I think I posted sometime back about our old cat Tigra’s love for lapping water out of the shower hose hooked up to our bathtub. It’s become her favorite method for regular drinking. Oh, she has the necessary water dish which we strive to change regularly, and we have visual evidence that she does drink from it. But the bathtub drink is what she prefers — well, it’s her second choice anyway, we recently discovered. Lapping from puddles in flooded basements appears to be her favorite watering hole.

Yeah, well, of course we don’t allow that — but we just discovered yesterday what a problem it could be. We, as with several million other people between Texas and the mid-Atlantic coast, suffered from that huge nearly-nationwide rainstorm that swept through here on Monday and Tuesday. Our damages were very minimal, thanks to the good old sump pump in our basement. (If you don’t know what a sump pump is, look it up. I don’t have time to explain.).

But we did get some small rivulets of rainwater and seeping groundwater in the old basement. What we didn’t realize until Tigra followed my wife, Shirley, downstairs was that Tigra is intrigued by these tiny rivers of slowly flowing and standing water. She loves to lap from them.

Fortunately, Shirley caught her in the act and we’re now keeping her out of the basement until everything gets dried up and cleaned up.

Darn cat, why can’t she just be cooperative and drink from that water dish I labor to keep fresh and full?? Or at least just the dish and the bathtub drinks — but nasty old basement flood water??

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