How far? Far enough...

Our new house has a relatively small back yard with no fence. Because of this, we were initially concerned that our cat, Moe, would want to go outside, roam around and generally be a pain in the ass to get back in the house.

For a day or two, that's what happened. We'd let Moe outside, he'd venture way past our property into the dirt beds of the opposite side of the street where they're starting to build new homes behind us.

Fed up, I got a yellow nylon rope that we used the last time we moved to tie stuff down, tied one end to our deck, tied the other end to Moe's collar and put the collar on Moe.

Moe resisted at first, but then gradually accepted his fate to be tethered to our deck. It's worked out pretty well save for the one night when he walked around part of the deck's base three times and then could only make it up the deck stairs halfway before running out of rope. He was out there for hours before I remembered he was out there.

One thing Julia likes doing with the collar and rope is that she'll snap it on herself and crawl around on the deck like she's the cat. She thinks it's funny and it is generally.

The other day we had some friend over. Julia, like any other kid her age, was trying to get their attention, so she snapped on the collar and started acting like a cat. Our friends laughed at it, so Julia kept it up.

My friend, Jeff, asked Julia about the rope.

"How far can that rope go?" he asked innocently.

She said with an air of confidence, "Far enough."

I had just turned my head to check the grill when I heard Jeff exclaim, "No! Wait! Stop!"

I turn my head in time to see Julia running. She had run down the steps of the deck and made a beeline straight out from the deck into the yard. This while the rope was trailing behind her with the slack getting shorter and shorter.

She heard Jeff's cries to stop and had stopped with about 5 feet of rope behind her. Now all of us were yelling to come back, stop and don't run.

Those messages must have sounded like, "Don't stop. Keep running!" because Julia took off again, only to have the rope's slack to tighten. Thankfully, Julia wasn't going that fast as the rope snapped because while she did indeed get pull backwards by the rope's tightening. She pull herself off the ground with no harm.

We lightly scolded her while we took off the cat collar she had snapped on herself and told her not to do that again.

It's funny now, but it could have been a worse ending.