Well, WE just had some excitement up here in Chez Broad: I got back from a wedding shower for the second next-door neighbor girl (ohmigod I'm old) where the take-home treat was these fantastic cookies in a plastic box tied with burlap and raffia, right? So I untie the raffia and let the Rube play with it, dropping it on the ground for a split second when it occurs to me that shit! You're not supposed to put any kind of string on the ground for cats because of this. Fuck!

So first thing I do after yanking* the offending raffia string out of Rube's mouth is call the 24-hour vet, where the perfectly lovely nurse tells me that I need to get him to ingest a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide to make him barf. Oh, and that it'd probably be better if I brought him in so they can inject him with it, but it costs $75 for the office visit and whatever the treatment is, and you have to pay it up front. Well, hell, I was just excited to have $45 bucks to last me through payday, so that's not going to work, what else you got? She tells me -- nicely -- that I'd need to administer it myself. Ok, but I didn't have a dropper, so I call Poppy, who's a regular St. Francis of Assisi has many animals of her own.

Now, you know that e-mail that's gone around about what happens when you give a cat a pill? Eeeeeeyeah. Rube screamed, hissed, spit and growled as if we were eviscerating him without benefit of anesthesia, and it didn't help that he HATES Poppy as it is. Haaaaates her. Always has. Anyway, after about 20 minutes of chasing him to where we could shut doors and get him cornered, Poppy, cornering him in front of my bedroom door with a towel, finally got in him a full dose, after which he took off for under the kitchen sink, where I'm assuming he barfed, but I'm not sure because there was still an awful lot of indignant growling.

Poppy took off, so I thought then would be a good time to call the bride-to-be's mother to find out just exactly how long the raffia string was. (Of COURSE you'd think that calling her beforehand would be the first logical step. Shutup.) Long story short, the raffia was used to tie the burlap in place, and the string I yanked from his mouth? Was likely the whole thing intact.

I just felt a little lick on my foot from under the desk, so I'm assuming we're all good again. But I'm telling you, NEVER underestimate the power of a 15-pound cat, because that little fucker even swatted the dropper right out of my hand. And his brother eventually came out from under the bed, but not without looking around like he'd just survived the battle of My Lai.