Bubble-wrapped

She is a strange one, our Tess!
Like most cats she has no owner, but she does have a household full of servants who will get up and open doors for her or make sure that her bowl has sufficient food in it. She is also pretty smart in other ways. We have trained her to sit on a box in the kitchen to tell us when she wants food, or wants more food. One of my daughters has decided that the next step must be to teach her to speak but I am a little bit sceptical of this possibility.
Often Tess can be incredibly affectionate, and loves nothing better than to curl up in your lap and sleep. Again like most cats, she can make herself unbelievably cute, inviting you to stroke and caress her. She purrs like the most expensive Rolls Royce.
But all of that can turn in an instant. When her eyes change colour and she takes on her 'scary look', you just better get out of the way because she is likely to want to sink her claws or teeth, or both, into any exposed flesh she can find.
Those are the times when she becomes "Psycho-Cat."
She was a rescued stray kitten whom we adopted from the local Cat and Dog Home some years ago. I reckon she was probably badly-treated and even abused as a kitten and occasionally (often for no obvious reason) she reverts to this almost feral behaviour because she suddenly feels insecure.
Fear and insecurity are often the real source of aggression - and not just in cats.

Today Tess was pretty unsettled for some reason and, as she often does, jumped up on to my desk. (This is an action which usually involves a complicated dance sequence over the computer keyboard, with typically annoying consequences.) But instead of settling down as she would normally do, among books and papers, and anything else that might be cluttering up the desk at any given time (and there is always lots of that!) she just jumped back down again.
Eventually she found a box of laser printer cartridges and managed to make an opening through which to squeeze her way inside. After a few brief, green-eyed, glances she curled up and promptly went to sleep.
I reckon the problem was that this morning there were near-gale-force winds outside and she just wanted to find somewhere safe to hide from the storm until it blew over.
I can understand that- though often the storms I want to hide from are not the meteorological ones.