Runaway Boxes

I nearly crushed the Vandycat yesterday.

Not on purpose! Though she has been a vexing kitty lately, what with her new jealousy issues. We’ve recently let the cats come upstairs when we’re up there and she’s been attacking Isaak whenever she runs into him up there. And whenever we’re skritching Isaak behind the ears or anything, she runs up and demands attention too. The “I” is beginning to act kind of wigged out by her sometimes.

Vandy has this ‘thing’ about cardboard boxes y’see… If you put an empty cardboard box on the floor with the top open, she’ll be inside it before you can count to ten. Anything in a box that’s just arrived is like a little slice of heaven to her, especially if it’s fragile. Vandy also loves chewing on styrofoam. My wife had a bike helmet in the basement of her old place that looked like parts of it had been dissolved by acid, but eventually we deduced that the little kitty had gotten into the basement and nibbled on the foam lining. This can’t be healthy. This has caused some problems with their new upstairs freedom.

I just got the new midi controller from ZZounds.com, and I’ve been very happy with it, but it arrived in a box the approximate size and shape of a junior coffin. The UPS guy who brought it made a couple of jokes about how I could use it as a Queequeg-brand floatation device. It took me a while to remember the whole Herman Melville / Moby Dick thing – it’s been ages since I read it – but the gist of it is that the only reason the narrator survived was because he was able to cling to the floating coffin of his buddy. You can go read the whole book online if the fancy strikes you.

And now for why it’s relevant: Now that the little kitty is allowed upstairs, she’s discovered a whole new world of cardboard. And the discovery of a coffin-sized cardboard box replete with styrofoam inserts had an almost religious effect on her. Several things got knocked over in her attempts to get onto or into the box, so yesterday I decided to use some of my vacation time doing cardboard box reduction. Any empty boxes I could find upstairs were flattened and stuffed into the huge box, which was then brought to the head of the stairs and jettisoned into the downstairs hallway.

As I was doing all of the preparation for this, I’d left the door between the upstairs and down open. The little kitty had been allowed to watch the proceedings and bid farewell to the monolithic box of doom (closure is important, after all), and the last I’d seen her she was curled up on the chair by the computer desk, fast asleep. Unfortunately, it turned out that I was wrong about her whereabouts. While I was distracted, she’d headed downstairs again, and just as I released the box and it started its journey down the stairs, she stepped into the hallway and looked up.

She froze for a second, then turned and scrabbled for purchase on the hardwood floor before rocketing down the hall and out of the path of the rapidly approaching box. I can’t imagine the conflict in the little kitty’s mind. “Here comes the huge box! But it’s thundering down the stairs towards me! But it’s full of cardboard and tasty styrofoam! But the human is yelling ‘look out!'”

Anyway, Vandy managed to avoid the lethal toboggan. I left it in the hall for a few minutes, and she came out to climb all over it and satisfy her curiosity. After that, it seemed less interesting. I chucked it down the basement steps and it’ll go out into the recycle truck next week.