Blogtober 2022 : Day 4

Do you ever have those days when you wake up knowing that you’ve got a lot to do but there seems to be so much that you don’t know where to start?  That was me this morning, so after not so small daughter and my husband had left the house, I sat down with a brew to Write a List because I knew that I would feel so much better when it was all down on paper.

By the time I reached for a second page because the list was considerably longer than I had thought, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all so I decided to take the dog for a walk.  That’s always a good plan of action, I find – when you’ve got a huge list of things to, go and do something completely different! 🙂

Outside, the leaves are starting to turn but aren’t quite as far on as I’d imagined after the cold days the other week.  It’s gone a little bit warmer again and maybe the trees are deciding to hang onto their leaves for a bit longer.  I was writing yesterday about my Split Mitten progress and it looks like there’s no immediate rush to get them finished 🙂

I saw sweet chestnuts on a tree today.  I usually spot the horse chestnut (conker) trees and love looking out for conkers on the ground, but I always forget about the sweet chestnut trees (these are the edible type of chestnut but I’m not a fan).

Here’s a sweet chestnut case – the spines are softer than a horse chestnut case and there will be three or four small chestnuts in here instead of one or two big conkers.  I thought it looked like a little bottom lying on the pavement and that cheered me up!

Back home, I sat down with a brew and ignored the list.  I thought I’d write my Blogtober post for today instead, and then add it to the bottom of the list and tick it off as a job done to make myself feel better 🙂  I’d just sat down when Hattie the cat came in through the open window (I’d forgotten to close it when I let her out) carrying a something that wasn’t her usual feather.

Aargh!  It turned out that she’d graduated from feathers to a live mouse which she proceeded to drop and we both watched it scurry off.  OH NO!  I’ve lost hours of my day to mice being brought in and then casually abandoned, leaving them to head under the bookcase and me to have to sort it out.  Fortunately, this one scurried into a corner and I managed to stop it disappearing out of sight – it’s lucky I’m not bothered by mice, I didn’t think twice about trying grab it! – and then the dog and the other cat joined in and the four of us worked as Team Mouse to try to catch it.  I think my constant encouragement of “Don’t let it go under the bookcase!”, “Stop it going under that chair!”, “Aargh, I can’t believe you’ve done this!” did the trick 🙂

I don’t know who dealt the fatal bite (I can assure you it wasn’t me as I was holding up the end of the sofa at the time) but the poor little thing was quickly despatched and now the window is firmly shut against any more presents of that kind.  I know that some of you might be distressed by this, but we live in a place where field mice are plentiful so although I am always upset to see something like this happen in close proximity, there’s a good chance it would have happened outside anyway if the window had been shut.

What I did discover this morning as I held up the sofa with my superhuman strength (blimey, sofas are heavy, aren’t they?!), is that ours seems to be some kind of black hole receptacle for feathers.  Our sofa sits very close to the floor so I usually brush where I can, and push the vacuum cleaner hose under there, and I’ll even move the sofa to brush underneath it from time to time but I’ll be honest and say that I can’t remember the last time I actually lifted it up.

It wasn’t pretty.

It turns out that moving the sofa to brush underneath it just moves all the stuff that’s underneath it as well so you don’t actually get any of it.  I found lots of dog hair, little bits of cardboard (why?!), a chocolate eyeball that must have been from a long-past Hallowe’en (urgh) and feathers.

SO MANY FEATHERS!

I had no idea that Hattie had brought that many in and hidden them under the sofa.  I must put nearly that many in the bin every couple of days when she brings them home – even the postman commented about the number of them on the doorstep yesterday and thought that there had been some kind of terrible bird-related incident outside our front door.  The only good thing is that I know that she’s picking these up, not forcibly removing them from the birds (mice are one thing, birds are quite another!) but it’s a wonder that we even have any birds around here when it appears that we’ve now got several birds’ worth of their feathers in our house!

Anyway, all of these are now in the bin, the dog and Astrid are resting after our adventure, Hattie is back outside (presumably stalking more feathers) and it’s time for another brew.

Oh, and I have added “clean under sofa” and “catch the mouse” to my list and ticked them off 🙂