Sunday, November 28, 2010

Jelly's Own Thanksgiving

















Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We had a wonderful feast at Mom & Dad's on Thursday. It was a good family gathering. My sister Lisa and her kids came from Tennessee, and my brother Dave's family was there, of course. The group of 17 included my sister-in-law Judy's parents and my cousins Debbie and Jenny (and Jenny's family).

The only local family members missing from the event were Buddy the dog and Jelly & Baby (my sweet adorable kitties). However, today I discovered that Jelly (clearly it was Jelly, not Baby) had her own little day-after Thanksgiving celebration in the closet of my second bedroom. On Friday I'd gone to City Dog Market to buy the girls' usual two bags of Innova dried food—the regular kind and the low-calorie kind, which I mix together.

Usually I dump the bags of dry food directly into a big plastic container. But this time I didn't. I decided the food would stay fresher if I waited a couple weeks, until the current supply of Innova was fully depleted. As I placed the two bags on the closet floor, my thoughts about the possibility of anyone trying to get into the food quickly dismissed any such silliness: "My girls are good girls. They would never chew through the bags."

How wrong I was. I got home today from some local exploring by car (in search of my next home) and was surprised to see one of the bags of cat food on its side on the floor, a large hole carefully carved out of it. There were a couple small scraps of the foil paper-lined bag on the floor. But as I write this, I realize now that there was much less volume of paper scraps than the size of the hole warrants. Hmmm. . . . I can't wait for that to show up in the litter box.

Clearly Jelly is the culprit. Going to the effort to chew a hole in a bag is more trouble than Baby would think it's worth. If Baby wants food, she either eats Jelly's food or she sits next to her bowl, looks directly at me from across the room, and meows. Once. She knows I'll feed her. Baby only eats when she's hungry.

Jelly, on the other hand, thinks about food constantly. It's not like I don't feed her enough. It's that she likes to eat a lot more than she needs (not unlike most Americans). What's funny is that the bag that she chewed open contained the low-cal food, not the good stuff. I laughed at her for that misstep. Burglary is obviously not her forte.

On Thanksgiving, I was good. I am very careful about what foods I choose at these large gatherings at my mom's. The food is always so good. If I ate everything I wanted to eat, I'd be shopping for a new, larger wardrobe in no time. But I've managed to lose close to 40 pounds and have spent a small fortune on an entirely new wardrobe, so I'm not about to overdo it.

Clearly Jelly is not as concerned about her wardrobe.
















HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

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