There’s disgusting messes, and then there are messes that are so disgusting I’d rather move out of the house today than look at them and clean them up. Today I found just such a vile and disgusting mess at the wall underneath my kitchen worktable. Ronin has been stashing root vegetables again.

I try to remember to check all the time to see if he has pulled anything back there to play with, but it looks like I forgot to do that for a while. There were three potatoes, two onions, and a carrot. That’s my best guess on what these vegetables were when they were vegetables, because when I found them this afternoon, they were a puddle of goo crawling with tiny little maggots and stinking to high heaven. It was so gross, I went and put on disposable rubber gloves and a painter’s mask spritzed with my favorite scent (dirt, by the way). Even that didn’t really help, because I still had to look at it and clean it up.

I wasn’t even really investigating the hidden corners of the kitchen when I found it. I was sitting on the floor in front of my kitchen cart and organizing my vast tea collection to squeeze one more box of tea into the cart. That was when I noticed a faint odor and a few too many gnats. I pulled the cart out from under the table, and there is was in all it’s wretched glory. After I got my stomach muscles under control, the first thing I wanted to do was kill a cat … the very cat that was sitting right beside me on the floor trying to make off with my teabags. Lucky for the cat I decided to clean the mess up first. By the time I finished with that my stomach was far too queasy to go on a killing spree.

And what is the little bastard doing now? I can hear him in the kitchen messing around with the onions again. It’s one of those unauthorized cat activities he refuses to learn not to do, no matter what training or punishment technique I try. He is simply determined to play with any and all root vegetables I have in my root vegetable storage area. If I had somewhere else to store them, I would, but I don’t have anywhere else to put them. Therefore, he will always be getting into them, I will always be shooing him away, and from time to time I will disgusting messes under the kitchen worktable or behind the stove (his other favorite root vegetable hiding spot).

Of all the many easy things to grab, hide and play with in this house, why does the stupid cat have to have an obsession with root vegetables?!