We have a cat that’s about 1 year old. She found us when she was barely big enough to hold in just one hand. She started out as a typical night roaming cat until the night she got beaten up and now she sleeps in our room at night. She won’t even go close to the outside door after dark and sleeps throughout the night. When the alarm goes off she starts meowing, loudly, for food.

Most days I wake up in stages. The first stage is at the 6 am alarm, the second is the 7 minutes later snoozed alarm and so it progresses. By 6:30 I am usually out of the bed and headed to the shower. Please be aware that being up doesn’t really mean I’m awake and fully functioning, because I am not really awake or functioning.

A couple of days ago, according to my regular morning routine, I stumbled into the bathroom and turned the shower on. After I got into the shower, I noticed that there was mud running off my foot. I thought that was odd but decided that it had come off my flip flop. I continued standing under the running water enjoying the warmth and waking up. A few minutes later, I noticed the mud was still on my foot. As I was leaning down to look at my foot, this horrible smell assaulted me. It smelled like crap. Furthermore, it kind of looked like crap. Really, crap on my foot at 6:30 am? I had to be mistaken.

I opened the shower curtain and looked on the floor; again, thinking it must have come off my flip flop. Right there on the bathmat was a large pile of crap with a perfect print of my foot right in the middle of it.

Need I say that I scrubbed my foot (and the shower) within an inch of their lives? One can only imagine how the rest of that day panned out.