The FCB

So last night, as Marc and I were taking Bandit for a walk, we got to talking about the wildfires in San Diego, and how horrible it was how a lot of people had lost their homes and everything. So Marc decided that we should have a "Fire Box," where we'd keep all our important documents and pictures and keepsakes. That way, in the event of a fire, we could just grab one box before leaving the house. When I pointed out to him that "Fire Box" sounds a little bit like an oxymoron, since it kind of implies that the box is going to go up in flames (and it would), he decided to rename it the "Fire Safe Box." But then I pointed out that it wasn't really a fire-safe box, since it was going to be cardboard, and wasn't fire-safe at all. I then suggested that we call it the "Fire Contingency Box," but Marc thought that was too long, so we decided to call it the FCB. There's no fun like coming up with dorky acronyms.

During that same conversation, we also outlined a plan for if we should ever have the evacuate the house. Marc would grab the FCB, and I would be in charge of getting the pets to safety. Seeing as how we have three pets, I brought up the point that three would be a lot for one person to handle in a moment of panic. I'd had experience with this before. More on that later. So it was decided that Snuggles would be given last priority, since she's our smelly, less personable cat. Oh come on! Every parent has a favorite! Okay, I'm just kidding about the Snuggles bit, kinda.

I don't think I mentioned Snuggles' little problem in my bio for her. You see, she has a stinky butt. She's been like this since she was a kitten. We suspect it's because she never learned how to properly clean herself, you know, down there. Stubby tries to pick up the slack, but I suspect you can only lick someone else's butt for so long before it gets old. Now we have Bandit helping as well, so things are a little better. At least the farting has seemed to stop. Of course, Bandit has also picked up the slack on that as well. That dog can seriously clear a room.

Back to my experience with trying to evacuate pets. It wasn't even three pets at the time, it was just the two cats. We were living at our apartment still, and I had decided to take a Friday off from work. So Friday morning I'm still sleeping, when I'm woken up by the loudest sounding alarms ever. "BWOOP! BWOOP! BWOOP!" I thought I was in the middle of a bombing raid. Thinking the world was coming to an end, I sprang out of bed, put my glasses on, and ran around the apartment looking for the cats. I found them totally freaked out, and grabbed a backpack, picked up Snuggles, stuck her in the bag, and grabbed Stubby. While I was on my way out the door (in all my pajama and glasses and bad hair glory), Snuggles squeezed out of the bag and ran back into the bedroom and hid under the bed. After putting down Stubby and trying in vain to grab Snuggles, I said, "Screw it" and decided to go find out what was really going on, since the apartment appeared to still be standing. After all that, it turned out it was just a drill, which they didn't think to notify us about. I grumbled my way back into bed while the cats gave me dirty looks.

There was something else I wanted to talk about, but I can't remember what.