This is your brain on catnip.

Anybody else remember an old YA series — I believe it was by Andre Norton — in which it turned out that felinus domesticus were actually stranded descendants of kitty-shaped aliens, who had returned to rescue them because humans were about to go boom?

I ask merely because there is a short crack, under one of my living-room baseboards. And for the last while my own fuzzy buddy, Jasmine, has been spending more and more time crouching and staring at this crack. Hard. Without moving a muscle. After half-an-hour or so she stretches, shoots me what could easily be interpreted as an Ominous Glance, and stalks off to resume normal cathood for awhile; then it’s right back to plumbing the mysteries of the woodwork.

I would chalk this up to one more example of inexplicable LOLcattery (this is, after all, the same feline who excitedly paws at the screen whenever In the Night Garden comes up on TreehouseTV) but that’s the thing — this isn’t random. It’s a crack, and it could reasonably be assumed that something might be coming out of it that would attract a cat’s attention. Especially a teenage cat. 

But there isn’t anything, as I discovered when I tried crouching along with her for a full ten minutes. Even ran a ruler under there, just in case the somethings had run and hid at my approach. Jasmine gave me a seriously annoyed look at this; evidently, I was cutting into her quality chatting time with the mothership. Or whatever.

I just hope that when the crisis comes, she remembers all those steak tidbits. Not to say the faithfully cleaned litter box. After all, (pace Dave Barry) she’s sitting right here as I type and hasn’t yet tried to stwqqwdfdsgfghpw