Well, I’ve gone and done it now.

I’ve sprained/jammed/otherwise-injured my wrist. The left one. The SPANKING one.

You’ll forgive my occasional typing error,  as I’m currently alternately icing my hand and cursing a lot while typing one-right-hand-fingered .

The truth is, I didn’t injure my wrist. The cats did. Really only one of them, but since I’m in a relative amount of discomfort, I’ve decided to blame them all, as a whole, for the sins of one: Tahoe, the Milk Beggar.

The cats know that I am a total slave to them, and they exercise that knowledge my meowing piteously every time I enter the kitchen for coffee in the morning. They know what the milk carton looks like, they know my routine, and THEY WANT MILK.

Tahoe, in particular, has a long, multi-octave beg sound that could crush the hardest of hearts. She also has a nasty habit of darting between and under my feet in an all out, blatant attempt to take me down, thus having full access to the spilled milk carton while my broken body cools nearby. She’s a bitch like that.

This morning, I was in no mood for pouring kitty milk into multiple shallow containers, microwaving them each for 18seconds to take off the chill, and then watching them for ten minutes to make sure that no spontaneous slapfights would occur…so I ignored their meowing and got on with the business of my second cup of coffee. As soon as I walked toward the refrigerator, Tahoe was underfoot, doing her best impersonation of a cat who wants desperately to be kicked at 8:30 am. Lucky for her, I have a strict moral code about kicking the living hell out of anything other than another human being, so I two-stepped around her toward the counter, saying “No kitty milk today”.

Her response was, verbatim “That’s it, human slave. You had your chance. Now we’re going to do this my way.”

At which point she somehow managed to wrap herself around both my ankles six times in less than half a second, pitching me forward at approximately three hundred miles an hour. I caught myself against the counter with one palm, wrist bent back, and managed to somehow stay upright while still holding the milk carton. There was no pop, no slicing pain, and no visible damage – but the damn thing started swelling immediately and now looks a little like a human hand balloon.

While I’m not certain, I think that this would be considered a Bad Thing. What exactly does a spanker do with a jacked-up spanking hand, hmm? I’d ask Tahoe, but she doesn’t seem to care.

– Dana