Vaporback Writer

Posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Flower Power


We had a change of venue for the summer staff meeting. Instead of the typical stuffy conference room, one of the managers opened up her home to the group—well, actually, she opened her yard since the house itself was too small to accommodate all of us.

Any outdoor even in this part of the world is a pretty risky proposition, even in August, because the weather can turn grumpy in nothing flat. Fortunately, the sun stuck with us throughout the afternoon. And the food, as I may have mentioned, was supreme.

Unfortunately there was one awkward moment. About midway through the agenda, I looked down to find the hostess’s cat attempting to make sweet love to my shoe—with my foot still in it. Picture Pepé LePew at his most insistently amorous—that’s the sort of attention that the cat was inflicting on my shoe. I tired tucking my foot under me to discourage Mr. Romance Kitty, but he jumped into my lap and attempted to retrieve the shoe from above, which, as you might imagine, was a bit of a scene. We finally had to interrupt a fascinating discussion about the finer points of library administration so that I could explain the hypnotic effect my footwear sometimes has on cats. See, this year I noticed an unusually large crop of volunteer catnip sprouting between my patio pavers. Normally, I’d pluck these seedlings out with the rest of the weeds, but since marauding neighborhood cats had decimated my usual catnip patch, I decided to let it go ahead and grow. It wasn’t long before the act of walking across the patio began to transfer the magic aroma onto my shoes. These are shoes I normally wouldn’t wear to work, but they seemed just right for a potentially muddy staff meeting. I had no idea they would become the center my manager’s cat’s borderline pornographic fantasies.

So, to end the distraction, I surrendered my shoe to the cat by taking it off and tossing it behind a bush where it and the kitty could continue their courtship in the privacy they both deserved. At the end of the meeting, when I rescued my shoe, it was still damp. Ew.

My patio has looked like hell most of the summer with weedy clumps of catnip growing everywhere. But I harvested it all today, and it’s not a bad yield for a volunteer effort. I’ll let it dry on racks in the garage for a couple of days before making the kids strip the leaves off the stems and store them in Ziploc baggies (when I made them do this chore last year, it was the first time in recorded history that they actually insisted on taking showers in the daytime). Our special “Meowie Wowie” blend has proven very popular with our cat-burdened friends. Just don’t get pulled over with a baggie of it in your car. You really don’t want to be in the position of saying, “No, really, Officer—it’s just catnip.”

This is enough 'nip to see my two cats through the winter plus most of the cats in our extended cat network.

USDA inspectors get to work grading the newly harvested crop.