Come evening of the same day that she came up with tracking-chip-airplane-laser-volcano solution to the African imports store going out of business, I was tucking her into bed, and Rosalind, her favourite of my two cats, jumped up on the bed for a cuddle.

“Awww… Rosie’s here to sleep with me!” she said as she snuggled up to the cat, giving her cheekrubs of the kind a cat would give a human, and then added contentedly “I am definitely part cat.”

I smiled down at them, thinking that, for all her quirks, it was nice that there were times when she was just a sweet little kid cuddling with a cat.

That impression lasted all of about 15 seconds, as she said, still with her arms around Rosalind, “I should take some DNA samples from her someday.”

“What? What for?”

“So that I can combine them with DNA from a human, and create an actual mutant cat-human hybrid!”

“Dare I ask why you would like to do that?”

“I just do,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her head on Rosalind like she was a furry pillow (which she, being a rather large and uncommonly tolerant cat, did not appear to object to at all). “And it would be tameable. But only with a special device, called a SID. S – I – D, for Sound Emitting Device.”

“Er – technically that would be SED, not SID. ‘Emitting’ begins with an E, not an I.”

“Hmmph!” she said indignantly, turning her face away from me so that Rosalind’s fur fully covered it. Apparently cats win out over humans tonight, perhaps because they don’t correct your spelling…