Cleaning Day

Today I decided to clean the living room carpet, both vacuum and shampoo. So the first step was to pull the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. As soon as the first rattle of the cleaner was heard, Gus dived out through the cat door into the garage for the duration. Julius ran out the back door and made himself scarce.

Calpurnia was unphased and took a great interest when I started moving all the furniture out of the living room carpeted area. Since  I have lots of furniture and little spare floor space this produced a big pile of furniture in the entryway and dining room area.

Calpurnia thought this was the coolest thing ever.  I looked over to see her swinging from the cat tree top shelf trying to get up and failing,  She hopped from table to table getting more worked up and I got the camera fast enough to capture this:

That has got to be the craziest face I’ve ever seen on her, bar none.  She soon calmed down enough to do some exploring, Here she is wondering why there is an end table in the bathroom behind the ottoman in the doorway….

She hung out watching while I vacuumed, only dodging back when I got really close to her. When I was done, she found the empty room a good place for a lie-down rest.

The cleaning machine was even noisier and wetter, so she soon bailed out and sat outside until I was done.  Julius came back with a lizard between the vacuum and shampooing, which was a good thing since it made chasing it down easier. I’m not sure if it was intended as a bribe to not clean in the future, but I’m not ruling it out either.

Gus finally came back in from the garage about dinner time, but I bumped into the vacuum in fixing his food so he was back out to the garage like a shot.  I had to coax him back in a couple of times.  It’s not that he is terrified every second he’s out there, he just makes himself scarce when the cleaning needs to be done.