Romance is dead. The cats killed it.

I very nearly played a spirited game of “Punt-a-Cat” on Friday night.

Ok. So here’s the scenario. My Wife was feeling a little tired, so she decided to take a little nap after work. “Wake me around 9” she said.

So I went to geek out a bit (short version: neither of the house PC’s will run Windows XP), then decided to head into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and two glasses. I snuck around all quiet like, stocking feet and all, down to the cellar and back. I opened the bottle in complete silence, crept down the hall, avoiding all squeeky floorboards.

And then, in the bedroom doorway, I stepped in cat puke.

There I am, open bottle of wine in one hand, wine glasses in the other, hopping up and down on one foot in the dark while cold cat puke soaks through the sock on my other foot. I managed to find the doorjamb with my shoulder, so I didn’t fall over, but I couldn’t see any place to set down the bottle or the glasses.

So I turned on the light.

And from the bed came the disgruntled snarl of my wife who had been awakened, not by a romantic husband with wine, but by blindingly bright light wielded by an inconsiderate lout.

That pretty much ruined the mood. I cleaned up from the cats and let my wife return to her nap.

Personally, I think the cats may be evil geniuses. They suspect that we’re planning on having kids, so they want to do everything they can to delay the arrival of anything which would take our attention away from them. Friday night’s experiment was an unqualified success.

Now that we’ve shown them that cat puke is the most formidable weapon in their feline arsenal, they’ll probably deploy it whenever they think we’re getting “too cutesy” for their comfort. Whenever one of us steps in it, they’ll be lurking just out of sight, giving each other high-fives and snickering behind their paws while we curse and fumble for paper towels in the dark.