The Great Flood of 2013

Warning: the events described in this message may be disturbing to some readers. So disturbing that instead of providing you with pictures of what our basement looks like right now (the insurance agent has taken plenty of those), we are illustrating this post, as usual, with beautiful, recent pictures of ourselves (be sure to click the pictures to enlarge them):

NEWS FLASH: As we explained in our previous blog entry, it snowed a lot this winter! And we have been eager for the weather to improve.

So, we were excited to see the temperatures go up and up during the past week or so. It was warm out there in our pen all night long!

But we were not so happy as the piles of snow in our yard began turning into big, muddy pools of water.

We became downright unhappy when, overnight on Wednesday, March 13, it rained and rained and rained. Rained really hard. The ground in our pen got soaking wet.

Even worse:

As the night-time hours passed we realized (because we were awake and playing and running all over the house), something Pat did not yet know (because she was sound asleep upstairs): ground water was rising higher and higher into the basement, even in the places where Pat puts eight of our twelve litter boxes!

It wasn’t until Pat got up on Thursday morning and went downstairs to clean our litter boxes (always her first job of the day), that she saw we couldn’t get to the boxes without wading through an inch of water.

Then Pat got as upset as we already were!

Once again, lots of men came to the house, with noisy machines. These machines are supposed to drain all the water out of the basement and dry all the moisture out of the air.

Pat says this is just the first step: next week, all the laminate wood flooring will be pulled up, and new flooring will be installed.
 

Pat tries to comfort us by telling us that we are not the only ones to be flooded. According to the newspaper that magically appears in our mailbox every morning – the Charlottetown Guardian – homes all over the Island have been flooded. In many homes the water is much higher and the damage is much worse than in our house.

Meanwhile, so long as the machines are running in the basement, none of us are allowed to go down there. Pat says we must use the litter boxes upstairs and in the garage. And, she has put new litter boxes in the ground floor laundry room.

The biggest problem is that we have lost an entire floor and an entire staircase where we played our games all night long!

So, Pat has done the only thing she can think of to keep us entertained: she went out and bought us new toys, which you can see in these pictures. And for now we do much of our playing in the ground-floor family room.

The final straw:  The temperature has fallen once more and we just looked out the windows to see that it is SNOWING AGAIN!

 What a winter!

Cabin Fever (Winter, 2013)

It snowed a lot this winter! Which usually doesn't bother us because we like to skip and twirl and slide and play tag on ice-covered snow.

But this year's snow was different -- when we tried to walk on it, we sank down so deeply that it was a struggle to claw our way out. So Pat said we had to stay indoors -- and then she closed the window and the cat door leading to our pen!

So what have we been doing while we are house-bound?

Natasha has the easiest time of it because she has so much to do inside. She loves to help Henry as he works in his office:

And, Natasha has a favorite indoor sport that involves lots of vigorous rolling back and forth:

Can you guess where she is?

Summer also has an indoor hobby: he likes to listen to the television news. But judging by this picture, Dandy was seriously bored by news reports concerning the (American) State of the Union:

Office work, bath-tub gymnastics, listening to the news -- these are activities that take quite a bit of energy. In the next picture, Boris joins Natasha in demanding that dinner be served early:

Here is what happens when Pat tosses us a handful of treats:

 In fact, we spend quite a bit of time eating:

Did you notice anything odd in the preceding picture?  That's right! Farah and Summer are no longer bitter enemies -- they can now be right next to each other without growling and howling and boxing each other's ears. It is Summer who deserves the credit for this detente: Farah still growls when he comes too near, but he ignores the provocation.

In the next picture, Farah and Summer exchange meaningful glances:

Take a good look at the pink carpet in this picture. Because, just when we thought our cabin fever was at its peak -- just when we thought things couldn't get worse -- Pat announced that she has always hated that pink carpet and she was having it replaced! And for good measure, we were also getting new tiles in the upstairs bathrooms!

As our much-stained and therefore much-loved carpet was being taken away, Summer was allowed to go outside to the porch to say goodbye on behalf of us all:

Then men came into the house with noisy machines. They spent days putting down the new carpet and tiles.

Whenever the men left the house, we hurried out of our hiding places to inspect their tools and see what damage they had been doing:

We were SO upset that Pat tried to calm us down by promising that after the men left, she would buy us a new tower to match the carpet!

Here is Hershey on the new tower:

(By the way -- if you are wondering, the print on the wall is "End of the Day," by the well-known Alaskan artist Rie Munoz. It depicts scenes from Juneau, Alaska in the 1960s, when Pat went to high school there.)

Taffy on the tower:

We are glad the men are gone now and we can get down to work scratching and staining the new carpet. But even with this project to keep us busy, we remain a bit bored.

So we devote many hours to the most reliable pastimes of all:  perching, and sleeping.

Dandy continues to be a mama's boy who prefers the company of his mother Tessa:

Hershey and Summer are best buddies who like to curl up together on the sofa:

But when Summer decides to stretch out, there isn't much room left for Hershey:

When that happens, Hershey goes upstairs to join his sisters: in this next picture, he is with Cocoa:

And here are all four "Jets": from left to right, Cocoa, Tootsie (who is Hershey's favorite sister), Hershey, and Taffy:

Sometimes, though, it seems best just to rest alone quietly while we wait for better weather:

Winter Morning