Entertaining and vaccinating

It’s been quite busy week. College started back on Monday. Fortunately we don’t have any students to teach yet – they’re still applying and enrolling – but we’ve just moved to a new office with half the number of filing cabinets and no shelves instead of lots of shelves. So there has been much unpacking of resources and much attempting to rationalise these and arrange them into less space than before. It’s quite hard to make folders smaller.

Last term, we were allowed some choice as to which room we would like for this new office. We chose one with a nicer outlook than our old one, but the crucial thing was that it was rather bigger. It was four windows wide instead of three windows wide plus an alcove. It’s unusual for things to get better rather than worse in the world of the public sector, so we were all excited about this extra space and made great plans for it. Then one day we passed the room that was to be ours, and workmen were stripping it out… and building a new wall which cut the room down to three-window width. So it’s actually smaller than our previous one.

It would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so annoying.

At home, we’ve had Daughter 2’s aspiring-actor boyfriend staying for some weeks (he lives down south) while he rehearsed for the play he’s now performing in during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. (This is more or less the only work, or as I tend to think of it “work”, he’s done this year – and I mean work of any variety, not just acting. Don’t get me started on this subject. Hmm.) Anyway, he’s been occupying our only spare room, Daughter 1’s former bedroom. Then last Friday, five of Daughter 2’s friends arrived to stay (two boys in Daughter 2’s room, which has one of those pull-out beds under the bed) while the three girls plus Daughter 2 slept, sleepover-style, on mattresses in the sitting room.

The friends departed on Sunday and then on Monday, aspiring-actor boyfriend’s parents arrived for a few days, to see Edinburgh and his play. They slept in Daughter 2’s room while she camped on her brother’s floor. Then, to add to the complications, my niece came on Tuesday to stay till Friday – yesterday. She actually slept at my mother’s, but was around here quite a bit. On Thursday, aspiring-actor boyfriend’s parents departed, and since it was my niece’s last night in Edinburgh, we had my mother and my aunt down to a meal.

So, while this has all been quite fun, I haven’t exactly been idle, which explains why I haven’t been doing a lot of blog activity.

This morning we took Cassie and Sirius to have their second injections. We don’t yet possess a cat-carrying basket, but when I took them for the first injections, I just put them in a slightly see-through plastic crate with a lid that folds down in two halves. No great problem. This time, husband was around to help, so we got a kitten each and put them into the crate. Or at least, that was the idea. We actually picked up a kitten each and these took one look at the crate and suddenly turned into squirming furry dervishes with fourteen legs between them, each of these legs kicking out in a different direction and not at all conducive to going into a box. No sooner had one kitten been crammed into the box and the lid slammed shut, than we had to retrieve the other one from behind a sofa (not an easy task – they move fast) and then we had to open the lid again to insert the second, whereupon the first shot out faster than the speed of light and zoomed into some other inaccessible corner. I had no idea they were so strong. I thought they were little fluffy toy-type things, not steely-muscled warriors armed with a thousand tiny, sharp claws.

At last we managed to force Sirius into the box when Cassie was already in it, and fell back, exhausted and sweating. Then we looked triumphantly through the sides of the box to savour our victory. One kitten only. We were amazed. We were so sure that, during our incarceration of Sirius, Cassie couldn’t possibly have escaped. We were there! We would have seen her! But we looked sideways, and there she was in the kitchen, poised for further flight.

We won eventually and the deed was done. The strange thing was that, at the vet’s, they behaved like little fluffy angels. You want to extract one kitten for the vet to stick a nasty needle into him? Certainly. I’ll just sit here in this box. You want to put him back in while the same happens to me? No problem. Now I should go back in the box? Of course. Home again, they went calmly to sleep. Husband and I drank coffee from quivering mugs and wondered if a sedative would help the next time. For us, I mean.