Carmelized Minions

I don't know if it will help the Birthday Girl out, but I offer up our cat Oscar's minion services. Here we have Oscar, who is attempting to hunt his own shadow:


Unfortunately, he failed this time, but I still have faith in him. Well actually no I don't. Keep in mind that this is a cat who very closely resembles a hook 'n ladder truck with no one driving the back end. His butt is somehow not connected to his central nervous system, and therefore flails about from side to side, often crashing into chair legs, cabinets, people legs, and occassionally nothing at all. We've often been acused of beating him but I assure you we don't do any more than our parents did to us.

He is happiest while chasing laser dots or in front of heating vents, which I assume is like huffing gas or glue for cats. Oscar is not the best hunter in the world, although probably not the worst either. I saw a few very slow moving, slightly flattened cats on the road one time, and they didn't look like they could catch much. I did witness Oscar sucessfully stalking a dead leaf one time, but it was only because he was running awkwardly and fell over on it. If he does ever catch a living creature, it will be purely due to collision.

The best Oscar story though (besides when Hillary Swank totally dissed that Lowe dude), happened a couple years ago when he was probably two years old. We lived near the large university here, and Oscar went missing for several weeks when it was really cold out...Minnesota cold, we're talking about here...not pansy Iowa or Missouri cold. Anywho, we thought he had been scooped up by a neighbor with a nice meat cellar, or tried to lick a car radio antenna and got stuck, and we would never see him again. Fortunately, he is bionic. And by that, I mean he has one of those microchip doohickies in his neck. Someone had turned him in at the animal humane society 20 MILES AWAY (!). We still aren't sure how he got there, although we suspect he constructed some kind of cat-sized raft and went down the Mississippi Huck Finn style. But we got him back. The only damage done was that the woman who had found him in her garage (20 MILES AWAY !) intended to keep him before realizing her husband was allergic to cats, and had him spade or neutered (the man one -- thanks Bob Barker!), and his front claws removed (pet-icure). I guess you could say he learned his lesson....running away = you lose important parts of your body.