Some excitement in our household tonight. I sat down about two hours ago after my wife (who has an early rise) went to bed, put iTunes on shuffle, and thought about what I’d write here. Before I could get very far, however, our cat, Simon, began scratching at the basement window and crying.

I turned to see what was up and saw him swatting at the blinds, then he fell from the little ledge onto the floor. That woke up the wife, and I got up to see if he was alright (ok, we talk to our cat so I did say “are you ok buddy?” out loud, I’ll admit it). He was fine, and he continued speaking while trotting upstairs to the living room window, clearly agitated.

It turns out another cat was outside the window, and Simon came running back down, hopped up, and both of them commenced bawling in unison.

At this point my wife was back up and we sequestered Simon downstairs while going out to investigate. We didn’t know whether this other cat was hurt or something, but as it turned out it was thankfully just fine. Better than fine, actually; it started purring up a storm when we approached and was jumping up to nudge us, rubbed against our legs, very social.

It was also pretty dry according to my wife, who was the first one out. It’s snowing heavily out tonight, though thankfully it’s not very cold, and soon enough it was pretty wet. That coupled with the fact it looks very well fed, healthy, and had been fixed (the wife checked) lead us to believe it’s a local house cat. Whether it got out by accident or gets out regularly we don’t know. Neither of us have seen it around before, and there are a few others we see every now and then, but this isn’t one of them.

Eventually we let it into our porch and fed it; Simon is very picky about his food so I have a nearly full case of Whiskas pate style he won’t touch, and this cat ate not one but two full cans of it. We put out water too, which it drank, and we’d given it some treats earlier while outside.

Before letting it in, I hastily finished the little kitty hut I’d been working on but it was having none of it. It’s out there now, though, in case it or any other kitty needs a place to stay. I meant to put it out earlier but like many of my projects I got distracted, so at least this forced me to get that done and put out there.

Anyway, the cat and Simon do not get along, so we can’t keep it in the porch. The door between our porch and the kitchen, which I sometimes refer to as our airlock vis a vis keeping Simon inside, has glass panels all through it. While the newcomer was there Simon couldn’t stay away from it and they were hissing and yelling something fierce.

The plan was going to be keep the potential stray inside over night and call the police and/or the town hall in the morning (no shelters for like 50+ km from here) but that clearly wasn’t going to work, so we put out more food (which it ate) and water, plus the little aforementioned shelter, then opened the outside door again. It left of its own volition and wandered back out into the night, but it has food, water, and shelter here should it return and need it.

So yeah, that was our excitement for the evening. Sara’s trying to get some sleep but she’s got to be up at 5:30am at the latest so hopefully she’s not too tired tomorrow. I’ll be headed to bed soon myself, but first I wanted to post this and will now post some pics I took to the NL Lost Pets Facebook group, just in case.

[eta] Attempting to embed my Facebook post to the lost pets group here, let’s see if it works:

It didn’t, but adding one of the pics we took and shared with the group: