Excitements!

I had gone to bed, slightly later than normal, on Friday night and had just drifted off to sleep when I was woken by the sound of one of the cats yowling, accompanied by a slight noise.

I listened. More yowling, followed by silence, followed by yowling.  

I got up and called them, just in case one of them was injured.  No response.

I finally found them, looking out the spare room window, tails fluffed up, ears pricked, yowling. Then Brandy ran into our room and tried to look out our window.  I pulled the blind up a bit for him. Then both of them ran down into the lounge room and stared out the windows.

They were clearly agitated, running ups and down the various windows in various rooms. There was obviously something outside that was agitating them.

I turned the outside light on and went out through the front door.  I didn't see what was out there, but I heard it pit, pat, pattering down the driveway.

I don't know what it was.  A possum or fox or perhaps another cat, I assume. Not human. The cats don't react like that to people. And a human would probably have gone away when I turned lights on inside and then outside the house. Anyway, whatever it was sounded to have four paws, not two feet.

Brandy and Whiskey were not convinced that it had actually gone away!

Peace finally restored I went back to bed and, eventually, back to sleep.

Jim slept through all of this!

Meanwhile, up on the hill, Lindsey was woken at around 5:30 by Hugo and then Rupert growling and barking. She got up and looked around but couldn't see anything to be excited about so went back to bed and told the dogs to be quiet.

They remained disturbed, growling and barking until around 6:30 when Hugo began growling and barking in earnest.  Lindsey got up and investigated more closely. This time she went to the kitchen end of the house, looked out the window and saw this:

Photo by Lindsey, from the house

Ian slept through all of this!

Until Lindsey woke him up and told him all about it and he went down to investigate

Photo by Ian, from the road

No wonder Rupert and Hugo were agitated. They don't get that level of activity on the road all that often, and never at that time of the day.

After all that excitement, I remembered that I had bought harnesses for Brandy and Whiskey. I fished them out and put them on the cats.  Once again they reacted with horror. This time I picked them up and took them outside the front door, where the "intruder" had been over night.They decided that I wasn't trying to kill them and had a good sniff around. 

We didn't go far. It was raining and I was in my dressing gown. But they spend 10 minutes or so pottering around the front lawn and around the front of the house.  Next time I'll get dressed first and see about going down the driveway. I let them out into the back garden as well. I've roughly blocked off the weak point up by the garage. It needs doing properly but it would be hard for them to get through the boxes I've built up to block the gap. So now the only way out of the garden is over the fence. So far they've shown no interest in jumping the fence. I wouldn't trust them outside unsupervised, but I might take them out with me more often.

Oh - and in other exciting news, on Wednesday I had my first Covid-19 vaccination. I had no obvious side effects, except that my damaged hand started being Very Grumpy Indeed about half an hour later. It only lasted for a short while and I don't know if it was connected or just coincidence. It doesn't usually behave like that, though. Others who had their jabs last week reported that they had no effects, or mild flu-type symptoms. One or two said that 24 hours later it was like being hit by a bus. So far we have all survived 😆