Laptops and Kittens....

I mentioned the other day that we have four cats currently.  Three of them are 18 month old kittens (ok, at 18 months, they're not kittens anymore, but we still refer to them as "the kittens").

A while ago, one of them (Aphus, we believe) discovered that if they batted at Valorie's laptop, they could remove the keys from the laptop, and the laptop keys made great "chase" toys.  Valorie has taken to locking her laptop up in a tiny computer nook upstairs as a result, but even with that, they somehow made off with her "L" key.  We've not been able to find it even after six months of looking.  To get her computer up and running, we replaced the "L" key with the "windows" key. Fortunately she's a touch typist, and thus never looks at her keyboard - when she does, she freaks out.

Last night, I left a build running on my laptop when I went to bed.  Valorie mentioned that it would probably be a bad idea to do this, since the kittens were on the loose.

Since I couldn't close the laptop without shutting down the build, I hit on what I thought was a great solution.  I put the laptop in two plastic bags, one on each side of the laptop (sorry about the mess on the table :)):

I went to bed confident that I'd outsmarted the kittens.  My laptop would remain safe.

Well, this morning, I got up, and went downstairs (you can see Sharron's breakfast cereal on the table to the top right).  I asked the kids if there had been any problems, and Daniel, with his almost-teenager attitude said "Yeah, the kittens scattered the keys on your laptop all over the kitchen".

I  figured he was just twitting me, until I went to check on the computer...

Oh crud...

There were the keys, sitting in a pile where Sharron had collected them...

I love my cats, I really do...

The good news is that I managed to find all the keys, although I was worried about the F8 key for a while.