Kleaning the Kitchen with Chi

I had a fun morning yesterday cleaning the kitchen with Chi. Chi is a little OCD, as was Zuki, her previous incarnation. However, OCD in a kitten versus a 15 year-old-cat translates quite differently. With an older cat, you can pass it off as being "set in her ways." Chi is a kitten. How can she be "set in her ways?" She's like six months old. Anyway, OCD in a kitten has a different energy level to it too. She has vigor to add to her OCD in a way Zuki would never have bothered. Plus she can jump up to places Zuki wouldn't have been able to reach, since Zuki was a Munchkin kitty and thus very short. She usually weighed in around six pounds and had to have stairs or at least stages in order to reach high places. Forget about jumping from the floor to the countertop. While Chi is unlikely to get as tall as anyone else in this house, except for maybe Sweet Eyes, our most petite adult cat, she is probably already nearly as tall as Zuki, although I doubt she weighs more than five pounds yet. She's still growing up too fast to fill out much.

My housemate and I had both already noticed Chi's affinity for the kitchen sink, a place Zuki probably never got to see because of her stature. Chi, on the other hand, is pretty well obsessed with it right now. She must have it totally cleared of dishes and silverware. There's a drainer rack in the right side though, so we can rinse their bowls after breakfast and leave them to drain until dinner and vice versa. Now never mind that the cats aren't allowed on the counter. That's a rule that doesn't stand up to adorable kittens with keen intellects. Chi's way of moving through the world involves being cuter than mere mortals can bear and smarter than most kittens ever considered being.

She beat me to the morning dishes yesterday and started moving silverware around in the sink. The telltale clank and scrape of metal on enamel is my signal to get busy clearing the sink. Never mind that breakfast generally occurs by 5.30 am on days when my housemate has to work. She's out the door by 6.30 am, so life in the Kat House starts early most days until summer rolls around and school gets out. Then we can all sleep in a couple of hours once the katz gets used to the new schedule. If we're lucky that means getting them to sleep in until 7 am, maybe eight by the time school starts again.

I'm not always up by 5 am on the early days, but about half the time I am, so I hear the scrape and clank up close. If I'm still in bed, I can only hope my housemate can get things in the sink tamed enough that I don't have to get up and do the morning dishes before I can resume my night of sleep. I'm hoping Chi and I can move past this kitchen sink obsession soon, but if we don't, I have hope that my housemate will get faster at taming the early morning snarl of cat bowls. Chi has already managed to train both of us to get all nine bowls off the floor pronto after meals and at least  stacked and filled with hot water. Now we seem to be moving on to getting them rinsed in super hot water and set to drain so they're ready for when dinner time arrives as close to 5 pm as possible. If you think cats don't have watches, then you've never lived with one. They know what time it is at least twice a day in this house. They really only care about breakfast and dinner anyway, so that's all that is actually written on the faces of their kitty kat wristwatches. It simplifies their schedule. That way the rest of their days are open for sleeping and playing.

Then there's Chi, who also has to schedule kitchen cleanup time like no other cat I've ever met. While she's less concerned about dinner dishes, doing the breakfast dishes is a very important part of her day so the rest of her morning centers around that task until it is finished. If my housemate and I are prompt, we are free to do the frivolous things humans are apt to do, such as writing and going to work. As far as the katz are concerned, the only thing we do with our day that is important--other than feeding them or playing with them--is shopping for cat food, treats, and toys. Everything else falls under the heading of frivolous frittering, futzing, and fretting, as far as they are concerned.

So back to Chi and our morning routine. Once she'd gotten my attention yesterday with all the scraping and clanking, I rushed into the kitchen to rescue kitten and dishes only to find said kitten in the sink with the dishes. I very gently turned the water on just enough to warn her that it was well past time to get out of the sink. She got the message and leaped out far enough to get her paws out of wetting danger, but not so far as to let me off the cleaning hook. No, she sat down next to the sink and stared at the dishes until they were magically rinsed clean with steaming hot water and set to drain in the righthand sink. She cared only that the left sink was immaculate. Once the sink was cleared of dishes, she glared at the offending cutlery until it was rinsed and put in the dishwasher. Then she used that laser-like kitten glare to stare down any bits left in the sink. Once I'd mostly cleaned the sink of bits and pieces, she focused on the remaining two tiny flaws in the sink surface. One I was able to clean off, but the other I explained was a chip in the sink surface that won't go away no matter how long I scrub it. Once I demonstrated this fact to her satisfaction, she allowed me to hang up my cleaning apron. I could envision her dusting off her front paws and looking self satisfied at a job well done. Her job, that is. My work had been merely mediocre until she had saved me with her superior supervisory skills.  I was finally free to go about my morning as I pleased until she found some other task that required opposable thumbs.