Time Wise

She realises that She's not mentioning Stanley as often as a lordly cat deserves, but Stanley is doing very well. He sleeps in the Spare Room with Sylvio and Grace and none of them have participated in the mass breakouts through the broken window this past week.

Worried that I don't give them enough attention in the evenings, I went in with the brush to offer them some quality time. Sure, traipsing through the house and garden doing bits of work between computering, I meet and I greet and so on.

Until I was in the room I hadn't quite realised how clean the three cats are. They carefully use the tray, even tearing newspaper for extra coverage. They don't spray to mark their nightly possession of the place and none of them required the brushing which is applied to all the other cats as they shed their winter coats.

Last night only the basics were carried out  because as it turned out, it was one of those eventful evenings.

Firstly I found some tacks and nailed cardboard covering to the window both inside and out.

Lucibelle and The Greys were astonished.

Princess had demanded release and for the second night she disappeared. The previous night she'd not only escaped by herself but she made it across the road. With diminished hearing and sight, she probably felt the vibrations of the traffic times and the quiet times.

Yesterday was warm and I'd carried her across the road after their breakfast and my first cuppa. With the fussing around the window and other processes it was late when I went to bring her back here. She wasn't on the verandah or inside with Jos. Black Tom, invisible in the darkness, had mounted guard on Jos's verandah. I patted him and we had a conversation. Scrap was  with him and flitted into Jos's place as Jos and I spoke. Scrap visits Jos, but doesn't stay.

I went with the torch tccch tcching, the evening signal to call the cats. No sign, though Scrap came back with me and with an air of conferring enormous honour, accompanied me into my room to eat her dinner. She hissed and swore when I tried to pat her.

Why do we put up with such insults when cats begin to own us?

Back to the spare room to feed Stan, Grace and Sylvio.

A knocking at the door. Jos says Princess has turned up out of her hiding place and so I fetch her, wrapped carefully in her old blanket from Jos's place.

No complaints. 

Two late nights, she's tired, old thing. It's clear that when the medicine is working, she remembers being a young cat and even if she was never particularly brave, she likes to recall her ancestral heritage.

On balmy spring nights it can be understood why the little ones like to run free.

But a gap in household safety is like a gap to the spirit of all of us. When the window was agape, none of us were getting on very well. I thought of calling the Agent, but the window is my responsibility in this case. The handyman should be here this weekend. Last week the leaking roof and the dodgy electricals were fixed by the Agent and all feels good and getting better maybe.

(OK, in the old ten room house I rented way back when, with a window blown in by a gale, I could have called the owner in, but hard to believe, I was paying $10 per week rental for that place so generally, I sorted out repairs myself. It was good. Even car repairs were carried out by a neighbour in exchange for tutoring a daughter! Life was kinder there in those times. I'd leave the doors unlocked when I went to the city for study just in case any friends dropped by in need of a cup of tea.)

The back garden is delectable right now, a mass of pink Evening Primrose and the mauve Heliotrope is still blooming. The Elder is a mass of white flower and yesterday, to my amazement, I discovered that the Comfrey has begun to put out its Ashes of Roses coloured blooms.

It wasn't so long ago that Princess arrived unwell and unsteady on her feet, refused her tablets utterly and I had to dig out the just sprouting Comfrey from an almost bare winter garden for her medicine.

Another large house with good neighbours close by and an adult Anna to help with problems is a very good thing. Last week there were nightmares and restlessness everywhere. More recently the dreams are good and there's more hope in the world somehow.

My Poem is Published! Now for the Novel which is already written and boring to transcribe from hard copy, but there it is and here we are!

Fresh Stuff

Which one was that ancient Greek Philosopher who claimed that illness is good because recovery is bliss?

Phew.

Anna came by yesterday & met our new gorgeous neighbours.

I did some cleaning, well quite a lot compared to when I was ill....

O it's still so smelly in some places.

Phooey, I've only been doing the most basic work since the illness hit me.

I can do the Dyson, the dishes and the surfaces, but!

I been only doing essentials and I haven't been sociable enough with my little crowd.

They are 'marking' to protest.

My sense of smell is only recently returning.

They hit the cushioned chair.

They hit my smart new rucksack (by the way, thanx Leeton for a great rucksack!)

(Sorry I dropped in on Roscoe with my rucksack ponging!)

As smell returned, I realised that the spraying process even hit certain spots in the kitchen.

(Which yesterday I scrubbed with diluted lavender oil!)

The couch is a write-off but I'll air the covers tomorrow.

I got younger folks visiting next week. I have to conquer some smells.

Truly, I do want to be further down the track, but my little critturs are saying, 

'Where have you been?' (PS, 'We could go even more feral if you like!')

Blissfully warmer weather, sunlight on back verandah in the mornings, ah, this place is a good place. Great light. Books keep coming in and with fabulous neighbours I'm doing some gardening at least.

I've got books to add as promised, and I have music to add as promised.

That's because Jez helped me.

I thank Brendan, Jez, Lucy, Mina, and we don't forget Aphex!

I thought I had too many cats until I checked the following site.

The Pussies Galore post on http://littlecatdiaries.blogspot.com/

WOW!

No Shoot Wild Life

http://traumaqueen.net/, the Diary of an Ambulance Worker/Photographer from Edinburgh is one of my favourite blogs. Recently, Kal has been running a competition. We have to guess what strange object it is sitting on his friend Calum's head. 

Well my guess has had to be 'a cat!'. All Right?

 

As I begin to think of promoting my blog (and assuming I'll get the hang of it at some stage), I notice that my  book  Blogging For Dummies says that a competition is a very good way of attracting comments to a blog. 

OK, Kal gets plenty of comments. He's a great writer with an astounding insight into the ways of the worlds.

Gee, if I was getting any comments apart from the odd encouraging email from this friend or that, I might have run the above picture as a What IS It?? competition myself! It had me more than bamboozled for some considerable length of time. 

Fact is, the above marks on the outer walls and  door of the laundry such as I show in the photo above, scared me shitless when I first saw them.

It was a day or so after the hostile neighbours departed. Yeh, they had wanted my flat. Like many other ignorant people in Sydney, they just assumed that as a Pensioner I'm automatically and immediately eligible for Government Housing.

(Even if that was possible, I don't want it because I want to EARN again eventually!)

In the months they spent next door in the smaller flat, I'd hear them planning my excavation through the wall. They had extraordinarily loud coarse voices. One time they even managed an Eviction Notice. I found a Lawyer. They began to back down only after this uniquely sane and intelligent woman took their arguments apart.

The air around their place became darker. Tired of bad-vibed people, I just began to pray that in this rental challenged city (and with their Real Estate connections), they'd find a really nice place somewhere else.

Whether it was the prayers or the winter chill of their southside flat, they did find another place and they departed, admittedly leaving the smoke alarm screaming all weekend to replace their voices and that abominable snare drum. 

They were spiteful in the ways that children can be spiteful, I suppose. I think that most of the damage in this poor world is caused by the twisted perceptions of adults who haven't been able to grow out of their inner (warped) child!

Soon after their departure, with my brain still exhausted from the long drawn out shrilling of their smoke alarm, I was feeling vulnerable enough for the marks on the laundry door, (resembling gobs of gore), to bother me to the max.

Apart from paint or organic matter in a water pistol, how could these blotches have occurred?

An Aboriginal and a Euro marriage I knew of in a racist Northern town had the experience of a tomato sauce spraying all over the front of their flat by local Klan members, believe it or not!!! 

The red blotches on my wall and laundry door gave me the same sick feeling as had that tomato sauce attack, in that case, a benign product used to symbolise horrid attitudes! 

The fact that I have a laundry and the former neighbours didn't have a laundry, had been a bone of contention. Odd, if they'd been friendly, I wouldn't have minded sharing, but if there's one thing I've learned from group flats and share situations, it's that you can't share a laundry with someone who hates you or holds you in contempt.

So threat was my first thought; from earsplitting dins to faeces wrapped and placed in my garden cleaning zones, had it come to a real threat similar to the tomato sauce stunt from that long ago northern summer?

OK, I make it a practice not to suffer in silence these days. One of the things that would always draw my temper previously was the inherited family tendency to pretend that everything is fine even when it's horrible.

(If things fine and attacks begin, a very common experience for any one with a condition such as Asperger's Syndrome, there's only so much pretence or panic I can manage before my temper, my considerable temper will blow and then frequently things will just get worse!)

Therefore, before sending off a terrified letter to the Agency and calling the Cops, I decide to convene a meeting in the back yard with Anna and Neighbour Ron. 

At our meeting, the cats gather too. They seem to know that something serious is up. 

They hated the recent dins as much as I did and were always afraid of those neighbours. As Ron, Anna and self all talk, the cats stay close by as if they are listening.

'You know, what I reckon it is, it might be bats!' says Ron.

'BATS!!??!!??'

We'd already wondered if the recent winds have been strong enough to blow the juicy loquats all the way across the yards and we've decided, No. Then we notice that the fence between my yard and the general yard also has red stains.

Ok, so the bats may fly over a fence dropping their faeces, but on the walls under the guttering? How?

It dawns on us all at once. 

Sydney's fruit bats are enormous, bigger than crows and even bigger than currawongs. The wing spans we see above us as they cheeteringly flap past on moonlit nights, are even wider than the wing spans of the black cockatoos, and the black cockatoo is a  damn big bird!

We look at the loquat tree again. Two days ago, it was loaded with fruit. Today, there are not that many loquats at all!

The bats must have come and feasted, flown over the middle fence and then hung off the guttering for a post dinner nap. 

The red 'gobs of gore' are bat poo. 

I'm struck by the imaginary images of these large umbrella-ed flight creatures hanging off my guttering and carelessly shitting on the wall, and I decide that I must get pictures.

I guess my new neighbour now either thinks I'm mad or is beginning to develop paranoia himself.

The night of our meeting, while there are still some loquats on the tree, I go to bed dressed except for the boots. The camera is charged and ready by my bed. Then every hour, I get up, put my slippers on and go through the front door very quietly. I tip-toe past my new neighbour's sensor light, (bling! on it goes each time). Next, I sneak quietly around the corner and over to my fence. No bats hanging. Then I bling my way back and try again. And again.

There are no bats that night. The bastards must have found another tree.

Would have been a great shot eh?