A near-fatal fashion mistake?

Where there are cats, there are claws.  Where there are claws, there are scratches and punctures.  For some reason, cats frequently mistake my legs for scratching posts.  For a while, it got to the point that when I drank water, it would squirt out the holes in my legs.  True, it's cute when a little kitten scrambles up your pant leg.  It's not quite as cute when you are wearing shorts.  Even less cute is when an adult cat comes up behind you and sinks its claws in the back of your leg.

In self defense, I ditched the shorts and took to wearing very baggy jeans, even on the hottest days.  This method of protection worked fairly well with small kittens.  Nothing helped with the adults.  If I walked out doors and stood still for more than a minute, I was fair game.  The big cats hated to see me standing around wasting time when I could be feeding them.  It didn't seem to matter that I had just fed them.

Of course, I wasn't the only game.  Chipmunks were also a great source of feline entertainment.  Before the cats came, we were overrun with them.  Even after the feline population explosion, there was never a shortage of the pesky little rodents.  I wasn't crazy about the chipmunks, but even to me, six or seven half grown cats against one little chipmunk didn't seem fair.  Whenever I encountered such a game, I would try and stop it to save the chipmunk. Unfortunately, I wasn't always successful.  But the cats thought chipmunk baiting was great fun.  I doubt the chipmunks enjoyed it half as much.  And the cats were always disappointed when the poor thing stopped playing.

One day I stepped out and saw a game going on.  A bunch of cats were clustered around something in the place that used to be a garden.  It was now a weed patch that did double duty as a litter box.  I had learned the hard way that cats and gardens don't mix.  I wandered over to see what the feline fiends were up to.  Sure enough, there were seven cats tormenting one chipmunk.  I began trying to chase the cats away from their victim.  While I was shooing them, the dazed chipmunk ran towards my foot.  Instead of swerving or stopping, the chipmunk ran onto my foot and up into the inside of my baggy pant leg.

I hopped around on one foot, trying every which way to shake the damn thing out of my pant leg.  All kinds of horrible embarrassing scenarios flashed through my mind, like rabies shots or how to explain a chipmunk bite on the rump to the doctor.  While hopping around, I used up every bad word I knew.  Still the rodent clung to the inside of that pant leg.  If I had been my younger brother, I would have just dropped my jeans, right in the front yard.  But even with a chipmunk clinging to the inside of my pant leg, I couldn't do it.  It didn't help that the trouble making cats were all crouched around watching the human do one of her stupid human tricks.  Finally, in the middle of hopping and cursing, I tripped over a rock or stump and fell over backwards.  I hit the ground so hard I saw stars.  But while I was lying on the ground, looking at the clouds and using up some more bad words, the chipmunk decided to abandon my pant leg for safer ground.

I don't know who the hell THEY are, but you know what THEY say:  No good deed goes unpunished.  And a few days later when I saw a bunch of cats playing with a big black snake, I just turned and walked the other way.

I had learned the hard way that it doesn't pay to make fashion mistakes.  After my catastrophic fashion flub, I began tucking my baggy pant legs into boots.