A Taste of Adventure

I have been feeling guilty about not blogging recently, so decided to do something about it. We are still dealing with the mite problem and most of my stuff is bagged up in the garage. Friday, hopefully, will be the last spraying for mites. I'm really looking forward to becoming more settled here at the townhouse, but there always seems to be something that comes up to derail my plans to unpack. The lastest unsettling event was having our refrigerator go out on Friday. The management company didn't deem it enough of an emergency to have the repair person come on the weekend. He came late in the afternoon on Tuesday, didn't have the component he needed for the repair, and promised to come today (Wednesday). We lost most of our food. Our good neighbor Phil graciously agreed to let us use one of his refrigerator shelves. We couldn't save everything, though. The appliances in these townhouses are low-end builder basics and are notoriously unreliable. A number of neighbors have already had their refrigerators go out, so it's not just bad luck on our part. The appliances are only 5 years old, which makes it sad that a company like GE doesn't make dependable products anymore. At least we don't have to pay for the repairs--being renters has advantages.

Now back to the topic of my title--our 18-year-old cat Tally got a taste of freedom on Saturday night. Larry and I went out for a little walk and didn't close our front door tightly. Tally went outside when it blew open. Back in Bellevue in recent years he never would go out the door, even when he had the chance. We thought he wouldn't go out here in Wallingford either. We are happy that Phil was at the house, discovered the open door, and started looking for him. We wouldn't have noticed for hours otherwise since Tally sleeps a lot in odd places. At any rate, after Larry and I joined him in a half-hour of frantic searching, Phil found Tally in our neighbor's yard, where he was looking around. Tally has been pawing at the front door every day since his adventure. He sits in our window, looking at the backyard, commenting now and then about how much fun it is to be there. We are wondering if he'll ever forget his adventure and are now very careful to close the door. Is Wallingford that much more exciting than Bellevue? Is Tally showing us that in our older years we can always find adventure if we enter doors that are open to us? Perhaps our old cat can teach us a thing or two about how to live.