Last week I told you about my two houseguests, Adam and Corey, staying with me for a month while their apartment is being renovated. What I didn’t tell you about is the two additional tenants who moved in with them.

The cats.

Ladies first, so I’ll introduce Boo, an older, fluffy black furball with a laissez-faire attitude. She does her thing, which is mostly sitting in the windowsill in the bedroom watching birds or sleeping on Corey’s bed. At night she hunts the same bright green cat toy which she wrestles into submission and then presents to Corey as a gift. During the day however, she can’t be bothered to move much, let alone misbehave.

Sheila is another story. A big, beautiful Maine Coon, he (yes, Sheila is a boy cat, I don’t understand it either, but there you are) lives to misbehave. His one goal in life, aside from dominating Adam’s every waking minute, is to get downstairs .

Which takes us back to last week and the delivery of the full-sized Japanese Shoji screen.

Our family is a lot of things. One of them is allergic to cats. So it was in the best interest of everyone to keep the cats upstairs during their stay. The boys ingeniously rigged the screen at the top of the stairs with heavy duty Velcro strips, so it can be popped open by humans, but not by cats. And it can’t be jumped over. By anyone.

Mission accomplished. The cats were safely ensconced upstairs and the downstairs would be allergen free.

“Not so fast,” purred Sheila, a glint of mischief in his emerald eye.

Then he proceeded to breach the perimeter by sticking his paws under the screen and popping it open. One evening we looked up and he was joining us for Happy Hour. Once Adam found him sitting on the stairs, taunting him, before he scampered down. Another night Corey followed him down and had to lure him back upstairs with treats. One morning Adam had to physically block him from coming into my bedroom while I slept, then carried him upstairs and unceremoniously tossed him into their bedroom. Yet another night Corey and I chased him around the island in the kitchen until we cornered him by the oven.

You wouldn’t think a cat that fat would move so fast.

The truth is it would be way easier to just let them come downstairs and then deal with fur and whatever later.

But where’s the fun in that?