I am worn out by all the insanity raging across what’s left of the world, so, to steal a phrase from John Cleese/Monty Python, now for something completely different…

I got up this morning too late to go back to bed, but too early, really, to walk our must walk dog. Still dark. Oh, well. I decided to take my little flashlight and take him out anyway, and WOW, I'm really, really glad I did.

Right off the bat, as soon as we came out on the seawall, I was hit by a sky full of stars, a rare occurrence lately. Venus, Saturn, perhaps Jupiter, the Pleiades, and Orion, all visible.

Like seeing old friends!

Then, as I sat on the seawall with my coffee as I like to do every morning after our walk, joined by Jo Black, my black minicat and Burgoy, our little, fierce territorial guardian dog, the sun, on its way to start the new day, put on a light show that went on for nearly an hour. Intense colors, brightening and fading and spreading across the sky, going from a strip in the east to the whole horizon from east to due south and back, then a quick dash to the north, with the pinks and blue grays that we usually associate with the Southwest in the US, and then to the yellows and golds intensifying to the almost painful as the sun finally made its appearance, rising brilliant and round, above the eastern horizon.

WOW! And through this, the occasional pitch black silhouette of a shimper returning to its daytime port. In the meantime, the local bats, the Night Shift, were returning to their roosts in the coconut palms and the swifts and swallows, the Day Shift, started breakfasting on the ever present insects along the shoreline...living the Dream, if only for an hour...

Family News: Small, the little tabby minicat who had kittens, moved them about a week ago. Too many people peeking in the cupboard to see them, and it kind of looked like she had taken them under the floor. Well, yesterday, I was looking under the kitchen sinks and lo and behold, out she comes from over the end of the undersink cabinets. Sure enough, when I opened the end cupboard, there they were, back behind the junk we keep in there. Sooo, I made a nice box, lined with a couple of nice, soft old t-shirts, wedged it into the space they had been in, put them and Mama Small in it, and all has been well ever since! I am not telling anyone else where they are until they are a little bigger and can be brought out without distressing Mama...

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that Jo Black was lying on the floor, looking like she was not well. When she had not moved after nearly an hour, I picked her up to check. She was kind of limp and unresponsive, not purring the way she always does when I pick her up. I sat with her for a while and she though she was breathing, her eyes were closed and she didn't move.

This is how all my lost little ones acted a day or so before they died, and I was pretty sure she would be gone in a day or two. After a while, I put her down on a pillow and she curled up and continued to sleep. Then, MILAGRO, Ronelle, Rina's oldest son and assistant chef and restaurant manager, came in with a fish head for her. She sat up and started to eat it, and then followed Ronelle into the back kitchen.

Full recovery! As near as we could figure out, she had been poisoned by a frog she had caught earlier, brought out by all the rain, and played with, but not eaten. Life in the Tropics! Anyway, life seems back to its normal abnormal self...

To be continued…