I sat there, staring blankly for a few seconds, until Plaid, a thin half-Siamese calico cat, emerged from her little hidey-hole under the counter of the kitchen. We stared at each other for a bit as the wheels in my head registered what I had forgotten. When I remembered that Plaid could sneak between the cupboard and the wall where the exposed drawers were under the countertop, a part of my brain shut down.
A couple minutes, one scared cat and another headache later, I was on top of the shelf under the counter pushing away at the drawer. A couple minutes of fighting had it out about three inches before it stuck solid, as it was known to do on occasion. I cursed it, then went out from under back to the countertop to check if I could get a knife out. I pawed at the metal for a few seconds, arranging a metal butterknife so I could grip it with my teeth.
The drawer clattered to the ground, followed by a very angry and frustrated hiss, minutes later. The contents spilled all over the kitchen floor, allowing me to step on a knife and slide it along the ground. I braced it against the one step up into the living room and lifted it. A carefully balanced flip sent it halfway across the floor. I approached it, balanced on my hindquarters, picked it up with my paws and heaved it as hard as I could up to the desk. It hit the front of the desk and ricocheted back at me. With a shriek, I darted out of the way and barely missed being skewered by my vengeful tool.
"That was close."
I picked up the knife, shimmied over, and tried again. The knife hit the wall and landed with a slap on a precariously purched stack of paper still resting half on the desk. It teetered for a bit with the papers before settling back down.
I let the breath I was holding go and leapt on top of the desk. Again, I gripped the knife - So much harder without my opposable thumbs to keep a grip on the situation - and arranged it so it would wedge down between the plug end and the power bar. I carefully jimmied it down until it balanced by its handle within the small space. I then snaked my way between the knife and wall, placed one hindpaw on the power bar, and both front paws against the knife and pushed. For thirty seconds, it was a battle of man-cat ingenuity and the stubbornness of the plug. I strained and pushed, groaned and hissed, even muttered some obscenities to convince the power bar to give its hold on the plug up. Eventually, the plug popped off and I fell face first onto that last stack of papers, which inevitably slid off the desk and landed on the floor.
I lay there for a few minutes enjoying the pain. Every second of this day had been nothing but a comedy of errors, set up to give the clown in the middle of the ring nothing but laugh-at-me-I'm-in-pain-or-a-forgetful-loser moments.
I was gerting tired of them.
So, with a frustrated grunt, I picked up the plug and heaved it into the plastic. I then pushed the container from the living room into the kitchen, from the kitchen outside, from the deck to the gravel, and finally from the gravel into the main pig part of the barn in a corner with a plug isolated from everything else.
There I sat and stared at my prize - my Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE.
And cried.
I had just committed my first act of thievery, and it was against my own family.
I cried myself into my first nap of the day.