That’s Mom in hyperventilate mode.  We sure thought she would fly off the planet.

This is what really got her goat.

Okay, so we admit we went a bit Over The Top in Dad and Mom’s absence, but once the excitement of their return was over, we actually thought Moment of Reckoning would be our last post.  We were grounded!

We are back now, a little chastised, a little bent – but not broken.  We are deeply injured by the unfairness of it all.  Torn books and scratched furniture are such a big deal for you; by that yardstick, humans should be grounded for life.  And just to be fair, we are not giving our own opinions, as we did when we lost our cool in Of poo packets and HS types . Our reasons come from the worldly wisdom we have picked up being with Mom day and night – from sharing her tea and newspapers to cuddling in quilts watching world affairs on the idiot box (we still have to figure out what the ‘idiot’ refers to – the box itself or those in / on it.  But more of that later).

• Grounding reason #1. We love walks but going out at certain times of the day means we have to ignore a dirty smell hanging about in the air.  Plus, from the time we have come into this world we have not seen the ‘clear blue skies’ we read about in Mom’s collection of storybooks about a world that seems to have choked itself out of existence.

• Grounding reason #2. Watching the idiot box is a surround sound horror movie.  Much of what you call the news is filled with scary sounds (and we don’t only mean yelling humans).  Sudden explosions make us jump out of our skins and run for cover … We have learnt a human word – conflict.  Everyday we hear that word at least a dozen times.  Your world is full of it. We run out of paws to count the ‘conflict-ridden’ areas in the world we share with you. Explosions is only a part of it.  We get so scared seeing pictures of kids crying.  They are surrounded by people in white clothes (we know what V-E-T means, spelt out or not), covered in bandages and blood (one little cut on one of our paws had our folks in a tizzy), or yelling their heads off.  You humans can only talk big words – mal-something, starv-something else – but we know why they are crying: we whine too if our meals are late.

😷A species that does not leave clean air for itself to breathe in and ruins the world for its own young – weird that you should be doing the grounding.  Now, moving back to our confusion about the ‘idiot’ in the box …