So…um…I accidentally dyed my cat pink.
Yes, I know, I have previously threatened to give her a colorful pedicure, and yes, to be fair, I did recently bleach half of my own hair and dye it bright purple.
But dyeing the cat was an ACCIDENT.
For many many years, one of my favorite parts of Christmas morning was balling up wrapping paper to throw either at my brothers or at the family poodle, who would very excitedly tear the paper to shreds. Despite my grandmother’s best efforts, no one put their wrapping paper in the box she’d put in the living room for that very reason.
Obviously, Gingersnap is not a dog (we all have our personal failings, I suppose), but since she’s a fan of crinkly paper, I figured that I might be able to continue this tradition with her. She doesn’t really shred the wrapping paper, but she does like to bat at it and/or curl up on it for a nap.
She really likes to switch up where she sleeps. One night, she’ll be on one of her beds in front of the heater grate, the next she’ll be on the couch, or on a chair, or on a magazine that she’s knocked off the coffee table for reasons known only to herself, or in her tunnel, or in her ottoman, or in a box. Almost every night since Christmas, though, I’ve found her sleeping happily in a box of discarded wrapping paper.
There was nothing unusual about this, at first. Just a cat in a box, pretty standard stuff. But a week or so after Christmas, I received a few late gifts wrapped in red paper, and obviously added the discarded paper to her festive little nest.
The next day, when she got up to stretch, I saw a flash of color. Her feet were pink. The backs of her legs were dark pink. Even her tummy was a light shade of pink. (Also, there was glitter on her nose.) I guess that prolonged contact of her warm little body with the red paper had resulted in some color transfer.
Oops.
I tried getting it off with a pet wipe, which only resulted in an annoyed cat. Next, I confiscated the red paper, which only annoyed her more. She disappeared in a huff. Very disappointingly, her annoyance prevented me from getting any pictures of her pink “socks.”
2021 is already shaping up to be an interesting year. I only hope that we might be able to spend more of it together than we were able to meet in 2020.
May the vaccine deployments be a success, may our communities find ways to thrive, may we continue to support each other in hard times, and may our socks stay white in this new year.