The Boyf is out of town this week and that means that I am the cats’ only entertainment. As such, they get really, really bored when I’m not there. They have each other, yes, but as often as not they look to one another to find an accomplice rather than a playmate. They are not one another’s toys, they are in search of toys to use together.

Of late they’ve been getting intensely curious about door knobs. No, “curious” isn’t the right word. They know what door knobs do. They’ve no curiosity to satisfy on that front, I’m afraid. Rather, they’ve been working like the devil to try and figure out how to operate door knobs without human intervention. More than once I’ve turned a corner to find them stretched up, paws wrapped around a doorknob, doing their very best to turn it. I know that sounds like it’s fiction, like I’ve made it up to have a cute catblog to tell, but it’s absolutely 100% true. As a former co-worker used to say, here is my hand. I swear it is true. They have sought for weeks now to figure out how to operate doors.

To digress seemingly further, we tend to enter and leave the house through the laundry room in the back. One of the primary reasons for this is also what has given the laundry room its name: the Cat Lock, much like an air lock on a spacecraft. We can walk into the laundry room, shut the door firmly behind us, then leave through the outer door without having to ward off the cats should they try to check out the Big Blue Room on the other side of the house’s exterior walls. Now, the laundry room door doesn’t like to close all the way but we early on learned the simple trick of pushing it shut until we hear the click. As a matter of habit I tend to push the door, lift the knob slightly, hear the click and then tug on the door to make sure it’s entirely shut. I do this every time I walk through that door. I know I’ve done it for the last two days running.

And yet, when I’ve gotten home from work on both the last two days I’ve found said inner door, from the kitchen into the Cat Lock, just barely open and a furry face or two peeking at me through the crack.

One or the other of the cats – or both, gods help us – has learned to open a door with a regular, round door knob. No thumbs, people. No thumbs, but I swear they’ve learned to open doors.

I’m sorry, archaeologists of the future. Once you’ve translated this blog post you’ll know what happened to my kind. A terrible future is staring me in the face every night when I get home from work.