Round And Round

The kittens have stumbled upon Many Mysteries since their arrival here two weeks ago. Life is, after all, quite the Mystery to baby cats as everything is New and Strange. One of the Greater Mysteries seems to be the front loading washing machine. If we leave the cover down, the cats will hop up on it and bat at the laundry as it goes around, first one way, then the other. Being unable to reach the moving laundry through the glass door puzzles them.
I can understand that puzzlement, but what puzzles me is their interest in the dishwasher. The cats will sit in front of the closed dishwasher for inordinate lengths of time, usually just staring, but now and again batting at the door. There is nothing to see-- it's a dishwasher door. Nothing moves. All is still. And yet they will stare intently at the door as though watching a team of mice were juggling catnip filled golf balls. What are they seeing? Do they have some sort of X-ray vision that allows them to see the spinning arms, the spraying water?
There are other less profound Mysteries, such as the baffling propensity of the cats to wage war on our bed every morning between 4:00 and 5:00. The waging of war doesn't bother us so much, we just don't understand why this daily Gettysburg must be reenacted in the immediate area of our feet. And given that there are two vessels of cat food, placed immediately next to each other, it is puzzling that they choose to eat not only at the same time, but catty, if you will, corner. That is, their hind ends are next to each other, but the heads cross over, so that the cat on the right eats from the left bowl and the one on the left eats from the right bowl, so one cat is always leaning over the other, and the other is sort of squashed by the one who's having trouble reaching. Why don't they just line up in little parallel cat rows?
So they have their mysteries, and we have ours. We anticipated many things, when these cats came-- an increase in noise and tumult, as well as the fun of having new kittens crashing about-- but we didn't really anticipate this large increase in the amount of Domestic Mystery. Perhaps the cats will come to An Understanding of the washing machine and the dishwasher, and maybe they will grow tired of daily hostilities played out in the mountains of our knees and the valleys between, or at least relocate to some other venue, and then the Level of Mystery will abate.
Then again, with cats, who can say for sure? Perhaps these conundra will vanish only to be replaced by new, improved causes of bafflement.