Hmmm, now that I think of it I haven’t written any “cat stories” in a long time. I suspect I was reminded of this subject recently when “Punky” jumped up and walked on my keyboard when I was typing some stuff in MS Word resulting in my perfectly constructed sentence momentarily having several “z’s” in the middle of a word! Oh well, I’m one of the very few men that admit they like cats. They are always good for a laugh when I need one with all the weird stuff they do. I also just love to play with their feet and those soft pads!!! They seem to like that since they have sensors there. In fact, the more I study cats from various books, I find they seem to have sensory nerves everywhere on them! It’s a proven fact that petting a dog or a cat actually lowers your blood pressure! Cool, huh! Whenever I go out to the stable, as I approach the barn, I am surrounded by at least 4 to 8 cats that make up the denizens that live in my barn! I have to feed them first before I do anything with the horses since it’s so hard to walk without stepping on any of them. One good thing about having all those cats in the barn is that only a really dumb or just plain crazy mouse would ever dare to get into the feed box and eat the horse feed! One thing, among many, relative to cats that Tim and I still laugh about is the way every cat would make an escape from us when we were kids. The living room was one of many places where we liked to tease any cat that was foolish enough to get near our grasp. Normally they knew better than to get too close to us, so we usually had to catch one of them. We would torment and tease them and generally make their lives miserable. I always had more fun teasing cats because I really think they take themselves much more seriously then dogs do themselves. We rarely caused them any physical torture, just mainly mental aggravation! Hey, in my earlier years I’ve driven more than my share of cats and people crazy! I would usually “nuts ‘em” by putting my face right against theirs and stare eyeball to eyeball. For some reason that really bugged them! I still do this to all my cats, but now they seem not to mind it at all. My vet says that touching noses is the way cat friends greet each other. Maybe this is what all my cats think I’m doing, heh heh. When I was finally finished with my various diabolical mental gymnastics, I would then let them go. However, more often than not they would flail their feet in several directions and scratch us thus resulting in a successful escape from our evil clutches after reaching their absolute mental  breaking point! While making good their escapes, they would be running at full cat speed, which is pretty fast if you’ve ever tried to catch a cat running at full speed! Our living room had carpet, albeit very thin and shabby. The kitchen had linoleum that was very slippery from years of use. Part of the cat escape plan was to head for the outside door in the kitchen at full speed. The carpet gave them great traction as they dug in their claws and shot away. However, when they hit the big curve in their route to the door on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, they would always loose traction and spin out and fly side ways on their side! We’d hear claw sounds sliding on the kitchen floor and the cats sliding sideways! It was really hilarious and always resulted in our rolling on the floor with laughter since they did this every time and never seemed to learn to slow down before taking a 90 degree curve at full cat speed. They probably didn’t have time to think about it since they were in such a hurry to get away from us!  I sometimes wonder if one reason God created cats was to give people like me life-long amusement. I told Tim that there came in point in my life where I knew I had finally arrived at “maturity” when cats didn’t run away when they saw me with 100 feet of them!  Now they walk under foot and have fights over which one gets to sit on my lap! Hmmmm, I have carpet in my living room and linoleum on the kitchen floor… Nah, I better not…