Monday, April 26, 2010

Morning Mysteries

 This is the scene after a bit of tidying up was done (we had to be able to reach the toilet after all).  And to think that I'd given the laundry a thorough clean up just that day!

Today began with a mystery.  I was woken around 5.30 this morning by the sound of mini galloping.  I lay in my warm bed for a while rifling through options in my head.  Possums on the roof (no, we have a tin roof and this wasn't a metallic sound).  Something that Tristan had caught escaped and he was now chasing it around the house - possibly, but there was only one set of footsteps and they sounded a lot lighter and faster than our large orange cat.  A very miniature horse race being held in my house with fairies as jockeys? - Wake up Rosemary!!!!  As the galloping came close to my side of the bed yet again (whatever it was seemed to be doing laps of the bedroom) I put my hand down to catch whatever it was and believe it or not I did catch it.  I lifted the body up off the floor and tried to figure out what it felt like.  I'm not the best at 5.30am so it took a while.  Thankfully it wasn't a rat accidentally released by Tristan, or a wild possum that had got inside.  It would have been better if these possibilities had gone through my head before I picked up whatever this furry body was.  Then my brain clicked into gear and I realised I was holding a ferret.  Obviously one of the female ferrets because it was a sable ferret.  Whether it was Jocie or Cecilia I couldn't tell.  It was too dark to sort out the slightly different face markings.

Well, that was easily dealt with.  I dragged myself out of bed, mumbling to Graeme who had just come to, that I had a ferret and was returning it to its indoor cage in the kitchen.  Graeme left me to it and and went back to sleep.  I returned the disgruntled ferret to its cage and performed a cursory check of the cage for the escape route but couldn't find one anywhere.  To prove there was no escape route from the ferret cage, all four ferrets are still in there a couple of hours later.  If there was a way out Jocie and/or Cecilia would have used it by now.  That was mystery number one.

I then decided to visit the toilet while I was up.  I went outside to the laundry (where we keep our only toilet) and met the second mystery of this very early morning.  The laundry was A MESS!  Chaos reigned supreme.  No dogs were to be found anywhere - I suspect they'd taken to the hills when they heard me in the kitchen, and I don't blame them.  If they had been anywhere in sight serious questions would have been asked, and one thing my dogs don't like is me asking them serious questions.  They have to go to the trouble of putting on their sorry faces, hanging their heads and trying to look innocent all at the same time.  That's no easy feat that early in the morning.

I surveyed the chaos.  The bin had been upturned, emptied and its contents strewn around the room.  The top of the bin was missing in action (Graeme located it under the rubble when he got up this morning).  The vinyl cover over the dryer had been pulled off and the various bottles and jars I keep on top were in the strangest places you could imagine, three heavy boxes stacked on each other and holding my hand dyeing equipment had been moved out from the wall and the top box was now tottering precariously, threatening to add its contents to the already overloaded floor, the large bag of kitty litter was dragged out from under the sink but otherwise unmolested, the cat food bin was barely jostled.  This is a mystery in itself because all three dogs love dry cat food and if they were going to this much trouble to create a mess, surely they'd take the time to tip the bin over and eat the contents.  It wouldn't be the first time they'd raided the cat food after all . 

And most mysteriously of all the cardboard box of tinned dog food had been dragged to the middle of the room and chewed down to the level of the remaining tins.  Why had the dogs mauled the cardboard box?  Had they had an attack of the munchies during the night and ignored the cat food and had a craving for cardboard?  Had the box in some way offended them and they reacted violently?  Had they taken time out from their nefarious night time destruction and absent-mindedly gnawed on the box while plotting their next move?  It appears that they actually ate some of the cardboard because there
wasn't enough cardboard litter on the floor to match the amount missing from the box as far as I could see.  Then again there was so much that was on the floor I might have missed it. 

I stood there for a few minutes trying to get my brain to make sense of this.  Unfortunately I can't make sense of anything during an ordinary morning, let alone all that lay scattered before me!  My brain just whirred with useless ideas like they'd chased a mouse, a possum had got into the laundry and they chased it (I don't know why I kept coming back to possums - we've never had one close to the house in the 13 years we've lived here, but possums kept intruding anyway), there had been a mini tornado, or possibly a very concentrated earth quake isolated to the laundry had struck.  An intruder had come along and looking for our valuables in the laundry rather than the house had created the mess and the dogs were off chasing him - that would explain the lack of dogs on the back porch at this time of morning at least.  But none of these scenarios explained the chewed dog food box.  It occurred to me that maybe I needed to go back to bed and think about this when I could think clearly in an hour or two. 
I returned to bed, told Graeme what I'd found and then lay there wide awake, questions whirling like dervishes in my mind.  He just grunted once or twice, so I told him I hadn't cleaned it up yet because I just wasn't up to it at this time in the morning.  Another grunt greeted that statement.   I get up at 6am anyway, so I got up ready to start my day.  My mind kept going over possible explanations, but other than you never know what my menagerie is going to throw at me, I couldn't find any rational explanation for this morning.

Graeme thinks the escaped ferret (no theory on how she escaped though) ran out the open front door (we leave it open at night so Tristan can come and go as he pleases), around the house, up the porch steps to the laundry at the back, ignoring the fact that it was full of dogs, caught the dogs' attention, they chased it around the laundry (in complete silence!?) until it finally escaped unscathed and then ran back to the front of the house, inside the front door, threw a right into our bedroom and started doing victory laps until I caught it.  It seems Graeme can't cope with two different mysteries this early in the morning and has to combine them to explain both.  He won't be swayed from this theory, even though, once again the chewed box isn't explained, nor the scattered bin contents for that matter.

I am a bit worried about Graeme.  It seems the animals are finally getting to him.