For several weeks, I’ve been doing my best to impress upon the kitten that yarn is not for playing with. I know, it sounds almost sacreligious — yarn is the “traditional” cat toy of the ages. However, I crochet a lot, and I can’t have the cats interrupting me constantly by attacking my yarn as I’m trying to turn it into a blanket.

The older cats have learned this lesson well. Neither of them even blinks when they see the yarn skittering across the sofa or floor as I’m crocheting. But until last night, the kitten couldn’t resist pouncing on any bit of moving yarn. Whenever Michiko grabs at the yarn, my family has gotten used to hearing me say, “No! The yarn is not a kitty toy; the yarn is Mommy’s toy!”

Last night, Michiko calmly sat next to me on the sofa and just watched intently as the yarn hopped & skipped across the sofa and my lap. I was quite pleased that consistent correction of unwanted behavior once again achieved desired results (raising kittens isn’t entirely unlike raising a 2-year-old …well, if the 2-year-old didn’t have thumbs).

Now I have to impress upon the little beast that crochet hooks are also not kitty toys, but Mommy’s toys! When I went out to the back patio for a smoke break, I heard the distinct ringing sound of a crochet hook hitting the wood floor of the front room and being batted about by a misbehaving feline. I couldn’t locate the damned hook upon my return, so I grabbed the flashlight to peer under the sofa & loveseat.

A few minutes of searching was to no avail — the crochet hook had either been hidden by evil kittenish design, or been eaten by the Black Hole. (That’s what I call the …uhm, thing… that hides things temporarily and puts them back in the strangest places, knocks framed pictures & candle sconces off the wall if it doesn’t like where they’re placed, and plays generally mischievous but harmless tricks. It showed up when I was pregnant with the eldest, and it was supposed to move out when she did, but I think it’s still here.)

What I did find under the sofa & loveseat, however, was rather unpleasant. The floor was positively filthy under there! I thought for a second that I was going to be ambushed by the legions of giant dust bunnies! I briefly contemplated opening a store to sell the vast quantities of pens & pencils I found under the furniture! There were three different catalogs from the Pyramid Collection under the sofa!

Something Had To Be Done.

At first, my plan was just to move all the furniture so I could sweep and mop the front room. Halfway through that process, I realized the the loveseat slipcover had an astonishing amount of dust and cat hair on it, so I decided to wash it. Removing the slipcover required transferring the 8 or so loads of clean laundry piled upon it to the sofa (I really hate folding laundry, and often let it pile up to ridiculous proportions before tackling it). After moving the laundry and tossing the slipcover into the washing machine, I bowed to the inevitable and resigned myself to getting all the laundry folded before I went to bed. In the best spirit of procrastination, however, I decided it would be futile to sweep & mop the rest of the front room floor before tackling the clutter piles on the two endtables (which certainly contributed to the dust, scraps of paper, and other miscellaneous mess that trickles to the floor), so I did that first. Of course, I also had to collect all the stuff on the endtables that don’t exactly belong there, and organize it all into piles depending upon which room the clutter actually belonged. So there was a pile of stuff that belonged in the kitchen, the bathroom, etc — and then the piles actually taken to their proper domiciles and put away where they belonged, with one exception: an entire laundry basket of stuff belonging to Anxiety was accumulated (and today, it still sits in the laundry basket I collected it into!). All the laundry was folded — grudgingly — by the time I started realizing I was running out of steam, and was put away so that the laundered slipcover could go back onto the loveseat.

Five hours later, my front room was as spotless as it gets, with the exception of the area rug needing to be vacuumed, but generally it’s unwise to vacuum at 2 am because it irks the neighbors. Anxiety laughed at me for sweeping the Roomba (there was dust on the top of it!) but otherwise was bright enough to stay out from underfoot during while Mom was in whirling dervish cleaning mode.

Now all I have to do is enforce the current state of tidyness with Stormtrooper-like vigor. If I lived alone, it would be the simplest task to maintain my preferred level of tidyness & organization. (I know this for a fact, because when I lived with only my very small children ten years ago, my entire house was OCD-approved clean & tidy. It was fun to watch people become flabbergasted at the proof that you can have small children and a tidy & clutter-free home, with actually very little effort.) But living with other people, who don’t consistently have the same compulsion to maintain order — although Anxiety occasionally tackles her room the same way I tackled the front room last night — is the trade-off I make to avoid becoming an antisocial, misanthropic, hermitical, crazy cat lady.

I did eventually locate the missing crochet hook, so when the whirling dervish mode had finally wound down, I spent a couple hours crocheting while watching an odd little movie called Witch Hunt that piqued my interest based on the title. Overall, the movie wasn’t bad — but unfortunately, the witchcraft in the movie is presented quite negatively and inaccurately; one character asserts that, to witches, males are good for nothing but providing the seed to produce female children. What pathetic & utter garbage!

However, all that effort put forth last night resulted in plenty of muscle aches today. I think I’ll sit in my tidy front room and crochet for much of the day, enjoying the fruits of my labor.