cimorene

Tristana instantly made it her goal to get inside and on top of the bookcase we recently put up in the bedroom. Of course, Cornish Rexes always want to be inside this open style of bookcase, which is why we habitually always block the open ends of each shelf with a larger book or box - otherwise they'll use them like a series of play tunnels and periodically throw books on the floor (even Snookums. Even though he's an old man now). She has nonetheless managed to get inside the shelf a couple of times through Methods Unknown.

She also took about a week of calculating trajectories from on top of the cabinet like in this picture, and finally accomplished her goal of landing on top of the shelf. She can now hang out there at will, and the main reason she doesn't much is, I think, that there aren't any toys up there, just some storage bins and a couple of plastic bags of fabric interfacing. So she'll pat the bins (clack! clack! clack!) and attack the bags (rustle RUSTLE rustle! RUSTLERUSTLE!!!) until she gets bored and then she'll come down. It takes about 10-15 minutes.

Her new innovation as of two nights ago is going up there in the middle of the night. It was literally 00:30, Wax was asleep and I was trying to fall asleep, when I was alerted to her activities by the thunk noises of her jumping to and from the cabinet. A bunch of little bonks. "Kitty! Sh! What are you doing?" I hissed. They continued and I turned on the flashlight to see this bad little face. She stared at me motionless as long as the light was on, and as soon as I turned it off the noise resumed. After 4 rounds I gave up and listened the the audio drama for a further 5-10 minutes before she got bored and came down (only to ricochet off the bed and zoom out of the room, presumably on her way downstairs to pull used teabags out of the trash).

Further contributing to insomnia last night was the fact that as mentioned yesterday, our tenant gave a month's notice. We sent pictures of the flat - bad ones, and lacking a picture of the kitchen and bathroom entirely! - to our SIL and she put them on FB last night and there have already been 6 responses. Apparently there's a housing issue in Pargas right now which we were unaware of. One less financial worry, only now we have to like... respond to all of them and like... compare. Entirely new reasons for insomnia for today!

My wife was moved to make a post about the unexpected deluge of would-be tenants to replace our tenant who gave a month's notice. Apparently there is areal shortage of rental housing in town. Personally, I was hoping the fact there's only one bedroom (and that the whole flat is only 51 m² - 549 ft²) would have put off some people, like the ones with children, but Wax already talked to 3 who were still excited anyway, and tragically they all seem pleasant, so we're definitely not looking forward to telling anybody no. Also we can't show anybody the flat for at least a week; it's currently full of boxes as well as the tenant's junk, and her normal state of living is even more cluttered and messy than ours. We're gonna have to call and talk to them all again once she's moved some stuff.

In a burst of energy sparked by inability to do anything about this situation yet, I made a heroic effort and managed to squeeze even more recycling into piles of bags and boxes awaiting the return of the van (it's nightmarish. There's Leaning Towers of Recycling dotted around the front of the house). I was kind of surprised they fit. But I was able to clear the counter enough to completely take everything off it and scrub it down with a magic eraser. I'm thinking we will actually oil the butcherblock now, something you're supposed to do every six months but which we haven't done since October 2020. Butcherblock is beautiful, but I do REALLY wish we'd got the whole counter out of stainless steel. There's nothing like avoiding the necessity of logging into a government employment website to stoke enthusiasm for oiling butcherblock!

And in all the subsequent excitement, I nearly forgot that Snookums had his first meeting with rain today!

We don't take the cats out when it's raining, but I didn't realize it had started raining when I put the leashes on them today. We found out when I opened the outer door, and I tried to just turn around, but Snookums wasn't sure what he was looking at and he hesitated, and then demanded to have the door opened again. So I opened it again and tried to point out that it was wet out there. He took a couple of steps onto the stoop and then... ran away from the door instead of towards it. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, but then when he found out it was still raining on him he ran away another few yards and stopped again. The third time he finally figured out how to run back towards the house and darted between my legs, entangling them in the leash so that I teetered on one foot and ended up losing my clog and putting the foot down bare and getting gravel stuck to it. So once I did manage to catch the cat and carry him inside, I had to walk quite carefully.

Meanwhile he was deeply offended that he was STILL being rained on even while in my arms and when I put him down inside he was still extremely dismayed. He stomped around yelling about it for a while, then went upstairs to tell Wax about it loudly, in her face, and I had to drop my recycling and come rescue her. He needed to be firmly hugged for quite a while before he got over it.

Also here is a chunk of the lettering I was inspired to do based on popular memes from Tumblr.