Fantasy books, terrible advice, and random silliness
Stories from my life with no particular point.
I can never stop things accumulating beside my bed. Tubes of lip balm, hair ties, and half-read books have a habit of piling up.
Going through them is a geological exploration. The deeper you get, the longer ago the sediment (or book) was deposited.
It seems like time to clear out the book pile, and I thought I’d document what I found.
Monday was my first day back in the office after two weeks of lying in the sun editing my book and keeping His Royal Fluffiness company.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my work (most days), but going back after time off is like falling through the ice on a pond.
Worse, His Royal Fluffiness gets lonely. And he still hasn’t figured out how to use his new cat flap since the lion cat incident, so when I go to work he’s locked in all day and I feel terrible. Is having to sit by the door for eight hours to let the cat in and out a good excuse for not going to work?
No one thinks school prepares young people for life, and it certainly didn’t me. Instead, I learned all kinds of fascinating and currently useless facts there.
Did you know you get better quality fleece if you shear your sheep in winter, because the section of wool that grows in winter is thinner and more liable to break due to the poor feed? Cut it at this point and the weak part is at the ends, not in the middle. Magic!
Given I sold my sheep before I ever got around to shearing them, not so helpful.
When His Royal Fluffiness (HRF) was a kitten he had a lot of energy. Think of a squirrel that’s overdosed on caffeine.
He liked to pounce and bite. He also slept during the day. That meant most of his playing went on at night in our bedroom.
One night my sixth sense booted me awake. It was a good thing it did, because this was headed for my face.
The first sign something was wrong was the empty cat food bowl. His Royal Fluffiness (HRF) never cleans his bowl to the bedrock, and yet there both bowls were, sparkling clean.
I didn’t catch on at that stage, though I should have.
The next day I was in the living room with HRF and I heard a crash in the kitchen. It wasn’t the sort of crash you get when a breeze knocks over the paper towel roll, but more the kind of crash you get when an over excited feline spars with a bowl of cat food.
I jumped up and heard the thump thump thump of the cat flap. By the time I arrived in the kitchen it was empty and so was the cat food bowl.