Meowing around or the story of cat traps

Banjo has been very loud today... not sure why. He keeps walking around my desk and meowing non stop. He doesn't seem hungry or sore, 'cos his appetite is fine and he's very happy to play. So I think he's either sucking up for attention (most likely), which he's getting plenty of today, or he's annoyed about the current state of things in the kitchen...

You see, for some time now Banjo has learned that he can jump onto the kitchen counters. What's the problem with that you ask? Well, that's the space where we prepare our food and having him walk there with his paws that have just been in the litter tray is less than hygienic. Apart from which it's really annoying to have to clean all the counters before cooking - every bloody time! So it's a nuisance. Things got even worse after we came back from Russia, because our house sitter was one big softie and let both cats do as they pleased. We thought that perhaps he likes to go to the sink, because he likes clean water - so Jack has been changing their water religiously every morning. We thought it might be that he wants more love and attention - so we play with him more... we have tried a whole lot of things:

• taking him off the counters nicely and nicely telling him off
• shoving him off the counters and telling him off nicely
• shoving him off the counters and punishing him
• spreading cayenne pepper on the counter perimeters
• putting double-sided sticky tape on the counter perimeters
• we even ordered a SSSCAT, which ended up coming faulty, so we had to send it back

Nothing works! So as an absolute last resort we 'googled' another method and ordered 10 basic mousetraps. We set them up over all counters and covered them with newspapers, so that he doesn't actually hurt himself. Thus when he jumps on the counter and moves a newspaper, a mousetrap makes a loud noise and that scares him off. We've been attentively listening to these bangs, and keeping score (below). Alas, for the last two days we haven't found any traps triggered off, or any paw prints. Hurra!!! I'm *crossing my fingers very very tightly that this will actually last*... Because if it doesn't, there'll be creme de la cat soup for entrée, cat Stroganoff for mains and cat tart for desert!

Some photos from today, and a video of the two kittens being very cute...