Our roommate Shawn left for work at 5:30am on Monday. In preparation for same, he took a shower. After the aforementioned, he left the bath mat on the floor, instead of hanging it over the shower door like he’s supposed to.

Consequently, when our cat Scrum passed by Shawn’s bathroom, he noticed the bath mat down on the floor, ambled over and took a leak on it. He proceeded to do so at least one more time during the day.

(Don’t ask me why he does it: old or new, red or blue, Scrum likes to piss on bath mats. Not sofas, not carpets, not down comforters or reproductions of the Magna Carta, just bath mats. Many of our dog-loving friends are rolling their eyes right about now, but I’ll take an animal who pees on bath mats over an animal that eats feces any day of the week and twice on Sundays.)

That evening, as Margaret and I were putting the cats to bed, I went into Shawn’s bathroom—which is adjacent to the room where we incarcerate the cats for the night—to refill their water dish, and saw the bath mat on the floor, with the tell-tale signs of illicit cat activity: rumpled and folded corners, where Scrum had tried to cover his “business”. I took one sniff and knew exactly what had happened.

So Instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, I stayed up to launder bath mats and clean cat urine off a bathroom floor.

Shawn was quite apologetic. He knew he was not supposed to leave the bath mat down, but he had been completely exhausted that morning.

Why had he been exhausted that morning? Because he had been up all night.

Why was he up all night?

Because he was reading,

And what was he reading…..?

Why, the latest adventures of that most nuzzleable of neophyte necromancers, Harry Potter.

My last post? I take it back. Throw me in with the Christian fundamentalists; Harry Potter is a tool of the Devil.