This week it's been mostly about our furry friends and the agonies they put us through. Sid and I spent a pleasant five hours or so redoing some of the electric fencing where the fumiste bloke had put loads of unnecessary knots in it thus reducing the current by several orders of magnitude. The weather was really nice and warm when we started off and we ended up soaked through to the knicker elastic. Amazing how quickly the weather can come in with a following wind (ho ho).
Anyway. Somewhere in the middle of all that Binky had gone out for an afternoon constitutional and was taking her time coming back; when we finally finished our fencing activities around the 8.30 mark, still no Binky. We had to get up at an even more ridiculous hour than normal as Sid was off to Amsterdam for a couple of days so ideally that would have indicated an early night, but no. 11.30 and still no Binky, no matter how forlornly or how long I stood out there calling her. Spent some time with the kittens and went off to bed, only to wake suddenly at 3.30am convinced that she was outside. Fumbled my way downstairs to find that no, she wasn't.
Still no Binky next morning :( drove Sid to the station at 6am then back home just in case but nothing. It was funny though because although my brain was really worried, messages from my body (which I have learnt to pay more attention to) were that I shouldn't worry, so the net result was that I oscillated between those two points.
I was pretty desperate to get home on Monday night, thinking she'd definitely be there, but still no Binky. Wahhhhhh. Spent quite a bit of time with the kittens, pleasantly comfortably sat on a bean bag with four of them swarming over me. They seemed to be coping and made the most of the minced free range roast chicken I just happened to have lying around.
Tuesday morning, no Binky. Hmmm. Either something's happened to her or she's off shagging. Got home Tuesday night not really holding out much hope that she'd be back, so it took my synapses a few seconds longer than usual to register the fact that she was actually sat there in the front garden, patiently waiting for me to arrive home :) I'm not sure who was more pleased; me to see her or her to get such a warm welcome, and she was full of chirrupy sweetness, both for me and her babies. It was lovely to see her walk straight into the kitchen, just as though she'd lived there for weeks and been waited on hand and foot with fresh fish and chicken and provided a safe haven and everything she needed to raise her lovely babies and generally been fussed over and welcomed into the family bosom. It's a funny thing, n'est-ce pas?
Needless to say the babies were thrilled to see her and swarmed all over her, though I was gratified that they also came to greet me as erstwhile supply mom while Binky was AWOL.
So you'd think would be enough drama, right? Me too. On Wednesday evening I kept hearing a mewling noise but couldn't place it, eventually thinking it was somewhere outside but couldn't see anything untoward, so went about my doings in the normal fashion and went off to bed somewhat later. Next morning at 5.30am there was the unmistakeable desperate mewling of a kitten in trouble and a protracted series efforts in tracking down the noise (involving clambering about on the kitchen roof barefoot in my jim jams, still bog eyed and bleary) led me to the undeniable conclusion that said kitten was somehow trapped inside a box below the guttering.
Sid wasn't best pleased at the subsequent need for a rescue mission at this ungodly hour of the morning but there was nothing else for it but to set to with a pair of chisels and wrench the thing apart to get to the kitten. What a tiny, pathetic, shivering little thing came out! No idea how long it had been there and more to the point perhaps howw the buggery it had got there in the first place.
Anyway, so we'd rescued it; great! Now what? There was only one thing to do really and that was to leave it with Binky and let it take its chances, so that's what I did. Immediately she started licking it, went over on her back and seemed to be pushing it towards her teats. Awwww. What an amazing cat she is. We were both a bit choked about that.
So we'll see. It's small and weak but feeding regularly and being barrelled around a lot by the others and seems to be getting stronger. Fingers crossed.
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