Saturday adventures...

I have spent the last couple of days taking the Christmas boxes out of the storage closet and setting up Santas, angels, and Christmas trees..... the house is beginning to look like Christmas. As always, as the things come out of the boxes, I ask myself "Who bought all this stuff?!" It looks like a ton of money was spent on this holiday, but mostly all the decorations came from resale shops, eBay, antique co-ops and yard sales...... when you stay out of stores like Macy's and Dillard's, you can have a house filled with Christmas for just pennies on the dollar. (My kind of shopping.)

Everything is out of the boxes and each room has more than its share of Christmas..... I know I could make a few more small trees and have rooms to display them in, but the long shelf in the storage closet has no more room for another tree, and my rule is that if there's no room to put it away neatly and safely in that closet, then I can't buy or make another little tree.

I was at the very end of that storage closet this afternoon, putting away the empty boxes... and I had forgotten to lock the door at the top of the back stairs........ and how do I know that? Because when I came out of the closet and walked into the kitchen, it was eerily quiet in the back of the house, but all sorts of meows and screeches were coming from the front of the house. Not a good sign. Up the back stairs I went, and the bird cage was face down on the landing of the stairs, in the middle of a zillion bits of birdseed....... Mickey was in the living room inspecting one of the large Santas, and Sweet Pea was in the dining room, hiding under the table.

First thing I did was make sure the parakeets were still in the cage--- they were still in there, and thankfully, the little cage doors were still shut. I left the cage right where it was.... picked up Mickey and put him in the TV room and shut the door...... picked up Gatsby and put him outside... and then went to get Sweet Pea, who by that time had run up the front stairs and was hiding under our bed. I knew he was the birdcage-tornado..... that cat can't resist anything with wings, from the tiniest fly to the largest black crows outside. Had those cage doors come undone, those parakeets would have been history while I was making everything all neat and tidy in that storage closet.

I coaxed Sweet Pea out from under the bed....... he crawled out only after he turned over on his back with his belly up in the air, looking at me upside-down with that 'poor kitty' look that cats can do so well. I picked Sweet Pea up, told him the birds were fine, the cage was fine, and the only not-fine thing was that he gave me a blessed mess to clean up. Into the TV room went Sweet Pea..... and into the front hallway went me....... I looked at the cage and the mess on that stairway landing and I hardly knew where to start.

Houdini and Bluebell were upset to be in the middle of a mess of spilled birdseed and water, plus some of the little branches broke when the cage went flying to the floor...... aside from little clouds of parakeet feathers, the birds were okay......... I put the cage on the kitchen counter so they could settle down while I cleaned up the mess on the landing. All that birdseed that I swept up....... into the yard it went, and the chickens ate up every last seed. I cleaned up the wood floor of the landing..... chased after those tiny feathers which moved around the hallway with every breath I took..... then I put the cage in order and replaced the broken branches with my 'stash' of pecan tree branches that I keep outside for their cage. From start to finish, it all took about an hour..... and of course my husband is never at home when excitement such as this happens.... by the time he got back from the neighbor's house, every last drop of water and bit of birdseed had been cleaned up and the parakeets were back on the landing in their cage and perfectly content.


We haven't seen the raccoon lately..... not since the night I went out there and shot twice at him with my eyes closed. I either hit him or I scared him enough to find another place to hang out....... a place that doesn't have a crazy woman who can't keep her eyes open when she pulls the trigger of a gun.

The orange cat........ we're calling him Pumpkin-Kitty for now........ he's still around, still meowing on the porch when he's hungry, still not letting me get too close when I feed him.......and we still don't know if we're keeping him. Even for an outside cat... I just don't need another pet...... I'll be worried about him when the temperatures get colder during December and January........... do we really need another cat? Of course not. Do we even want another cat? Of course not. My cousin F suggested the name 'Pumpkin," but this being the south, everyone gets a middle name and everyone uses it, so Pumpkin-Kitty it is for now.

Last night just at dusk, there were three huge deer in the front pasture. So huge that at first I thought the neighbor's horses were out roaming around...... from my front door to the middle of that pasture is a good long way, and it was nearly dark and hard to tell from inside the house. I told my husband that we'll have to remember to look outside tonight, around the same time, to see if the deer come back.

Raccoons in the middle of the day, deer at dusk, cats who overturn birdcages.... another day on the ranch here.