Thief! Thief!

This is our cat Luke. He will be 13 years old in March.

He doesn't look like he'd cause too much trouble, but lately, he's become quite a pain in the butt. You see, he's taking things that don't belong to him. His favorite thing to steal are socks. And usually, this is no big deal. He find one that X-man leaves on the floor, or he swipes one out of the clean laundry basket that I carried upstairs but was too tired to put away... and I find them all over the house the next morning. Sometimes it's just one or two. Sometimes its up to eight. (Woot! Laundry party.)

He meows as he carries them around. It's very distinctive.

So earlier today, after X-man got ready for KTDID to take him to soccer, he and I ate dinner. (We had Morning Star mini corn dogs, where he told me I couldn't eat them because they were meat. He took learning that his beloved corn dogs were actually soy with an air of -- WTF? It was pretty funny. He's never eaten a meat-based corn dog at home -- ever.) He had his uniform on, but not his socks. We heard Luke meowing upstairs, and I made the comment. "Luke's got someone's sock."

Forty minutes later, I went upstairs to get the sock, and X-man was showing me the mini Lego Harbor he built today that he got from Santa for Christmas. (It's pretty cute and he's having a ball playing with it.) But for the life of me, I could not find his other sock. X-man started to get upset, "I left them both right here!"

And then I froze, and I smiled. "What Mommy?"

"Think about it."

"LUKE!"

So we wandered into my room and there in the middle of my bed were three socks. One of them was X-man's, two were mine from my hamper.

Besides the sock stealing, he's also stolen underwear from X-man's bottom drawer and a small, stuffed blue hippo from X-man's room. I found Luke using it as a pillow.

I'm wondering if all this carrying around suddenly has a purpose, or if he's just going crazy in his old age?

Update: He just brought me X-man's two dirty socks that he put on the floor of the laundry room to be washed. Normally, I'd thank him for helping me pick up the house. But since X-man put them somewhere where they'd actually be washed. It just means I have to carry them downstairs again. :-)