Last night as I was sitting at my computer I heard a rather impressive crash from behind. Richard had been putting away all of our gaming gear, including a huge stack of books and our green Tupperware bowl (that may have, at one time, been meant to actually store food) in which we store the majority of our dice.

Like all good gamers we have quite the collection of dice, accumulated throughout the years by buying individual sets, or by purchasing ‘Dice by the Scoop’ at various gaming conventions. I have picked through all the dice and selected out the prettiest ones because if I’m going to be a nerd with a hefty bag of dice to my name, by golly at least they’ll be swirly, pearly, girly, sparkly dice. Richard, being a guy, could care less how ugly his dice are so he tends to end up with all the boring speckly ones. Long-term readers may recall my feelings on speckles (which has nothing whatsoever to do with dice, now that I think about it, but oh well). And in order to keep our dice separate, mine all live in a grey cloth bag that is carefully tied shut to keep the dice from escaping. The dice in the green Tupperware bowl, however, are free to roam as they wish, should the bowl ever tip over. Or, perhaps, be dropped from a great height.

So in case you haven’t figured it out, the crash was the container of dice, landing on the floor. Dice skittered out of the closet where the gaming stuff lives, and a cat or three took off for parts unknown in wide-eyed terror from the attack by small numbered monsters. It was quite exciting there for a second or two.

However, the dice on the floor weren’t really what made this all so gosh darn funny. You see, the closet in which the gaming stuff lives is also the closet where the litter boxes are. And Richard managed to drop that bowl of dice so the majority of the spillage went directly into…uh…a pile of nice soft granules made from all those bits of corn that are left over once they take out all the edible parts and stick them in cans, which we use because the clay litter tends to clog up the Littermaids.

I couldn’t help it. I started to snicker. Despite his protestations that it wasn’t funny, eventually he joined in. There we were, crouched down over the litter boxes, eying the dice. It didn’t help matters any when one of us (it might have been me) said something to the effect of “Look Hon, the cats have laid us a nice fresh crop o’ dice” in her best redneck drawl, followed by another of us (quite possibly him) adding, “Hey, I need another 20-sider. Call in the cat!”

As for the aforementioned dice which were littering the…er..litter boxes, well.. After all, they are Littermaids, which means that they are self-scooping, and judging from the pristine quality of the bed on which the dice reposed, they had recently self-scooped. And after all, we were talking *dice* here, and no self-respecting gamer ever lets go of any of his or her dice. No matter how ugly or speckly they might be.