Ellen has a friend, we'll call her "A", who, I kid you not, is every bit as cat-obsessed as she is. In fact, A has even more cats than we do (6), in a house slightly smaller than ours. Ellen and A are so close they've been accused more than once of being "the cutest lesbian couple I've ever seen" by complete strangers.

"A" tends to be, well, "organizationally challenged", but she's so cute about it all you can do is secretly plot to drown her. Like my wife, fate needs only the slightest tease of loose thread to completely unravel an entire sweater's worth of planning in A's life. You don't hold it against her, but she tends to be the kind of person you lie to and say an event is an hour earlier than it actually is, just so she'll show up on time.

One of the things A and Ellen do is cat-sit for each other. Not only do they cat-sit, they look forward to it, not simply changing litter and filling the food bowls, but hanging out with the cats, playing with them, even singing songs with them. Swear to god if they could get away with it, they'd build campfires for them and roast marshmallows. Sleepovers are not uncommon.

So today it was our turn to make the half-hour drive to A's house to provide the full ten-point-deluxe cat sitting experience. Even better, since Ellen is in "that delicate state", I would be the mule privileged to slop out the two cat boxes while Ellen got to play involuntary snug-and-cuddle with whichever cat was unfortunate enough not to see her coming.

Watching this in action is always a slightly surreal experience. Ellen is well known for having quite distinctive "voices" for each of our five cats. Right down to accents and unique vocal rhythms. What is not widely known is she can, in as little as fifteen seconds, come up with such voices for any cat on the planet. She had long ago bestowed "true voices" on A's six, and was looking forward to having long discourses on the texture and bouquet of the latest three-day-dead-rodent wet cat food.

Ellen justifies my participation in this scheme by telling herself "I'll buy him dinner". And she'll mean it too, because she and A are the only two people in the universe who think schlepping out cat boxes, whose odor favorably compares to a four-day-old armadillo roadkill on a west Texas highway and actually has an airborne texture, is fun. Why was I really doing it? Don't you read this site? Hint: We Do Not Make Requests to Those Who Should Rightfully be Grateful Serving Our Majesty.

A had dropped off keys and instructions (written, and signed, by one of her cats). And therein, as they say, lies the rub. Because A didn't know you were only supposed to get keys made by a locksmith, and she also didn't know if you simply had to get them made by the Simpson's teenager at Home Depot you should test them.

Me, I know how Ellen and A work. I was surprised we'd made it all the way to her house without having, say, a seagull spear through our windshield or a crazed chipmunk gnaw through our tires. As Ellen most colorfully puts it, "sh*t always happens to us, always."

So I didn't even roll my eyes when Ellen started rattling the keys in the lock. I knew that this was tantamount to accusing The Empress that she was... *GASP* ... w-r-o-n-g (we don't even say it at our house, we have to spell it) about something. Being quite experienced in A and Ellen's relationship, I let the goddamned lock take the first bullet for not cooperating with my beloved.

"It's not working... none of them are working." In the meantime we're hearing "MIAOW!!! MIAOW!!! GGGRRRrrrrRRMIAOW! MIAOW MIAOWMIAOWMIAOW!!" on the other side of the door.

Did I mention that A lives in a condo complex? And has a neighbor who is a complete stranger to us? One who was probably listening to Ellen get all New York on a defenseless door, while, to them, some desperate and defenseless cat was putting up an Alamo-like last ditch effort to protect the house? Of course, all Ellen did was say "HI G! IT'S AUNTIE ELLEN! WE'LL BE THERE SOON!" I pictured A's neighbor hanging up her 9-11 call and digging out the phonebook for the men in white coats.

We'd been wrestling with the front door for a good fifteen minutes when Ellen, as wives are wont to do, mentions only in passing "I bet she locked the back door too". "BACK DOOR?!?", I say... ON THE INSIDE. What I actually did was simply grab the keys and start heading out that way, with Han Solo's immortal words "NO TIME TO DISCUSS THIS IN COMITTEE" ringing in my head (I got nearly the same answer back too).

So 'round the back we went. My perfect plan was then confronted with two realities... A's house was at the top of a steep embankment who's bottom lay somewhere outside Beijing, and A's back door was protected by a five foot tall wall. Ellen's friend, Ellen's cat project, and so, for once, Ellen went over the wall doing a convincing imitation of a G.I. going over the side of a landing craft on D-Day.

*LEAP*

*THUD*

... PAUSE ...

"I'm okay!"

In an ideal world, i.e. the one everyone else lives in, the back door lock, being different from the front door lock, would've popped right open and our adventure would've been quite standard, albeit slightly delayed. In our world, the one where you trip over carpet just because it's there, we had no such luck. The best part was watching A's cats react to us through the mostly-glass back door.

Being members of a six cat household kept by someone who is quite patently a crazy cat lady in waiting, many of A's cats are... well... we'll just say three steps inside neurotic. The expression they had on their face as they gathered 'round the door was not "oh, we are SAVED!", but rather "ohmygodohmygodtheressomeoneatthedoorandthey'recomingcomingcomingforusshitshitshitwhatdowedoWHATDOWEDO!!!"

Well, it didn't matter, because, as expected, that door stayed locked too. Ellen, being busy plotting how to put the impudent lock at the bottom of the East River, blithely leapt over the wall to start heading back to the car, forgetting the Sarlaac pit underneath. After several moments of desperate scrabbling and at least one "GETOWFFME", we dusted off and headed home.

Life-and-death cellphone calls were exchanged. After all, to these cats hunger was something that happened to other people and the shock would probably cause them all to roll on their chubby fuzzy backs and stick four paws into the air. Fortunately, A's ex-husband had keys that would work, and so A would not be confronted with sunken-eyed, half dead emaciated east African famine cats, as she was quite patently convinced she would.

Hey, I didn't care. I managed to skip the damned cat boxes!