Senile dysfunction

A few things.

1) It seems that my 14-year-old cat is going senile in her golden years. Is this even possible? There doesn't seem to be any other explanation for her behavior, though--I mean, she's not banging into walls or anything, but what used to be her funny little foibles and quirks have lately turned into full-blown neuroses. For example, she's always been picky about her water dish - she does NOT like stray objects in her water while she's drinking, and this includes cat hairs, dust mites, and itty bitty bits of food (I guess I can't blame her there; it is kind of disgusting to have floaties in your water) - and will splash the water repeatedly with her paw in order to expel the offending debris. She has done this since I adopted her as a kitten, and it's just been one of her odd little things. However, since her kidney disease diagnosis she's gone off the deep end with the splashing splashing splashing SPLASHING. It's gotten to the point where we'll set a completely cleansed and newly filled bowl of water in front of her and she won't even so much as sniff it before the splashing commences. We wake up in the middle of the night to her splashing. We can't walk into the kitchen without wading through a pond of her splashed water, and we've had to change socks more than once because we forgot that, oh yes, our cat has gone insane and splashes water water EVERYWHERE! Of course, her brain is too small to realize that sticking her grubby, furry, dirt-and-litter-covered paw into the water only makes things worse for herself, and I often find a disgusting cement-like substance churning in the bottom of her dish from the various sand and dirt grains she's transported into her Sea of Tranquility.

Another example of her sudden-senility onset: ever since I lived in an apartment in Vancouver that housed a particularly large, cavernous, dusty-and-dark-corned closet where incidentally her cat food was kept, she has chosen one closet in my apartment with which to become obsessed, I guess in the hope that suddenly one day that same closet with the shadowy expanses of investigatory bliss will suddenly open unto her. In my current apartment, her closet of choice is the laundry closet in the bathroom where the washer and dryer are. There is nothing else in this closet except a broom, because there is no room in there for anything else. She knows this, and she has been shown the washer and the dryer many times and found them lacking in interesting features. Yet her obsession with getting a peek inside that closet continues unabated. That sort of behavior I have taken for granted as semi-normal, because she is silly and old and apparently her memory is hazy. But what used to be occasional begging for the magical closet door to be opened whenever BF or I were in the bathroom has turned into a sudden lunge for the bathroom anytime one of us stands up or moves in any direction that MIGHT indicate a visit to that hallowed ground, and she now spends much of her free time sitting in the bathroom staring at the closed closet door.

Should I start calling nursing homes?

2) Anyway. I have decided that Girl Scout cookies should be declared illegal, because 1) they are fattening and are contributing to the obesity epidemic of the nation, and 2) they are laced with crack or a crack-like substance. How else to explain how a calm, rational person can sit down with a box of Girl Scout cookies and think to oneself, "OK, I am going to have two reasonably-sized cookies and then close up the box and put them in the cupboard and not even contemplate eating any more until tomorrow," and then suddenly find oneself thirty minutes later in a fat-induced stupor at the kitchen table staring at an empty box of cookies, with smears of chocolate in one's hair and on one's clothing.

I'm not saying this happened to me, I'm just saying - those cookies ain't right.