Peace and Quiet - or perhaps not!

I had loads of work to do yesterday, it involved checking information and dealing with unfamiliar subjects so I needed peace and quiet to get on with it. As you can imagine I find it impossible to get much work done when Robbie is around because he is very distracting. Even when he is trying to be good he can't last more than ten minutes without one of his famous 'did you know .......' monologues. Even when he is not talking to me he talks to himself and that is just as distracting. Yesterday Robbie was safely despatched to work and Sam and Laura had been delivered to school so I hoped for a nice quiet morning to get on with my work but thanks to Oreo (our cat) it turned into the most chaotic sort of day.

Oreo is less than a year old and still quite playful, but usually he doesn't cause too much disruption. I had just settled in front of my computer when there was a clatter in the hall and I discovered a rather sheepish Oreo wearing a new stile in feline bridal attire - my net curtain from the hall window! Liberated from his apparel he scampered up stairs while I replaced the curtain. I settled back to my work, but Oreo, who had been doing a spot of bird watching from the hall window had found a better vantage point at the window at the top of the stairs. It gave him a brilliant view of the flat roof of the utility room and the little puddle where the starlings like to take a bath. Unfortunately for Oreo it involved perching on top of a large plant pot containing an equally large christmas cactus, which I would imagine proved rather a ticklish problem. Before many minutes had passed we had a feline Humpty Dumpty, Oreo and the plant came tumbling down making a horrible mess and ruining a pile of clean laundry that was waiting to be put away.

Finally I settled back to work, and Oreo kept a low profile. He amused himself by stalking his favourite quarry - elastic hair bands! It is comical to watch him chasing and sliding on the laminate floor and such an insignificant little thing can hold his attention for ages. After that he and Dave (the other cat) played a very energetic game of chase and managed to sound like a whole heard of elephants racing up and down the stairs. Eventually peace reigned when they both found a patch of sunshine on the hall carpet, the ideal spot for a cat nap. Oreo was soon up and about again, he decided to investigate the hearth and chimney, but finding that he couldn't get up the chimney he examined the vase standing on the hearth instead. The inevitable happened, his head got stuck and a vase with a cat in it rushed around the lounge in a panic, amazingly both survived unscathed. Even more amazingly I managed to finish all my work.