece of firewood, which you can see in the picture above, in FRONT of the grate.  That was step #1: what I’d call the “make it too heavy” tactic that my brain thought was good enough to outsmart two morons on a mission.  I should clarify that this was the Engineer’s way of solving the problem.  The Sicilian in me would probably have tossed them individually into the ashes, then out in the yard to consider the gravity of their crimes… and… well, reason over passion… it’s a good thing at times.  Anyway, well, that solution actually DID work for a while, as the cats would look at the piece of wood and just stay away from the grating altogether.  They would lay to the left of the grate as if trying to find some Zen-like peace with it, but for the most part, I assumed I had won the contest and my days of seeing little cat paw prints in the light ash on the other side of the grate were over… Yeah.  No.  No.  It didn’t go like that.

Well, cats being the criminal moron masterminds that they are, eventually realized they could still go to the left of the grate, raise a paw, and slide the grate out enough that they could get back there.  Apparently one fire log isn’t enough weight to keep them out.  For all I know, they were working out and doing some deadlifting while I was sleeping, to get big enough to move it… they make enough noise at 3am, who knows…  Anyway, soon enough stage two was needed… a way to keep them off the mouth of the fireplace entirely, because even letting them up there was enough to see the house of cards come tumbling down.

At this point, I introduced the ENTIRE PACK OF WOOD to the left of the grate in the picture, what I would call the “deny access” tactic.  Now, two things about my second cat countermeasure… first, it completely blocked off their previous access to the point they can’t get up there to pull at the grate.  Check.  That’s gotta be good, because that’s both where they pulled it out before AND it’s where they went marching in behind the grate, given the andirons are on the other side and there’s no space for cats over there.  The second thing is that it is ALSO pushed against the grate so that there is even more weight and pressure to overcome for them to move the grate out from where it is supposed to be.  At the point I added this second level of security, I figured I had solved the problem and the cats were effectively screwed to do anything about it… yep, that’s what I thought… until this morning.

Well, the picture above is what I found when I woke up today, and I really don’t know what to make of it, because, by all indications… MY CATS HAVE A CRANE HIDDEN SOMEWHERE.  Not only did the cats manage to pull the grate down, they also did so WITHOUT knocking the piece of firewood out of place that was in front of it… In physical terms, I’m not clear on how they did it, but it would’ve theoretically meant they lifted the grate up BEFORE they toppled it forward, which seems almost impossible for two little idiots to have accomplished without some form of complex machinery… and that’s scary as hell… Wherever this contraption is, clearly I want to find it, because I need to examine its construction and figure out what other kinds of equally dastardly devices they may be able to build (without the benefit of opposable thumbs, mind you) if they want to make me a target of their mania…

The larger issue is also what to do now… I may be out of basic engineering tricks, and the idea of using the infamous “plastic bag deterrent” was clearly confounded with the Christmas Tree incident.  I’m also afraid that introducing the plastic bag threat at this point could backfire and escalate the situation where they may do something really harmful to the fireplace, like spread its contents all over the room… and that would be… well… really, really bad.

As I said at the outset, I’ve lost.  I’ve lost and I’m confused.  I thought I was living with two complete idiots, but after two rounds of failed safeguards, it would seem that my cats have an understanding of basic engineering principles, or there’s no way they safely lifted that grate over the firewood and dropped it onto the carpet without disturbing either of my presumed “protective measures”…

I need to think on this one some more… and have more coffee… yes, coffee… but this war isn’t over.  Not by a bathed and shaven domestic short haired cat, it’s not…

-CJG 06/08/2017