Brownies

Two weekends ago, DH had to go into work all day Saturday to help conduct interviews for potential college hires. I decided I should bake him something nice to make up for it, so I took some of the peanut butter cups left over from Halloween, chopped them into wedges, and folded them into some homemade brownie batter.

When they came out, I tasted them - delicious! I let them cool, put a bunch into a plastic container, and left a half dozen or so on a plastic-wrapped plate on the table.

Some time after dinner, I wandered back through the dining room and was shocked to find one of my cats on the table hunched over the plate stuffing her face!

I burst into laughter at the guilty look on her fuzzy little face - even while I began to worry, knowing that chocolate in quantity is toxic to cats. The question was, how much was too much?

DH googled for information. And, after I gave him the amount of chocolate in the recipe, and the weight of the greedy kitty, he concluded that she was right on the border. So I got on the phone to animal poison control, and, ultimately, they suggested we'd better take her in to the emergency vet.

We knew we'd be about 3 hours in the waiting room, if they were as busy as they'd been in the past, but there was nothing to be done about that. We loaded the guilty party into her box, and headed off to the vet.

Not 3 minutes before we arrived, my husband the engineer almost stopped the car: "Wait... did I get the math wrong? I think... I think I multiplied instead of dividing at the end!"

Sure enough, he re-ran the numbers and confirmed it.

We called poison control back while sitting in the emergency vet parking lot. As he suspected, they told us we could just go home. Sigh. (At least we figured it out before they put kitty through some unpleasant procedure. The car ride she didn't actually mind.)

Tomorrow DH goes in to do another round of interviews. I'm thinking maybe this time I'll stay away from the baking...