Bucketing Down

Over the last few days we’ve seen an awful lot of this.

It’s surprisingly hard to photograph rain. We pulled the kayaks right up the stream bank to keep them safe.

Kitty-pop has been mighty displeased. After her gifts of mice (one dead, two still kicking) on three consecutive days, she thought the very least we could do was to stop that wet stuff falling from the sky. She came to tell me so rather loudly while I was painting window sills.

Resene Lustacryl ‘Barely There’, in case you were wondering.

She sat on the arm of the settee in the study for a full 15 minutes, during which time she alternated between glaring meaningfully out of the window at the wet stuff, meowing loudly, and giving me the evil eye. It reminded me of the weekend we moved here.

It was another July and it was raining. Kitty-pop, according to Google wisdom about moving with cats, was supposed to be kept inside for at least 48 hours. She had spent the last 24 pacing and yodeling, complaining bitterly about the relocation of her food bowl — the washing machine it usually sat on was part of the furniture left behind as staging while we sold the old house.

The old house showing the correct placement of Kitty-pop’s washing machine.

Darling Daughter and I conferred, and decided that the grumpy kitty should be let outside before she started shredding paper, the furniture and, by the sound of her, quite likely our legs. The front door was opened, and Kitty-pop ran outside. She got as far as the end of the verandah before she saw the rain.

As she sped straight back into the house she shot us a look we had very little trouble interpreting. It meant something like this: ‘Unbelievable! First you imbeciles took me on a very uncomfortable car ride, during which you changed the whole interior of my house’, ‘Now I find you’ve messed with the outside too, and to top it all off you’ve made the sky leak. What in the name of Bastet are you thinking?’

Kitty-pop undertakes a solitary protest sit-in on a computer keyboard

Fast forward to today. Eventually, vacating the settee, Kitty-pop moved herself to a laptop and used her backside to enter a single question mark into the Google search field. Was she questioning why humans are so dense as regards her perfectly clear meteorological requests, or wondering how many mice it takes to bribe an oppressor? Or perhaps she was asking that universal question, to which the answer is 42.

I played it safe and assumed that sitting on a keyboard meant some petting of the kitty would be appreciated. She graciously accepted this olive branch and begrudgingly graded my efforts as a ‘C’.