Friday CatBlogging: I'm Really Quite Innocent

So this morning I'm working away in my office in the basement and I hear noises coming from the utility room.

Some months back we were having problems with Pumpkin (pictured above), jumping up on the water heater, then getting on top of heating ducts and going underneath the floor of the kitchen.  The utility room is unfinished so there is a gap there where she can get under the floor of the next higher level of our split-level house.  To stop this, we put up chicken wire blocking the gap.  It worked quite well, Pumpkin would sit on the water heater and get quite frustrated that she couldn't go up any higher anymore.  Every now and then I would hear her there attempting to get up, but with no success because the chicken wire blocked her.

This morning I heard those noises again, except they were different.  I went in to the utility room to investigate and discovered that the rascal (pictured above) had managed to bend and twist the chicken wire to create a small opening large enough to squeeze through.  Fortunately, the noise I heard was actually her coming down from her forbidden foray under the kitchen.  I've closed the gap again.

Bad kitty!

(The main reason we don't want here going there, aside from the fact that there is no way we can reach her while she is in there, is that years ago Queenie got up there once and fell into a gap in the wall and fell into the wall!  She was wailing in there for hours.  We thought we were going have to tear the wall somehow to get her out, but Anne showed a flashlight down into the wall and Queenie managed to climb up the wall to the light.   We've blocked that off, but who knows what other trouble a cat could get into under the floor.)

As always, for more cat pictures, see the Friday Ark #75.

Comments

[Myke]

Pumpkin just wants to have fun! We have an orange cat with orange eyes also.

[chris]

Why do they go there? Maybe they know they aren't allowed to...

[James]

A few years ago I adopted a cat from a cat sanctuary called Suzie. She was so scared when I got her home that she managed to scale the bottom side of my stairs and squeeze through a tiny hole into the gap between the ceiling and the floor above. And stayed there.

Eventually I had to prise up the floor of one of the bedrooms to get her out before she starved.

The story does have a happy ending though: she settled down nicely and is a lovely little cat.

[_Jon]

My dad's cat would use the stairs to get on top of the furnace duct and hide where she could not be reached.
Then she would cry as she couldn't get down.
The worst part was that the ducts were wrapped in fiberglass and she always got sick after she got up there.
It was frustrating.

[Carl Gundel]

I haven't owned a cat in a few years now, but if I did she would sure regret jumping on top of our hot water heater. That thing gets brutally hot! :-/