Random Musings

I’ve been sick. Again. Really sick. It might be a sinus infection, it might be a bad cold, it might be some other sort of virus. Whatever, I’m vigorously and aggressively medicating each and every symptom that rears its ugly head. My women’s chorus is singing at the southside UU church on Sunday, plus having a Sunday afternoon rehearsal, and goodness knows I’ve missed enough rehearsals now that I really need to make those extra ones! But currently my voice is croaking, in between the coughing, and as it’s Thursday, I’m losing hope.

Other than a trip to the doctor, which I actually had to ask DH to drive me to, I haven’t been out of the house since Saturday. While this suits my hermit crab nature down to the ground, I also miss my women friends and choir practice and such.

But, I’ve been able to let the Kittens of Chaos out of the Little Kitten’s Room for a good deal of each day, which they appreciate. In fact, as soon as they hear me coughing in my computer room, they set up their “Puh-Lease let us out, Grandmommy” wails. It’s funny. And when the door to DS’s room is closed – it squeaks loudly – I can hear the dingle, dingle of kittens moving up close to the door to their room, getting ready to zoooooom out as soon as it cracks open.

At one point Ray ran past me into my bedroom when I was trying to get to my own bathroom. The kittens are not allowed in bedrooms without human supervision, as they have been known to find beds to be perfectly reasonable alternate litterboxes. But Ray especially loves my bedroom, and he’s very, very fast. He’s also smart enough to immediately run behind the bed, where he cannot be grabbed. So I went on into my bathroom – he’ll come out. And he did. And the next thing I knew, he was climbing into my pants! Right into my jeans! And he curled up and settled himself in for a comfy nap. Simba used to do this, before he grew to 14+ pounds, and it’s incredibly cute. Ray kept peering up at me, through the leg holes in my panties, looking like, “Isn’t this wonderful, Grandma? It’s so comfy!” Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t as comfortable for me as for him, so pretty soon he was being removed from his cocoon, and also from the bedroom.

I’ve been reflecting on the roles taken on by the various members of our feline family. Up till Tempe and Ray, we’ve never had two cats of the same age before. The roles, and personalities, seem to rely on both age and position in the family. When Maddie died, Wilma, who had been a perfectly content, fairly friendly cat, moved immediately and firmly into Maddie’s old niche, that of Cranky Old Lady. (I had rather been hoping to occupy that niche myself.) Angel, who had been DH’s worshipper-from-anear and bosom companion, moved into the fairly content and occasionally affectionate middle-aged man, in the warm-up spot for Cranky Old. Simba has taken over the worshipper-from-even-more-anear and bosom companion role, in addition to the traditional role of youngest cat, Skimbleshanks.

Skimbleshanks, for those who have never seen Cats or read T.S. Eliot’s book on which it is based, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, is the Railway Cat. The train can’t go until Skimbleshanks has declared everything is in order. In our house, this translates to Keeping the Humans On Their Toes. When the kittens come out to play, the door to the big cat’s food, water, and litter box is closed. So, just now when the kittens went back into their room, Simba soon came to remind me to open the door to their room. Sometimes he’ll come and tell me the kittens want out. He supervises the cleaning of the litter box and the filling of the food bowl. Angel used to have this job. If, for example, the bottom of the food bowl could be seen, Angel would go bug whoever was home until it was decently covered again. When Wilma was a kitten (and I remember her being a kitten, even though she now denies it), she used to come tell me when the food bowl was empty. And I remember many years ago when Leo (long since gone over the Rainbow Bridge) used to meet us at the door, complaining that Misty (who has joined him there) had dropped another toy into their water bowl and messed up the water.

The kittens haven’t taken up this task, in part because they are denied access to the big kitties’ stuff, and partly because DS and DH, especially, keep their stuff fairly well policed. Although I understand both of them have been known to carefully supervise the litter box cleaning process.

And changing the subject …

It’s spring in Texas. That means that the weather is out of whack and … unpredictable. Here in Central Texas, we don’t get hurricanes, we don’t get earthquakes, or blizzards, or mudslides. We get spring. Spring does mean lovely wildflowers. It also means thunderstorms and possible tornadoes and hailstones and flash floods. This week it has also meant 90+ degree temperatures (100 on Monday), which kicks up the thunderstorms and makes them worse. We’ve had hailstones the size of baseballs (to the west of me), rolling blackouts (an unusual effect of the weather), and rain, mostly in the evening. Today it’s rained all day long, and it’s now getting very dark outside (very unusual at nearly 5:00 pm), and I did see a bit of lightning a minute ago. DH was talking about hearing from someone that the hail on Monday evening totally destroyed someone’s car. Now *that’s* hail. My WeatherBug, which I normally just use to keep track of the temperature, has been altering about every 15 minutes or so all afternoon, with tornado watches, flood statements, severe thunderstorm warnings, etc. The alert sounds kinda like a cricket, which after a while becomes annoying. Less annoying than a similar program that I tried for a while that used thunder. That wasn’t the main reason I went back to WeatherBug, but it was one reason!

Ah. Someone has dumped a really, really large bucket of water over my house and the street in front of us, and I believe they have also moved a river to run down it. And hail is hitting the roof. Yep. Spring in Central Texas.

Oh, the rolling blackouts? Those were on Monday, when the temperature hit 100 at the airport. Evidently April is the month when yearly maintenance is done on power generating machines and stations and whatever. So many of them were off-line. Then the need for power went way up and, as Californians could tell you, the result was inevitable. I got lucky, since I was sick and not interested in enduring the heat without my air conditioning, and the blackouts didn’t reach me.

I guess I’d better see if the hailstones and such are upsetting the kittens. Hope to be back with New Orleans pictures soon!