Sunday, July 10, 2022

Tybalt, you have been a naughty cat

Late last evening, while I was elsewhere, the sound of a loud crash emerged from my office, and then so did a cat. Investigation proved that the ten-pound cat had jumped from my desk on to the hanging bookshelves next to it, which he'd never done before because they're fully occupied.

Thus the weight, or more accurately the momentum, of said ten-pound cat caused the entire assembly to fall to the floor, not incidentally knocking out the power cords from their wall outlets, and all of that is now buried in a large pile of shelves, shelf supports, and all the books and papers on it.

That means not only is my computer unplugged and without power, so are the room lights, so I can't attempt to clean any of this up until the morning.

Right now I have a lot of computer work to do: a book I'm in the middle of indexing, another indexing job about to arrive, and the revised proofs of the Tolkien Studies special issue came the previous day, with only a week to get the whole thing reviewed and returned. That'll have to wait.

The only amusing part of this is imagining how startled the cat must have been when its perch disappeared out from under it.

Then, literally in the middle of the night at 3 am - while I'm up, as I often am at that time, working on a totally different long-standing project - B. reports that the tank lever on the toilet has broken.

So that's the first job in the morning, waiting for the hardware store to open - late, 'cause it's Sunday - to find a replacement part and then hoping I have the mechanical savvy to replace the broken one. Relievingly, I do.

Followed by long job of picking up enough books and papers and shelves and shelf supports to uncover the power cords and outlets. Putting the shelves back up will have to wait for later; everything's now piled on my work table. Despite entreaties, the cat is not permitted in the room.

Fortunately everything electronic still works, and I'm here to report on that and then get back to work.

No comments:

Post a Comment