If you can't be with the one you love, honey...

Business first, then deets of the day:
1. Twilight
2. New Moon
3. The Five People You Meet in Heaven
4. Telling Yourself the Truth
5. The Shack
6. On Writing
7. Marley & Me
8. Eclipse
9. Doomed Queens
10. Revolutionary Road
11. Breaking Dawn
12. She's Come Undone
13. The Reader
14. A Version of the Truth
15. Darth Bane: Rule of Two
16. Love the One You're With

So I'm sitting on the couch at roughly 3:15 and the cat knocks her food dish from the ledge. At this point, I don't even flinch. Koo will clean up whatever she spilled. (I know I shouldn't be so apathetic to it, but whatever) She's in there for a few minutes when I hear another thud, followed quickly by the bloodcurdling meows of Aeris in pain. Not that I've ever heard Aeris like that before, mind you, but it's an easy guess. In the millisecond it takes me to throw down my books and yell "I'm coming, Aeris!!!" my mind finds two distinct scenarios. One, the more unlikely, is that Aeris got too close while Koo was sniffing around for food and Koo got angry with her. But Koo doesn't get aggressive with Aeris, AND I would hear growling if that were the case. So I assume that whatever the thud was, it landed on the kitty. No idea what could have fallen on her, but in any case, I'm imagining her intestings getting more compressed by the second as her meows of pain turn into shrieks.

If she weren't shrieking, I would be amused by what I find, but instead, I'm horrified: the cat is dangling upside down, with her foot tangled in the rope for the blinds. My first instinct is to quickly scoop up the cat and simply remove the foot from the rope. WELL. Let me tell you. Whereas when Mikenna is hurt, she becomes a helpless little puddle, Aeris McNinja Beatrice turns into almightily pissed off feral jungle cat, a fact that I had no way of knowing before the instant when shrieking Aeris turned into shrieking-hissing-clawtheshizznitoutofmyarms Aeris. At this point, we have a crisis situation. Not only is the cat even more frantic, but she won't let me help her. I briefly consider cutting the ropes, but the intensity of the howling makes me afraid that I don't have time to go get scissors. I try a couple more times to get in near her, but clearly she is going to claw the living crap out of me if I even try. As I begin to grow more frantic, Koo wonders if her sissy is playing, so she steps up near the cat, who begins hissing with a vicious franticness that sounds like a large Italian housewife spitting indignantly. (I imagine if cats could swear, Aeris would have been screaming obscenities at her.)

I realize that my only course of action is to wedge a pillow under her and lift - and if that doesn't work, try to get Aeris to attack another pillow while I lift her up. Thankfully, the pillow lifts her just enough that she is able to wiggle free of the rope and runs off. She's fine, but a little skittish for a while, while I went off to apply neosporin and bandaids to my new found gouge marks and let my frantic heartrate and shaking subside.

The humor in all this, of course, is that Aeris is woefully ungraceful. For a cat, she falls off of things, misses jumps, and is a bit of an all around klutz. What cat falls out of a window AND gets her foot caught in the blinds? I jokingly told Matt that Aeris is like a rogue who fails her dexterity checks...miserably.

So, the lessons from today are these:
- Untie the knots in your blinds. I can't imagine what little miss dexterity would have done if this had happened while I wasn't home!
- The frightened and in pain cat will NOT act like the demure, loving kitten you know her to be and will claw the living daylights out of you, given the chance.
- Aeris could definitely hold her own in a fight, so long as there aren't blinds involved. She rolls roughly 4 D10 piercing/slashing damage, and 1D4 biting damage.