Piper’s Last Stand

Blogging has pretty much taken a back burner to everything lately. I have a lot of things going on right now, and I am staying pretty busy. We are having Thanksgiving at our place next week. Originally we were expecting as many as 15 people, but it turns out we’ll be lucky to have more than 4 people (besides ourselves) show up.

I can’t believe Christmas as going to be here in a little over a month. Every year Jennifer and I say we’ll start shopping early, but we never do it. We wind up having to buy all our gifts in the last month. Neither one of us could really think of anything we wanted for Christmas this year, so we are talking about buying a new recliner. Our existing recliner is an eye sore. We bought the leather recliner we have about 5 years ago.  We had also gotten a cat not long before that, and we named her Piper. One weekend, we decided to go out of town and leave Piper at our apartment with our new recliner. We thought everything would be OK.  Up until then, Piper had left the chair alone. When we got home, we discovered that Piper had decided to chew the thing up from top to bottom. Yes, I said chew. When we first saw the results we assumed the obvious: she had clawed it. There may have been some of that too, but over the years we discovered that it was chewing that did the chair in. We got part of the chair reupholstered at one point because my wife was convinced Piper never messed with the chair anymore. Well, we discovered she preferred perfect leather upholstery. Once she had chewed it up, it apparently lost its appeal. I’ve kept the chair for this long because we put so much money into it, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. Besides, it was ugly, but it still worked. That changed a year or so ago with it stopped reclining. So now its not only an eye sore, but it doesn’t work anymore.

Most people tell me we should have gotten rid of our cat when she chewed up the chair the first time, but we kept Piper until this past summer. She was getting meaner and meaner over the years and wasn’t adjusting to Grace. Piper could have been mean to almost anyone she wanted and Jennifer would not have cared, but when she started hissing at Grace, Jennifer turned on her. The only person in the world that loved that cat decided it was time for her to go. I’ll save the story of getting rid of her for a later date, but it involves an empty potato sack, piano wire, a cinder block and a little event we refer to as “dunking day”. I am joking, of course. We left her at an animal shelter and like to think someone fond of possessed animals took her home.