Laundry: it's what weekends were built in for, sadly.

When Nick is doing laundry, he takes the clean clothes up to our bedroom to fold them in piles on the bed. When I do laundry, I fold the clean clothes on the living room floor and then repack the basket to take upstairs. I'm not quite sure why I do it this way—except that it's the way I've always done it, and I like patterns.

I think of Mufasa telling Simba that everything the light touches is his kingdom. To Sophie, everything that touches the floor becomes hers by default. She's a territorial mongrel, but she's like Attilla the Hun with rosy little cheeks that you just have to squeeze: possessive, but distractingly cute.

Even though I knew she was going to bug me with the laundry, I held out hope that this time would be different…that she wouldn't look at my neat piles like pins that her bowling ball body will take care of. Not the case. I kept shoving her away. She kept coming back. Nick laughed from the couch, and I threw a pair of his boxers for Sophie to chase down (she loves playing fetch).

Once I was done and reclaimed the diversionary boxers, I noted that they were coated with bits of catnip. I brushed off what I saw, shrugged, and folded them to add to his pile. Nick is going to be a very popular human with the feline population one day this week…