Bobcats, house cats, and tall trees

I knew it was going to be a good day when I walked in the door and Gena had just finished brewing a pot of Mukilteo Peruvian blend coffee—one of my favorites. The guys were already hard at work picking up where we left off yesterday.

Since I didn’t post yesterday, I’ll quickly sum the day up: we removed the siding (got a little too ferocious on the ripping and was rewarded with a knot on my head where I got drilled by a stray bullet of a siding chunk), the big dogs tore down basically the entire inside of the coffeehouse, and probably a lot of stuff that I just don’t know how to describe. Basically, a lot of stuff happened.

Today, they’ve got a bobcat digging dirt out to create enough of a hole to pour the foundation for the Rosie-dubbed glass room that, despite the connotation of that name, does not have “any more windows than ordinary,” to quote Gena. I’ll try to track down Jim and get more of an insider scoop when I can. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, let me tell you a story about our cat Samson. Great cat, Samson, but apparently he inherited my dad’s fear of heights. He seems to be able to climb just fine—he flies up tree trunks like they’re laid flat across the ground. However, as we discovered last night, he can’t seem to get back down. In fact, he becomes too terrified to even attempt to climb down. I first discovered him up there around 4 and decided to leave him up there as I cleaned my car, hoping he’d finally just quit crying and man up.

He didn’t. At that point, he was pretty low down, maybe 10 feet off the ground. So, I borrowed a painter’s ladder from Jim and Jo, thinking that would be enough. By the time I got back, that little moron had climbed up to about 25 feet—probably crying the whole way up. We were at a loss for a couple of minutes, but then Caitlin remembered we had a slightly taller ladder in the shed, so we leaned it up against the trunk (it topped out at about 8 feet off the ground), and I climbed up the tree in the night rain with my headlamp on. When I got to him and tried to pick him up, he clutched the branch with his claws like I was trying to toss him off a cliff. Anyways, we got him down at last, and that was our excitement for the week.