More adventure at the house of cats

This time, none of the cats are involved in the adventures about to be described. Though I would like to mention that our youngest, the one who found the possum, was very cute watching DNC speeches with us; he seemed to particularly like Michelle Obama.

Anyway, I was going to post about our adventures replacing the shed door a couple weeks ago. A previous owner had used an interior door, and it scraped on the concrete floor enough so that the door wouldn't really open and it was quite damaged. Also, the door knob and lock didn't really work, as they were loose and falling out.

But, since we replaced the door with an exterior door like it should have had in the first place, we've had a bit more excitement. Monday night, the night before Mark started teaching his first class and I had a meeting regarding my research assistantship and all the work I'll be doing for that, the power went out for part of our neighborhood.

We heard it before it happened, and therefore both knew what was about to happen. See, the transformer is in the back corner of our yard, so when we have a power outage, depending on how/why it goes out we might hear it, and this was one of those times.

It turned out that a neighbor's tree had fallen on the transformer, which the power company figured out a little before midnight, meaning it was going to take longer than they'd originally estimated to bring power back to the neighborhood. It also meant that they had to bring chainsaws to cut down the tree (and apparently some that it took with it) to get the transformer free and do the necessary work -- which means that we were woken up at 1 or 2 or so by the sound of chainsaws in our back yard. And muttering. Somehow I missed the part where one of them audibly said something along the lines of "It's going to look like a tornado went through here." (Mark heard that one, and it didn't help him get back to sleep any easier.)

We got power back sometime in the early morning while I was asleep, and woke up in time to get me to my meeting. (Mark's class is in the afternoon on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there was no problem there, and his full-time job is pretty flexible on the hours as long as he's there for meetings and puts in the time.)

Possum in the house

A while back, Mark heard one of the cats growling at something, but it didn't sound quite right. He found Banshee by the TV stand, staring underneath and, he thought, growling at something. However, it didn't sound like Banshee. Suddenly he realized that the growling was coming from underneath the TV stand.

Mark had been working in the garage with the side door open earlier. The possum must have gone into the garage then when he wasn't looking, and come into the house with him without him noticing. (The cats sometimes manage going through that door without us noticing, so it's certainly possible.) Then, after Mark had gone upstairs, Banshee cornered the possum. We're glad it ran under a piece of furniture that the cats are too big to go under, as someone would certainly have gotten hurt otherwise.

We locked the cats away, two in the laundry room downstairs and two in an upstairs bathroom, and Mark used an old outdoor broom to coax the possum out from its hiding place. I managed to get one picture of it before my camera batteries died (shown below) while he was trying to chase it toward the back door. He got it a bit farther before it just hunkered in a corner.

Finally, we got a big cardboard box, coaxed it in, and carried the box outside, letting it leave in its own time. While Mark went to find a suitable box, I kept an eye on the critter to make sure it didn't go anywhere, and had some fun at its expense, holding the broom above it and watching it move its head around, mouth wide open (looking ridiculous), waiting for a chance to bite the broom.

We got it out with nothing more than some potential emotional scars for the possum. Everyone who was supposed to be in the house was completely unharmed, and the possum got back outside to relative safety. Banshee probably didn't really think much of it even when it was happening.

Calls asking about flooding... after ours is done

Saturday after my last post, we got two calls from parents -- one from each set -- asking about how we were doing with flooding. This amused me because our flooding happened on Wednesday. Since then, the state has apparently had the worst flooding in 100 years or something.

We wouldn't have noticed ourselves, as none of the areas we went to over the weekend were directly affected. If it hadn't been for the calls from parents, we would only have noticed due to headlines later and because some friends of ours had their weekend plans altered due to the flooding; one friend was supposed to fly somewhere on Saturday, but was unable to reach Indy to get to the airport.

Basically, Bloomington itself wasn't hit too hard by that flooding. We mostly couldn't get anywhere. Depending on timing, the vehicle being driven, and the person behind the wheel, Bloomington was either an island or a peninsula. People couldn't get from Martinsville to Bloomington, and Mark has walked to Martinsville from our house. (Okay, so he's a little crazy, but still...)

Rain, rain, go away

Yesterday was an interesting one weather-wise. I'd gone to a friend's house to spend some time with her, she working on some sewing she's doing for someone, and me working on some of my computer stuff. We went out to grab lunch and got back a little after 2; the weather wasn't so bad then. But then it started raining. And I mean it was pouring. We've had over 3 inches of rain since the beginning of June (isn't it still the beginning of June?), and most of it was yesterday afternoon. I waited at the house for a while before going to pick up Mark from work due to what we'd heard about road conditions in town.

The following links should take you to photo galleries at the Herald Times from around town yesterday afternoon. At times like this it's nice to live on a hill.

Herald Times photos

Reader-submitted photos

We've had this blog set up for some time, and had not yet actually used it. We've had pictures from our trip to Japan for even longer, and have not yet shared most of them. So, when I recently rediscovered at least one place where we had those pictures stored, I decided to finally make use of the accounts I'd set up to share such things.

And so, now we have an album set up on Picasa: Japan pictures

And here's a slideshow of them: