Looks Can Be Deceiving

I realized today that I still hadn't shown you all pictures of my other adopted baby, Jasmine!

Here she is on a dining room chair:

And here is a picture of her taking advantage of laundry day to slip into a tear in the mattress cover:This is her with Kenny. Aren't they cute? And so innocent...looking....

Mostly, Jasmine is the quieter, more docile of the two kitties. However, I did have a mild scare with her a few weeks ago when she snuck out without me seeing her.

I'm still not sure how she got out. One day I couldn't find her anywhere in the house and was starting to worry. Jasmine is an adept hider, though, and can cram herself behind the entertainment center better than one would think. But somehow, I had a feeling that this time she really WASN'T inside the house.

After spending a good deal of time searching all of her usual hide-outs, I happened to casually glance out the kitchen window as I walked by. Wouldn't you know it, there was Jasmine walking around in the backyard! Except, the only problem is that it's not MY backyard. Technically, it's the neighbors, and I don't have access to it from the house.

Frantic, I opened the window and called to Jasmine, hoping she'd decide to repent of her wanderings and come home. Unfortunately that did not happen. To make matters worse, the open window proved to be too much of a temptation for Kenny and before I could grab him, he'd jumped out as well!

Distraught, I began desperately weighing my options. The bars on the open window made my jumping out highly implausible, so I was really left with only one other option- go talk to the neighbors. No big deal, right? Well, not when your neighbors speak the same language as you, it's not. But mine don't speak English. Not at all. However, I was not about to lose these cats to a silly linguistic barrier.

So I marched myself over to the neighbor's gate and began using basically every word in my limited Khmer vocabulary. "Excuse me....I need...ummm...I don't have...ummm....Can I...." At this point I am thinking "Why oh why don't I know the word for cat?!" But I took theatre in junior high and I'm a very resourceful person. So, I channeled every ounce of creative energy that I have and delivered what I consider to be a fairly decent cat impersonation- complete with sound effects and using my fingers for little pointy ears!

While I'm SURE I was the topic of a rather comical dinner conversation that night, my miming worked well enough to get me access to the backyard so I could look for my lost felines.

I wish I could tell you that I found Kenny and Jasmine right away. But I didn't. Nope.I had to endure climbing through a dark and dank abandoned basement with bats flying at my face for at least another 15 minutes before I finally gave up and went home.

When I walked into the house, though, I was warmly greeted by Kenny, who had decided to jump back into the window sometime during my absence! Jasmine would follow several hours later, after I had spent a full day giving myself a stomach ulcer over her departure.

Needless to say, heightened security measures have been taken since this breach.

**I know I said I would profile a student in each post. But I need to get some more info before I'm ready to do that. Sorry for the delay!