First on the To-Do List

I’m going to wrap the cats in cotton wool.

We got in from a lovely week in San Francisco around 2:30 this morning.  Other than the plane taking off about 45 minutes late and an unscheduled tour of the terminals at O’Hare International Airport because of some poor signage on Mannheim Road it was a smooth trip, but it was still a long one.  By the time we got home it was all we could do to stow the suitcases in the kitchen and fall into bed.

But we’d been gone a week, as noted.  And cats are not good about that sort of thing.

Especially Midgie, whose seven brain cells have enough trouble with coordinating chewing and for whom the concept of object permanence is foreign.  She cries on normal nights, despite the fact that we are right there and we wrap her up in her Thundershirt to make her feel secure.

But even Mithra was lonely while we were gone.  The rabbits had been farmed out to a friend and she had only Midgie to keep her company, and frankly Mithra would rather chew on pine cones than hang out with Midgie.

They were really, really, really, really, really, really excited to see us, in other words.

Then we turned out the lights.

And that’s when the Grand Serenade for Two Lonely Felines began.  It’s one of the lesser-known works in the canon of Western music, mostly because one rarely gets to hear it entire.  Usually somewhere around the third or fourth movement one of the audience members will get out of bed and toss most or all of the performers outside, often at some distance from the concert hall.  An underhand motion seems to get the best trajectory.  But we were too tired to do that, really, and so we got a fairly complete rendition, with all of the trills, fortissimo sections, glissandos, and 690-measure rests that make you think the piece has come to an end but are actually there to lull you into a false sense of security.

I suppose it is nice that the cats worked together on something, though if they really wanted to cooperate on a task I’d prefer they made themselves useful and reduced the mouse population around here.

Eventually I just got up and came downstairs in the fond hopes that this would put an end to it and the rest of the people in the house could get some sleep.  It did allow me to make a nice mug of tea and enjoy the English Premier League game on television without the awful feeling that I should be grading something, so there’s that.

There will be bloggage about our trip, yes there will.  We had a grand time with great people in a wonderful city, and if there is any urban place in America designed for photographers it is San Francisco.

But first, there will be cat-wrapping.

And then some rest.