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 FBC,
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.