How I spent my "free" hour for Daylight Savings

One time I witnessed an interesting conversation. A gym-goer was wearing black workout pants had a huge patch of dog hair on her butt. The instructor then made a comment that made me certain that she was not a pet-owner. She said "What did you do? SIT on your dog???" Ahh, if it were only so simple.  Pet hair has a way of finding clothes of the opposite color, no matter what you do to avoid it.

Even though she looks predominantly black, my 14-year old cat, Samantha has a white belly. I know that if I'm going out of the house wearing black, I cannot put on that article of clothing until I am literally walking out the door. If I put on my black workout pants and sit down to reply to an email, I will have white, furry butt, just like my poor comrade at the gym. No matter how much you clean the hair off a chair or sofa, it comes back almost immediately.

Fast-forward to today...Daylight Savings November 1, 2009. To put it mildly, I was behind in my housework. There were FOUR clean loads of laundry in need of folding and putting away. Not a fan of standing alone in a tiny, dark room, I decided that I would move all of the clean laundry onto the bed and fold it there. But there was one small problem with the bedspread:

CAT FUZZ.

Even though the duvet cover was just washed, the cat hair still remained. Once washed, the hair does not magically disappear as one would hope. Rather it gets concentrated into little clumps or "fuzzles", which also take hold for dear life. The only way that I have found to remove this hair is with some elbow grease and a rubber sponge I got from Bed Bath & Beyond.

My Weapon of Choice: The rubber sponge

Hair, Hair, everywhere

A Fuzzle

As it was cold, I was wearing a tank top and two long-sleeved t-shirts. By the time I had 'sponged' the duvet cover both of the t-shirts were off and the fan was on.  (Does this count as a workout?) Then I began to De-Fuzz a fleece blanket, but when I tell you that those hairs were glued there forever and will remain until Armageddon, I would not be exaggerating.

I figured that I could lure Samantha off the bed so that it could remain fuzz-free by making the fleece blanket into a SPECIAL bed, JUST for HER! I would place it at the foot of the bed and therefore lure her away from our bed. Brilliant idea, right?

Here, kitty kitty. Come to your new bed!

Yeah, well she's way too smart for that. She had a good sniff around and then proceeded to her usual spot.

Um, yah mummy, I'll stay here thanks.

You can see her paw-prints on the fleece where she briefly contemplated relocating her lounging activities.  Then she found her way back to her original spot. Ugh. (Can you hear me screaming in Sherman Oaks?)

Near her tail is a ball of hair I retrieved from the duvet and the fleece. Looks like a fur-poop.

This labor (cough) of (cough) love took the better part of an hour. But since I was on a roll, I decided to tackle the Cat Tree, aka Kitty Condo. Oh boy was I in for a treat!

Ack, more hair

Samantha sniffs the now-enormous blob of hair retrieved from the condo and bed.

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Feeling accomplished, I went to lunch.  When I came back, I found THIS:

Can you hear me screaming in Salt Lake City??

More fuzz!

The guilty party returns to the scene of the crime

You might ask how this sort of follicular mayhem can happen in such a short amount of time?

The "Ear Scratch"

"The Licky Lick"

"Because I can"... Now the yoginis are envious.

A bit of privacy, please?

I re-cleaned the offending areas and went to wash some dishes. I kid you not, 5 minutes later I returned to find that she had decided that she no longer wished to lay on the nice, clean bed. So she found a new place to hang out instead....

The NEW clean pile of laundry. Note my black workout pants in the foreground.

Can you hear me screaming in Chapel Hill??

Well, after all that excitement and activity, there are still 4 loads of laundry to fold.  Glad I had that extra hour.

Q: What did you do with your extra hour?