Friday Funnies – When Hairballs Attack!

Yak? What yak?

Warden Julia here. You all know how much I love my three cats, right? To the moon and back. But on the flip side, there are also a few rather…um…repugnant things that go hand in paw with having cats.

For me, hairballs are at the top of that short list. There is only one sound more disconcerting than a cat about to yak, and that sound is…drumroll please…a cat about to yak in the middle of the night.

If there’s anything more terrifying than being woken up from a sound sleep to the disconcerting gurgle of a cat in full yak mode, I don’t know what it is. It happened to me last night. It was dark, I was groggy but suddenly wide awake and I knew that I had less than a minute to jump out of bed and grab something – tissue, towel, piece of paper, anything I could get my hands on – to mitigate the impending indignity heaped upon the poor carpet.

Also, a minute is not nearly long enough for a sleepy brain to decide whether to just lie there and deal with the carnage in the morning, or jump up like the house is on fire. Most of the time I choose not to spring to action. I’m not proud of that, exactly, but I’m just not in peak form when startled awake at 2 a.m. And that pre-projectile minute goes by so fast!! Soon enough I know it’s already too late. Once the damage has been done, what’s the point of waking up to clean? Right?

In the morning, I thought I might have to search for the yak, but there it was in the middle of the bedroom floor – the ugliest, most humongous hairball I’d ever seen. It was the length of a full grown cat, I swear!

It wasn't my yak, I swear

I stepped around the hairball because I was still too sleepy to deal with that atrocious thing. Hairball cleanup before coffee?? I don’t think so. Unfortunately, by the time I’d fed the cats and puttered around the kitchen, I’d forgotten all about that THING in the bedroom. How that could actually happen is beyond me…but it did.

I forgot all about it. That is, until I sauntered into the bedroom on a mission, stepped in something squishy and felt something cold and slimy on the back on my leg!!

Yep, I not only stepped in the yak with my bare feet, but I crushed it with such force that it flew up into the air, hit my back leg and slid down it all the way to the floor.

Eww!! Eww!! Eww! I screamed to no one, because the only witness to this mortifying moment was three very disinterested felines. My life will never be the same, but my cats…they just sat there nonchalantly licking the last trace of breakfast from their furry little faces.