#Cat help (more like a #writers nemesis)

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This is my ever-present “helper,” Able to leap onto my keyboard in a single bound, and whose feet have more brain power in them than his head.

Remember the old Bob Newhart series featuring Larry, Darryl and other brother Darryl?  That’s Other Brother Coon Cat (OBCC).  If there were 3 of him, they might equal the brain power of one normal cat.  

He’s a sweetie…sometimes.  Who can resist a 20 pound purry furry curled around your arm on a cold night?  Or a head gently nuzzling as if to say, “I love you.”

It’s quite different when you’re about to go to bed, smell cat pee, and find that he’s used your pillow as a urinal when his litter box is 3 feet away.  He does have the brain power to know what a litter box is and how to use it, but he was upset about something (perhaps I gave him food he didn’t like that day, or it wasn’t in his bowl on time, or I didn’t pet him the right way).  

Last night, he found a pillow case on the floor to pee on.  He likes tuna with extra water in it, but that’s 80 cents a can at Dollar General.  Regular cat food is 5 cans for $2.00, so I opened the beef in gravy instead.  

As I mentioned, his feet have a mind of their own.

When he isn’t knocking the phone off the hook to hear the recording say, “If you’d like to make a call…,” OBCC loves to whap my keyboard with his feet.  If I slide the keyboard toward me, he’ll follow.  But today, he finally did it. He made me see red.

I’ve been working on book 3 of my second series and, just as I started opening the file, he jumped onto it, pushed his feet on the keyboard.  He managed to replace the entire file with one letter:  The letter “I.”

I’d been working on  that book for the past 2 days!  

It might have been an easy task to “undo” the damage — if he hadn’t closed the file seconds after he’d saved it.

I searched for other copies, and remembered.  I was so tired the night before that I had forgotten to save it in the usual 2 places.

OMG!!!!  I’d just lost 3 chapters!!!

That’s when the floodgates opened.

While I cried harder than a teenager who’d just broken a 2-inch nail, OBCC was licking his butt. Typical cat.

Once I stopped crying and began to contemplate what roast cat might taste like, the word “restore” popped into my mind.  I clicked on the file name in Windows Explorer and there it was — a way to go back to the last point at which the file was saved, and…and

EVERYTHING was there!!!  

That’s like the universe giving me a shot across the bow, so I immediately saved it in 3 places.

What is OBCC doing now?  

The usual.

I’m presently saving my book in 4 places.  One can never be too careful around OBCC.

 

©Joelle (still mostly sane) LeGendre

 

Category : cats, humor, Writing
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