Flying Cats?

Well, nearly.  Friday morning, I thought I heard a crash around 3:45 am.  Its a pretty common occurrence with our 2 kitties.  At 4:40 the alarm went off as usual and after shaking out some cobwebs, I heard the distinctive sound of cat having way too much with a toy.  I figured they’d snuck one of their toys out of the lower level and were gleefully smacking it around on the hardwood floor in the living room.

I race out of the bedroom and flipped on the hall light to try to catch the perpetrator in the act.  Sure enough, there’s Dexter putting distance between him and a little black tube.  What is that?  No wait, it can’t be.  Oh @#$% it is.  Its the top to a nail polish bottle.  Stay cool don’t lose it yet.

I made it into the kitchen and flipped the light on.  Ok, then I lost it.

Smashed across our nice ceramic tile floor was the remains of one nearly full fire engine red nail polish bottle.  Much cursing was then had.  I wheeled around the living room and began to look for a blood like trail.

Surprisingly, there was none to be found.  Damn, good thing too.  If there was, I probably would have thrown Dexter straight out the front door, slamming the door behind him soon after.

Surmising that is probably nearly impossible to effectively clean nail polish while its still wet, we flipped some rubber made containers on top of the puddles and duct taped them down to keep the cats from tracking it all over the house.  I knew the polish would come off the tiles themselves without too much hassle.  But, was guessing that the grout would just drink it up.  Prayed a bit that when everything was dry, we could just peel it up in one big sheet.

A day a later, razor blade in hand, I tried to lift a corner of one of the puddles.  At first, it seems plausible.  But, then I realized that the ceramic tile is just porous enough that razor blade skims across the surface and leaves a lot of polish stuck in all the pores.  Yuck, the grout will be even worse.  So, I scraped all I could and cleaned up the remnants with nail polish remover.

After getting most of the polish off the grout with the razor, I followed up with a wire brush.  I helped a little bit, but you can still see the red pretty easy.  Crud.    Maybe some nice fresh dirt ground into the grout will cover it up eventually.  For now, I guess we’re stuck with the painful reminders for now.

At this point, I’m guessing we won’t be leaving anything out on any horizontal surfaces that are kitty accessible.