But to explain why, you need to see the following chronicle of my workday yesterday.

I started out in The Chair with Mr. Bell. We have a good working relationship; he curls up in the front, I rest my keyboard on him, and we call it good. Then he got up, and Loki came over.

Loki is not so familiar with being a keyboard stand, but he started to get the hang of it. He actually makes a pretty good keyboard rest, because he’s so broad. And warm. It was cold, so it was nice to have a foot warmer.

This post gets pretty image heavy, so I am sticking it behind a jump so that it doesn’t totally clog your browser. I am also doing this because stories about cats are not fascinating to everyone, so I wanted to provide you with the option of not reading this one.

Then Loki decided he wasn’t comfortable, so he squirmed around:

And then he started getting annoyed because I was contorting myself to photograph him:

And then Mr. Bell decided that he wanted to sit on the chair too:

They worked it out:

Shadow looked on woefully from the ground. There was a time when all four of us fit, but some of us have gotten larger, making that a bit difficult.

I got up to pee and came back to this:

I protested feebly that they needed to move so that I could sit down and work and they countered with this:

I mean, what do you do in the face of something that cute? I finally managed to negotiate a thin sliver of space for myself:

They were willing to compromise.

Until this happened:

That would be Mr. Bell’s head which Loki is stepping on, although you can’t see it because he’s under the blanket.

This went on pretty much all day, with a constantly cycling population of cats in the chair, fighting for supremacy. We never got to a stable point with all three, because they just won’t fit.

So, there are a couple of solutions to this problem. I could not use the chair for work, since they obviously like sitting in it and I don’t have to battle for custody of the ball with the cats. I could also just be ruthless and force cats to move when they are in the way while I work, but that doesn’t seem very nice, to me. I could also get a second chair, which would probably cause them to abandon both chairs, or I could get a giant chair which would accommodate all of us. Or I could hope it stops being freezing cold, making the chair less appealing, since right now they like using me as a radiator and hiding under the blanket, because even with the crappy electric heater running, it is still really, really cold.