Caturday: The Eviscerator Sleeps

It has been a very busy couple of days for Dexter the Tabby. On Friday, the baseboard heater in the upstairs bathroom sort of . . . exploded, and it made weird noises and horrible burnt smells before tripping the breaker. I was actually on the phone with my husband when it happened; he reported that Dexter was very distressed by the whole thing, and ran around with his tail DOWN.

Fortunately my husband was home when it happened, and he threw the windows open and kept an eye on things. He and the electrician he talked to online figure it was the thermostat that went; but when it went, it fried some other things. When I got home, my husband commented that Dexter had been hard at work all day, supervising the problem-solving process.

I picked up the replacement parts my husband had called in to Lowe's on my way home from work on Friday, and then Dexter helped my husband make the repair on Friday evening and Caturday morning. Isn't it true that good help is hard to find?

The repair went quite smoothly until we got to the part where you had to decide which color of wire to connect to which wire. The colors of wires on the new parts weren't the same as the ones on the old ones. Even Dexter couldn't tell us which one went where. In the movies, don't they always cut the green wire? Or is it the red wire?

So we took apart another baseboard heater as exhibit A, and figured out where to go from there. In the meantime, Dexter played Ninja Cat, crawling over and under and around the shoe rack we had to move to get to the heater. Such good help is hard to find.

Dexter sleeps in his own bedroom each night. When I went in on Caturday morning, I discovered that overnight he had eviscerated his favorite little orange lizard toy. (You saw it once in a prior blip.) Poor thing, its guts had been quite efficiently removed and it lay helplessly on its back in the middle of the floor.

I put the critter and its stuffings out of cat-reach, and later in the afternoon, while sitting on the sunny deck, I replaced the guts and sewed the incision shut with a neat row of orange stitches. It's not QUITE good as new, but it'll do. You should have seen Dexter's face when I gave it back to him - he sat in a sunbeam playing with his little orange buddy, looking delighted.

One of my tasks for this day was to sort through the charity and junk mail and recycle most of it. That is the job I was working on on the bed, where Dexter, ever curious and helpful, joined me to assist. And then, exhausted, Dexter finally caught some Zzzzzzzzzz's.

This is just how I found him, totally sacked out on top of the junk mail, when I came in from the sunny deck. You know, it's tough being a cat on Caturday. There is so much helping to do: heater repairs to oversee, ninja cat maneuvers, mail to sort, orange critters to tear apart. But in this photo, The Eviscerator finally sleeps.

The song to accompany this peaceful image of Dexter the Destroyer is Barry McGuire, with Eve of Destruction.