I thought they were supposed to be low-maintenance.

I am first going to say that I am head over heels for our kittens/cats.

And then I am going to tell you that some days I'm ready to hand 'em over to my sister's crabby neighbor who sets neighborhood cats loose up Butterfield Canyon.

Yesterday I was juggling a million tasks while making dinner. I have a big cottage cheese container that I've been using to pour old cooking oil into (bacon grease, etc.). It was full, and sitting on the counter waiting for me to take to the trash.

I should have known better, but it was sitting right next to the fish bowl, which just happens to be Willow's favorite drinking bowl when he thinks we're not watching. So while I had my hands sticky with bread dough, Willow jumped up on the counter to drink from the fish bowl (naughty kitty) and somehow jumped into the container of grease, spilling it all over, but not before submerging his whole hind quarters in it. So lets see....my hands are covered with bread dough and flour, the counter, backsplash, and floor is covered in grease/oil. And I have a pissed-off half-greased cat running through my house trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

I alert the girls--one grabs Gabby (the dog) to keep her out of the grease, the other grabs Mango to keep her out of the grease, and I go searching for Willow. After tracking him down, we tried to figure out the next step. What do you do with a cat who is covered in semi-liquid bacon grease? We first tried toweling him off. That did nothing. And I couldn't just leave him--for one thing he stunk. For another, did you ever see that Oprah where the kid drank baby oil? So did I. I wasn't going to let that worry keep me up for the next week. So I tried something that in hindsight was not the smartest thing. I put him in the shower stall and turned it on. Let's just say the sounds that came from that shower would have made a sailor blush.

So that didn't work. We finally decided on a good ol' fashioned kitty bath in the kitchen sink. This required that I first attend to the grease spilled all over the kitchen counter and floor. Once that was done, the kitty bath went....okay. Slightly fewer feline profanities this time, although with all his scratching and flailing, Willow did pull The Joy of Cooking off my window ledge and into the bath with him. And he knocked a vase into the other side of the sink where it shattered to bits. Really lovin' the cat at this point.

Once he'd been thoroughly scrubbed clean with dishwashing soap (Dawn really does cut the grease), and rinsed, and then dunked one more time just for ruining my cookbook, we wrapped him up in a towel and started rubbing him dry.

And this is when he turned on the charm. He snuggled right in and started purring and acting like the last 90 minutes was just exactly what he had hoped we could all do that afternoon.