Fourteen weeks + 1

Well I am running a little late this morning, but for all of the right reasons, I woke up again at about 4 o'clock but 4 crosswords and 2 sudoku puzzles later I finally dropped back off and slept until 9 o'clock, it's not a perfect nights sleep but it nearer to a whole one. This morning I have had the interesting task of trying to move the feeding of my cats from the floor in the kitchen, onto the new breakfast bar in the utility, anyone who has ever attempted this kind of major upheaval with their cats will appreciate the enormity of the task I have ahead of me, it certainly isn't a simple process. Phase one was to get them all into the kitchen at the same time (easy) then by way of using a can of tuna to tempt them into the utility and up onto the side. It does bear mentioning that I have 3 cats, and as anyone with cats will tell you they are all completely different, and so pose very different problems. Denny (Dennis the Menace) owns the joint so he practically walked straight into the room and onto the side, Mini (yes the car not the mouse) she came in second, but milled around on the floor meowing like a noisy beached whale, well I lifted her onto the side, then she was fine. Now Herbie (again a car, do you see a pattern now, this is what happens when you have boys and you let them name your cats, plus Denny had a really close call and was nearly named Spaka Cat) Herbie is my very nervous Bi-Polar cat, and Neil had to carry him in, avoiding the hissing, and place him on the breakfast bar, at that he hissed at me and jumped back off, but the door was shut, so I picked him up again and put him next to his bowl of tuna, nope he just hissed and jumped off again. Well by this point Denny had finished his tuna and moved onto the next bowl anyway, so I said enough for now. I know this will be a slow process, and just to give you an example of how Herbie doesn't like change, when we had the dog it was 6 months before he would even eat downstairs, so I am in for a long haul!

Yesterday turned out to be a trip from hell, well no it was a hellish trip through Wolverhampton. Somehow we managed to turn up in on the ring road at the exact same moment as the spectators all poured out of the Molineux, the whole place just ground to a standstill, and no matter how much turning down side streets and trying to cut across we did, we just ground back to a halt. It took us 40 minutes just to get out of the city. A journey to Neils Mom and Dads normally takes between 40 and 50 minutes so basically we doubled our journey time, plus I thought Neil might actually implode, if you think I've got no patience I'm nothing compared to Neil when he's stuck in traffic. It is our own fault we never checked to see if a match was on, but to be fair, even if there is we are normally travelling through whilst it's on, so I can only assume it was an early kick off time. Still it was a lesson learned.

As to today, well we will have the ongoing adventure with feeding the cats, that can only get more interesting. Neil has moved my washing machine into the utility as well now, which was a much simpler process than the cats, well it was once he'd pulled it back out and actually turned on the cold water. Now I can move the little freezer back under the breakfast bar in the kitchen and then I just have a nice furniture sized gap to fill in the kitchen extension. Although there was some talk yesterday of not doing that, and of getting rid of the dogs settee, demoting him to a bed on the floor, and possibly buying the boys a pool table for Christmas that would fit quite nicely in there, thank you very much. I'm not quite sure how much of a say I have in this, but I only narrowly managed to hold onto my dining room table, earlier in the year when the idea was first mentioned! This is the cost of being outnumbered by the men in my life. When Neils Mom said, "where do you eat though?", Neil just said, you can put a piece of MDF and a table cloth on top of the pool table, it's simple. That's when I knew I was in trouble, it had been far to thoroughly thought out. I will keep you informed of the pool table plans, and whether my cats manage to adjust to their food moving. Now I'm going to find that elusive second cup of coffee and hope that the washing machine isn't leaking all over my lovely new utility floor.