A Bit Like This, A Bit Like That

 I reach the end of today feeling a bit like this…like Nell when she was a puppy and so tired she couldn’t quite summon the strength to stay on the sofa…

…because, despite me telling myself early this morning that I was going to have a hibernating sort of day involving not much more than watching ‘My Fair Lady’ and eating ginger cake, it didn’t work out like that because I got distracted into doing things that turned out to be both strenuous and annoying. 

Firstly, I took a large cardboard box to Aunt Ada Doom’s woodshed which is where we store cardboard in case it is needed for garden weed suppressing purposes, or sending off motorbike parts (that’ll be my son-in-law, not me. I don’t pretend to know anything about motorbikes, let alone selling parts of them to other motorbike enthusiasts). On opening the woodshed door, I was met with a tsunami of cardboard. And the problem was that whilst I was heading to the woodshed with the aforementioned cardboard box, I thought I’d collect some logs and bring them indoors as we are now in ‘lighting the wood burner’ season. 

However, because of the cardboard tsunami, I couldn’t see the logs let alone pick them up to bring them inside. And so, I ended up wrangling cardboard boxes, sorting through them, squashing them, deciding which to keep and which to send for recycling, and generally getting cross that cardboard boxes had overtaken the woodshed. Also, it was very cold in the woodshed, and just as cold AND wet on the courtyard patio and when I’d finished I had to run my hands under warm water to bring them back to life.

And then I took Nell for her daily walk, and it was still very cold AND wet so I never really warmed up all morning, and I thought how lovely it would be to sit on the sofa and watch ‘My Fair Lady’ and eat ginger cake.

Then I took delivery of a large bag of dog food and a new scratching post for Bambino Bobble Wilson because Nell keeps eating and Bambino has massacred his old scratching post to the point that you could see daylight through all the holes he’d made and the whole thing was on the verge of collapse. Dismantling his old and complicated cat scratching post tower was very trying because some of the screws were difficult to access and the allen key was being very awkward. 

However, construction of the new cat scratching post was very easy because I chose a basic and simple model which involved the insertion of a single screw, and even I can manage that. 

Now, when Nell arrived chez nous we moved Bambino’s food bowl, water fountain, scratching post and litter tray upstairs so he’d have some peace from the irritating puppy. Unfortunately, peace for him meant no peace for those of us trying to sleep through Banbino’s nocturnal activities, like loud kibble crunching, kicking litter around in an extravagant manner, and stropping his cat post, usually between the hours of 4 and 5 a.m. His food and water is in my sewing room, the litter tray is on the landing and the scratching post in the bedroom, because it is the only place it would fit. 

His pre-dawn routine is: jump off bed with a loud ‘thunk’, strop cat post, crunch kibble, kick litter around and do either a pee or a poo, return to eat more kibble, especially if a poo has just been performed, then return to bedroom for another round of stropping. I know his routine because I am awake listening to it and thinking this wouldn’t be a problem if all his stuff was downstairs like it used to be pre-Nell. 

Anyway, today I took the opportunity to swap the new, slimline scratching post into my sewing room thus allowing me to fill the vacated gap with my rocking chair, which is far more suitable furniture for a bedroom. 

Here is Bambino sitting in my rocking chair when he was a kitten. He doesn’t fit in it now because he is a massive dollop. 

I’m not complaining, really I’m not. 

Okay, I am.