Cat burglars in my house..

I decided to keep the Easter chocolate low key this year. The boys are teenagers now and we have teenage friends staying with us at the moment and I don't think the boys would have got excited over mom embarrassing them with an early morning egg hunt wakeup call. So I bought each of them a giant slab of chocolate and that was that.

I decided to defrost my fridge on Friday as it was nice and warm. Inside the fridge against the element had grown an iceberg which was slowly engulfing the contents of the fridge and the freezer was just as bad. After switching off the fridge and removing the contents to the old fridge in the garage, I worked on the ice until there was just a big blob of ice left slowly melting inside the fridge and another big sheet of ice against the top of the freezer. This had taken the better part of the morning and I was hungry. I fetched a few items from the garage fridge to make myself a burger. Amongst these items was a brand new block of cheddar cheese newly purchased. After fixing my burger, I popped the fridge items into the defrosting fridge which was still cold even with the door open. While I was sitting in the lounge eating, a movement made me look up and there was Kittykie, the tortoiseshell, carefully stretching from the stove next to the fridge and climbing onto the fridge ledge, reaching for the block of cheese. I shouted and she darted out the door. Thats where I went wrong. After finishing lunch and still waiting for the iceblock to depart, I settled in to watch a movie. After the movie was finished, I returned to the kitchen to check on the iceblock and my first indication of a crime was the cheese crumbs left in the fridge as evidence. Outside lay the plastic clingfilm wrapper and the label. Of the brand new cheese block there was no sign. Oh how I screamed. A hardly used R17.00 block of Cheddar. My cats had selected their own Easter treat. Dael came to bash out the remaining ice as my patience was now exhausted and added insult to injury by saying "You should have put the cheese in a container!" And don't I know it. That sounds like something I would have said to him.

That evening I still baked biscuits to sell at the morning market. I baked until I was exhausted. The boys hadn't wanted to eat at the same time and I had left the pot of stew and rice on the stove for them to help themselves. After finishing up the last batch of biscuits, I fell into bed and the first thing I knew was a tapping on the door. It was early morning, still dark and my brother was knocking me awake. He and mom hadn't been able to raise me on my cellphone (not charged) so they had come round to see if I was all right. I threw on my clothes, grabbed the biscuits and locked up.

Later on that morning, about 11am when I returned home, the boys were awake. "Oh mom, the cats knocked off the (almost new) tub of margarine from the counter and a lot was wasted." Dael had scraped the clean marge back into the tub. First irritation! Then I discovered that whoever dished up stew last had not put the pot into the oven or fridge and the cats had eaten the remains of that too. Second irritation! Grrr! I can't blame the cats. They are opportunists and all they know is to hunt for food. But I hate to waste food especially if it can still be eaten by the human scavengers in my house.

Thankfully that was the last of the cat incidents for the weekend.