 For several years now, I have been indulging the OCD side of my personality that demands I keep my desk neat. That’s doubly hard to do, of course, when the four felines with whom I share this office insist on parading across the desk, sleeping on the warm modem, or rolling around on top of a stack of papers. However, I have one tried and true solution to the cat-hair accumulations — “Dust-Off” — a can of compressed air that makes cat hair disappear like magic. Or so I thought! Fast forward to this morning. My new living-alone morning ritual follows this pattern: Make coffee, feed cats, check overnight book sales, and eat breakfast while watching Good Morning America or The Today show, depending upon what they are obsessing about. Then, when I’ve had enough of the world’s troubles, I take a second cup of coffee back to the office, place it carefully on the two-drawer filing cabinet next to the desk (to keep any spills out of the computer innards), and visit electronically with some my favorite long-distance friends. But this morning! One cat started seeing spooks. Tail went to bottle-brush position and the race was on. Eventually I was directly in the path. The 20-pound diabolical orange male took a flying leap over my shoulder and landed with one front paw in my coffee cup. (I determined that later when he was fastidiously cleaning all of that black stuff out of the fur on his right front paw, and grumbling about it with a throaty growl.) Mayhem ensued. Coffee everywhere, pencil holder flying, phone off the hook. papers and books hitting the floor. By the time I grabbed a towel to mop up, the flow of coffee had spread far underneath a tall stacking rack of file folders. And when I lifted it up, I found the answer to today’s burning question. Cat hair never disappears. It just piles up behind the file folders — the better to soak up spilled coffee. |
