The Tale of the Freaked Out Cat

Mika received a cool little journal today from a friend. It's one of those kinds of journals where you answer questions about yourself, add in various pictures and momentos, etc. Mika asked if we could get out our color printer and print a few pictures to put into the journal. I agreed and she set it up on the coffee table so we could plug it into my laptop. (We don't keep it plugged in because we don't use it often. Keeping it more difficult to use means we aren't spending tons of money on color ink.)

So, there I was with the printer on the coffee table and me on the couch with my laptop printing up the pictures Mika selected at the sizes she needed. One of our cats, Abby, jumped up onto the couch next to me. She was quite concerned about the noise the printer was making as it zipped back and forth. Without realizing she was freaked out, I reached out to pet her. The two things combined did not go well together. She suddenly did a four-legged, straight up in the air hop backwards...and repeated the funny-looking hop four or five times right across Scott's lap, bumping his laptop, and finally down onto the ground before taking off out of the room. When she returned to the room a few minutes later, she was still skittish and hopping around in that weird way. She started swiping at invisible demons near Madelynn so I ran over to grab Madelynn out of harms way. Later still, the cat returned to the room and was checking out the table and pawing at a flower arrangement on it. She was still freaked out and looking for the source of the scary sound.

Later still...in fact half an hour later, she was still one freaked out cat. Who knew a printer could be so frightening?