random thoughts – Day 2,385 (Sunday) – weather and mystery

View on a wet and windy day.

The weather was wild throughout the overnight stretch from Saturday into Sunday. I was tired and went to bed at the very responsible hour of 10:00 and read for a bit, until I was sufficiently sleepy. There was a brief nap and then I was awake all over again. Still awake (and annoyed) at 1:00 am, with the wind howling and rain slamming from every direction, I did the thing I usually manage to avoid and picked up the phone. Soon, I was deep in a Doomscroll and it was suddenly 2:00. The phone was put down and I tried to sleep, unsuccessfully, and suddenly it was 3:00 and I was really annoyed, but I finally fell asleep.

A bit after 8:00 I woke up tired, but got up anyway. It wasn’t until the coffee grounds and water were in the machine and nothing happened that I was aware the power was out. A text from the power company about the outage and a map on their system indicated 450 people in my chunk of town were out of power. The estimate for repair was 4:00 pm, which felt very far away.

Kudos to National Grid for under promising and over delivering. The power was restored at 9:20 am, coffee was made and consumed, and my world was returned to its axis. The weather was still wretched with a forecast for a full day of it, and it was decided to stay in and enjoy the rainy day.

There was another installment of the seasonal game “find the rest of the sweaters” when I prepared to dress and couldn’t find the one I wanted to combat the chill in my other game of “don't turn on the furnace.” The targeted sweater was finally located with a bunch more, and the final analysis is that I have many more sweaters than I need. Maybe. Life is uncertain and I can’t see the future, so it would be risky (foolhardy, even) to discard the nice office sweaters or the dressy sweaters just because they weren’t used last winter. 

Maybe I’ll finally create a social life in my new city and have a variety of places to go and things to do. Maybe I’ll be 20 years old again and be crowned the queen of some remote country due to an unknown lineage like in a Hallmark movie. Anything is possible, right?

In the weirdness of the weather and the power outage and the sweater agonizing/organizing, it was 11:00 am when I realized Kiki hadn't been seen since Saturday night when she got her treats before I went to bed. I walked around the house, calling her name and looking in all the rooms. She was in none of her known places. I finally found her blending in with the shadows in the darkest corner under the bed, which I had already checked. It felt a little like our first few weeks together in Lowell when she hid inside the box spring for weeks on end.

And suddenly, she appeared.

Once, I laid on the floor and stretched my arm under the bed to hand feed Kiki some treats. She stayed under the bed until nearly 9:00 pm, when she finally emerged, acting like nothing was different and she hadn’t been MIA all day. She wanted her cheeks rubbed and let me pet her from head to tail. 

It seems to be a continuation of Kiki mixing things up since a month or so ago when she stopped sleeping on top of the bed and with me at night, as suddenly as she started.