A weekend of Raclette and misplaced cats.

The first two weeks of the new year have gone by pretty fast. Which is mostly due to the fact that I had to work a lot. Like A LOT. I took the S-Bahn every morning last week (which means a 2k walk) and did really well with my steps. Unfortunately I misplaced my fitbit on Friday and had to go without it. Well, my cat misplaced it really. I put it on my desk like any other day, and Friday evening after work I found it on the floor. Bad kitty! It’s not supposed to play with it. So hopefully I will achieve the 70,000 steps this week.

On Saturday we visited a friend to have Raclette. Let me explain for those of you that don’t know what that is: You have a little grill that you can put on the table where you can roast meat or vegetables of your choice (pineapple tastes very good as well!). Then you have little pans where you put in your stuff and top it off with a slice of cheese, which is the put under the heating thingy so the cheese melts over your food. It is sooo delicious!

We went shopping and got all the good stuff – roast beef, chicken breast, cheese, peppers, tomatoes and more. A friend had borrowed a Raclette grill and we put everything on the table, plugged in the grill and waited for it to heat up – at which point the fuse blew. We tried everything – switching of all the lights, the fridge. Nothing helped. The fused kept blewing every time we plugged in the grill. At which point we got so frustrated, we went to buy a new one which worked just fine. My friend tried the borrowed one at her place yesterday and it worked fine. Very weird. When everything worked as planned we had a great evening though. And lots of great food.

My friend has a cat she got from a shelter. He is completely black and very shy, and he has FIV so sadly he can’t be with other cats. He is called Carter which is actually funny if you’re German because it sounds like Kater, and that’s what you call a male cat. So it sounds like you call your male cat male cat. Speaking of cats, my sister gets a the-cat-is-alive-picture from me every day now. She loves my Paulchen.

Anyway, that cat usually has its litter box in the bathroom. As I slept on my friends couch that night and she wanted to avoid the cat going crazy in the living room, she took him and the litter box into the bedroom with her.  In the morning, he was going from the kitchen to the bedroom and looked a little nervous. I thought – maybe he needs to go to the loo, so I opened the bedroom door a little and told my friend. She said she’d just bring it back to the bathroom because she had the window open. That was when we started looking for Carter – and we did not find him. We looked under the couch, under the bed, in the closets. Nothing. The cat was nowhere to be found. Of course we feared he had jumped out of the window, so we looked outside. Nothing again. My friend was very calm – I would have had a minor panic at the point. We had breakfast, searched again. I had a look behind the kitchen cupboards, but didn’t see anything (when I first got Paulchen, he hid behind the kitchen cupboard and didn’t come out for a few hours). Finally, she dropped me off at the station. When I was on my way home, I got a message from her. He had indeed hidden behind the kitchen cupboard and didn’t even come out when we rattled the treat box. But I can tell you, I was soooo relieved. And we realized that it’s very hard to find a black cat that’s hiding in dark places…