Guest Post - Curses, foiled again…by Nic Tatano - #CuteChristmas

Of all the cats I’ve had in my lifetime, and there have been many, our Siamese kitty Pandora was with us the longest. Seventeen years. Which was pretty incredible since she was abandoned by the mother cat when only a few days old and kept alive with an eyedropper and bottle.

Pandora was very attached to me, a true one-person cat, but having been “raised by wolves” she had a ton of quirks, most of them related to food. I could not eat any potato chips with her in the room, as she was determined to eat one and would jump on me and get in my face trying to do so. (Salt isn’t good for cats, by the way.) Grapes were another obsession. Well, not the actual grapes. If you ate a bunch of grapes, left the stems in a bowl, and walked away, you’d return finding Pandora gnawing on them like a dog with a bone.

Then there were the inedible objects, as I once pulled a dress shirt from a laundry basket and found she had eaten every single button on it.

She was also a food critic. Give her a new brand of cat food she didn’t like, and she would turn her back on it and make a “covering it up” movement like it was something unsavory in the litter box.
But the one thing that was a true obsession with Pandora… ham. If she smelled a ham cooking she’d be pacing in the kitchen, back and forth like a caged animal in a zoo, determined to get a bite. If dinner included ham you either had to lock her in another room or stay completely focused on your plate, as she was not shy about jumping on the dinner table and stealing food.

We forgot about this one Christmas.

The holiday dinner had been a typical one; a ham with all the trimmings, lots of great side dishes and desserts. If you’re like most people you like to go back and nibble on the main dish later in the day, so before putting the ham in the fridge we left it on the cooktop and covered it with aluminum foil.
Forgetting about the family member with the ham obsession.

As we’re watching television, we suddenly heard a strange sound from the kitchen. Sort of like something metallic being crumpled up. I thought maybe we had a mouse in the house.
We got up to investigate, turned on the kitchen light, and there was our cat Pandora, standing with all fours on top of the ham, pulling back the foil with her teeth. Basically unwrapping what she considered to be her Christmas gift. Fortunately I was able to grab her before she got very far. I can only imagine that if we had gone out for a walk we would have come back to a ham covered with cat hair. Yum.

So, a word of advice to people with cats that really do not respect boundaries. (Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much every cat.) 

Tupperware makes a great Christmas gift. Because you simply can’t foil a cat.

What a fantastic story Nic, I loved it, and I love Pandora too. Thanks for sharing and Happy Holidays.

Amazon UK

The purrfect gift this Christmas…

The night her house catches fire, kick-ass lawyer Tish McKenna’s neatly ordered life is thrown into chaos. At least she’s alive—thanks to her adorable cat, Socks!—and after her near-death experience Tish realises she wants more in her life than late nights and case files…

Professionally speaking, hot-shot attorney, Spencer Capshaw hadn’t realised how far off track he’d come. Sure, he had his reasons originally—saving his dad’s life required more money than the DA’s office paid him—yet helping corrupt corporate bigwigs was not why he became a lawyer…

With a little help from a furry friend, these two lost souls find each other in the heart of Manhattan. But when Tish and Spence are pitted against each other in a trial that pushes them both to their limits, can their budding relationship survive?

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