All is not well in the state of Montana.

Last night – well, technically this morning – I woke up in the middle of the night at about 2:30 a.m. to pee. It was pretty chilly inside the house, so I went downstairs to find that the woodstove fire had died down and was nearly out. I spent some time getting it built back up, gave Dakota some scritches, etc. Probably downstairs for ten minutes overall. Head back upstairs. As I walk into the bedroom, Bagheera goes streaking out of the room. Okay. I go over, sit down, and immediately smell something terrible. I jump up, flick on the light.

The cat.

Just took.

A massive.

Shit.

All over my bed.

It’s probably a good thing Bagheera did go streaking out of the room, because at that moment I was very capable of violence. I let my feelings be known, vociferously. Because here’s the thing. It wasn’t just ON the bed. The bed was open. It’s not like a neat pile on the bedspread. He managed to hit both sheets, the bedspread, AND the homemade quilt on top. And, of course, my shorts…because I sat on it.

For a moment I considered just burning the house to the ground and blaming it on the woodstove, because I’m not getting paid enough for this. But I did a ten count. Then another ten count. Then a third. Got some toilet paper, flushed the cat poo. Stripped the bed, carried it downstairs, started a load of wash, cleaned myself, sent some furious text messages, found a blanket, and went to sleep.

Today dawns, and I Google what the internet has to say:

“In many cases, cats poop next to the litter box or on your bed due to certain behavioural changes. For example, if you have changed their living environment or made any changes in their house, it could be a cause for this situation. Moreover, cats could also get triggered if there are any new family members in the house. Hence, you must always ensure that no drastic changes are taking place.”

Great, super helpful. Thanks internet.

So I’m doing chores, cycling laundry, all that fun stuff. Things are finally starting to settle down, I make some lunch, I pop open a delicious beverage, I figure I’ll spend the afternoon relaxing and getting some writing done. Dakota runs in from the back yard and I notice that she smells TERRIBLE.

Uh-oh.

So I go outside, and realize that either the female goats popped their gate open from their pen or maybe I didn’t latch it properly, and Dakota has been spending the last however long chasing one of the smaller female goats around the backyard, tackling it, humping it from behind, all that good stuff.

I get the goats locked back up and text my sister, because, while I said in the first part the female goats don’t smell terrible? Maybe outside in the cold, but after Dakota spent an hour wrestling with one and then came back inside, she smells horrific, and she keeps coming up and being all PET ME PLEASE I LOVE YOU and I kept having to push her away. Rachel tells me where the dog shampoo is and I get Dakota inside the bathroom and she flatly refuses to get in the bathtub so I boost her in and she immediately starts howling mournfully. She calms down after a minute and eventually with dog shampoo and elbow grease I un-goatify her and get it to where we both smell like wet dog. I’m about to go upstairs and shower myself when I hear a loud crash.

I come out to the dining room table to discover that Seamus has knocked over the freshly opened Mike’s Harder Cranberry Lemonade that I’d left next to my laptop. In the first stroke of luck, none of it got on my laptop, sitting open, or my phone, sitting right next to it. Instead, it just rolled off the table and was now sitting in a large pool of red sticky liquid spreading across the floor.

So, then I got to mop the dining room floor.

One of my eyes (the left one) keeps twitching.

Edit: IT GETS EVEN BETTER. At some point today Bagheera went back in the room, climbed inside my suitcase, and pissed all over ALL my clean laundry. LITERALLY every clean piece of clothing I have is soaked in cat piss and my suitcase is ruined.