That Darn Cat

This is Hobbs, he is our land lord’s cat and he is a pretty nice cat. The kids like him well enough and for what ever reason they have never called him Hobbs but they call him Robin because he looks like the fox from Robin Hood. Any way this cat likes to get up under our house when it gets cold and sit on the heater ducts to stay warm and makes a lot of noise banging around and meowing and stuff. It was pretty annoying but we figured that maybe he was at least discouraging mice and since he isn’t our cat there really wasn’t much we could do about it. Well one day we started smelling something dead and we figured that a mouse had died some where in the walls. We tried everything to keep the house from stinking but it just got worse and worse, then with a sinking feeling we realized that we hadn’t seen the cat for quite a while and wondered if our problem was bigger then a dead mouse, like cat sized bigger. I called the land lady and asked her if she had seen the cat recently. She said that no, the cat was gone. He had been looking sick lately and one day a few days ago just never came home. I told her I was pretty sure I knew where her cat was. Weldon had crawled under the house a few times to see if he could locate the cat but all he could find was a tear in the plastic and the insulation where the cat would get in, but that was on the other side of the house from where would would usually hear him banging around at. Finally after talking to the land lady and knowing for sure that we were not dealing with a measly little dead mouse, Weldon armed himself with elbow length gloves, garbage bags and a knife to cut through the plastic covering the insulation and crawled once more under the spider infested crawlspace under the house. Weldon felt around under the house where the smell was the strongest and found a spot that was heaver then every where else. He had found that cat!! He cut the plastic and pulled the cat out and shoved it into a garbage bag, then army crawled out pulling the dead cat behind him and swearing at the stupid thing the whole way out. It was actually kind of comical at that point but since he was doing all of the dirty work and I was just playing the role of moral support I didn’t dare laugh at the situation just yet. After he got out and buried that cat and took a shower and cleaned up we laughed about it together. I am sure grateful that he was willing to get under there and take care of the problem though and sure enough the house began to immediately smell better! That night Colton said the prayer and he prayed for a new house with “no stinky cat”. It was cute. Weldon has pretty much sworn that he will never own a cat now, but Kaci is determined that at some point she will have a kitty, we will have to see what ends up happening but my money is on the three year old.