It Is My Honor to Protect My Girl From the Pizza Delivery Man, or, My Fault

Today something happened that Lily grins and calls one of the great social exchanges of our culture. We had a man come to the Cat Philanthropy house with a big, thin box that smelled really good. My girl calls it "a pizza box."

Lily went to the door to get it.

This, of course, wasn't safe.

There is only one human man that is safe enough to be around Lily and that is her cousinbean John and that delivery man definitely wasn't the cousinbean. The cousinbean was in the house.

So I, of course, had to come over and stand behind her and glare at the man and give him my best, "Don't you even think about it!" look, even though I wasn't sure what he was thinking about. It didn't seem like very much.

So my girl took the pizza box and turned around and she didn't expect me to be right there. In fact, she didn't even see me under the pizza box. And she tripped.

And it's my fault.

She didn't actually fall. She grabbed ahold of the doorframe and caught herself.

But she could have fallen. She could have hit her head on the entry table and gotten a concussion and fallen into a coma. She could have twisted her ankle and gotten temporary nerve damage from the inflamation. She could have... okay, maybe I shouldn't listen to every word my girl says when she plots her books aloud (she's an amateur writer of murder mysteries).

But it's my fault.

I am a mancat-in-training. I weigh sixteen pounds and I am a little over a foot tall. My girl is a short bean. A really short bean. If she and Shawn Johnson stood side-by-side, Shawn Johnson would be taller than her shoulder. So I am a big cat and she is a small bean and perhaps if I was a small cat and she was a big bean she wouldn't have tripped, but either way, she did and it's my fault.

I am a bad mancat-in-training and a poor excuse for a musketeer!

So now I am hiding under the bean's bed in the company of a small part of Buster's Stash of Shiny Things, most notably aluminum foil she stole. My girl has been on her stomach trying to coax me out three times, but I'm back too far for her to reach because I know if I let her scratch me in the special spot on my head, I'll collapse into a puddle and she can scoop me out.

Mancats, musketeers, how do I resolve this? This is almost as bad as the time I made my girl trip and fall down the stairs because I had my tail around her ankle.

-D'Artagnan du Chat Noir, "All for one and one for all!"

P.S. All musketeers - the sidebar will be updated ASAP can do it - as soon as my paws can do it.