The Plastic Albatross

This morning, just minutes after the alarm went off, I heard what sounded like sleet or hail pounding against our bedroom window.  I listened carefully, but didn't hear it again.  Not too many seconds after this, I noticed that Otto had jumped on the bed.  He was kind of hunkered down, and when I peered into the filtered light that was coming in through the window, I noticed that Otto had what looked like a big, bulbous, filmy mass on his back.  

It turned out that the noise I heard wasn't sleet at all.  It was actually a plastic grocery bag that had gotten stuck around Otto's neck while he was licking one compulsively.  He was actually very calm, given the situation.  I figured he'd gotten it from an adjoining room and subsequently jumped on the bed, until I went downstairs to the basement and started seeing items that I recognized as having been in a plastic grocery bag on the floor in Sean's office.  So apparently, he had become ensnared there, then run downstairs in a panic, trying to free himself of his plastic albatross.  

I'm going to guess that by the time he reached our bed, he was pretty much at his wits' end.  He may have even resigned himself to his petroleum-product-connected fate.  I kind of wonder what the prior few minutes were like, and how long he ran around with that thing around his neck.  I'll likely never know.

Flash back to circa 2002, when Wanda ended up in precisely the same boat, only we were awake to witness that one.  Wanda went tearing around the house like a bat out of h-e-double-hockey-sticks, trying futilely to rid herself of the monster that was breathing down her neck.  Her little heart was racing like a runaway train when we finally managed to catch her and free her from her captor.  (Wanda is little, but she's also freakishly fast, so this was not particularly easy.)

Otto was right back to licking another plastic bag by the evening, thereby proving the accuracy of the phrase "his memory is good, but not very long."  Which seems to go double for cats, somehow...