There have been developments in negotiations between all parties. A few border skirmishes:
… and a few (failed) cease-fires. Easter-cat has been staked out on the bed for the duration – her hill to defend – while she’s battled a recurrence of cat flu, a direct result, she claims, of the horror of invading forces, and she’s petitioned the war tribunal for compensation, to be paid out in Greenies. Catnip flavour. So far, the court has been sympathetic and generous.
Carlito is the Russia of this Risk board; he flips sides whenever the mood strikes him. He has been seen on numerous occasions to be fighting the valiant fight against the invader, but there is accumulating evidence of joint training exercises, and incontrovertible evidence of at least one instance of sleeping with the enemy:
Mostly though, Pikachu, or Bug, is settling in just fine.
In other, more book-relevant news, I’ve still been re-reading like a fiend. I’ve gone though the entire Anne Bishop Others series, and actually re-reading Lake Silence twice. My original reviews for those books all still stand, and I still love the series as much as ever.
I’ve also just finished listening to Bill Bryson’s The Body, with a review coming up, and likewise Patricia Wentworth’s The Gazebo – the best Miss Silver mystery I’ve read so far (fact: I’ve read very few).
MT and I continue to sneak out and cheat on the cats with wild nature every weekend. This weekend is the 4-day City Nature Challenge, an international bioblitz, where participating cities encourage everyone to go out and take pictures of every wild plant, animal, and fungus they find, and upload them to inaturalist.com. We’re looking forward to seeing how many different flora and fauna we can get photos of. It started at midnight and so far, I’ve gotten pics of three spiders and our resident possum, who has decided he likes our bird house just fine:
Aw! I’m a bit jealous. My closest brush with animals/wildlife lately was a symptom of the Great NSW Mouse Plague of 2021. We’re fairly close to the river and I guess the local snakes do some pretty good rodent control because I haven’t seen a single mouse in the entire 13 years I’ve lived here . . . until I heard rustling in my garbage can and one popped up out of the trash to gaze at me unabashedly. Brazenly, even. That turf war is ongoing.
lol – we just lost our network at one school because rodents chewed right through our fibre optic cabling. They’re moving south!
LoL. Is Carlito okay with Bug being just as photogenic as he is? Or is this part of his antagonism towards her?
Btw, Easter Cat and the possum – have you named him/her, yet? – are also very cute but don’t seem to play to the camera as much. (I wouldn’t want them to think I thought them less pretty than ‘Lito and Bug.)
Your weekend plans sounds fantastic. I hope post a lot of pictures from it.
You’re right, Easter-cat is not a fan of the camera and doesn’t play up to it at all. You’d never know she has the sweetest face to look at her pictures.
Carlito is mostly, I think, unhappy with finding himself the ‘middle child’ – with Easter cat under the weather and Pikachu oozing cuteness and hilarity, he’s been a tiny bit marginalised – though we’ve tried to make up for it with lots of brushing and tiny amounts of milk (his fav. treat).
The possum has been named “poss poss”. Because … I have no idea why; we both just started calling it poss-poss and it stuck. He/she is not quite as photogenic, true, but in defense, it was after a long night of eating everything in our garden, and right before bed when I caught the photo. Allowances for fatigue should be made. 😀
Wow. That actually looks like huge progress with Carlito and Pikachu, and in almost no time at all. Poor Easter cat, first in self-selected isolation and now due to the flu in addition … 🙁
She’s recovering nicely and back to having hiss(y)ing fits every time Bug come near her. Hardly any snuffling sounds at all now so we’re expecting drama in the days ahead. 😉
Ah, the times when screeches are a sign of progress … 😂