Still alive and (mostly) breathing

Well it's been a week of blergh and staying very close to home.  I'm very tired of everything smelling like the inside of my sinuses and nausea which goes along with the junk running down the back of my throat. Cack, cack, cackity cack!  Is all I can really say! Of course I gotmiserable.  It's been quite a while now since laying eyes on my sons (of course I would be cursed with sons who don't post pictures to their mother) and while Brooke has promised some..............

So what to do?  You guessed it! We got a kitten!  I wore David down with my constant cries of  "Look a little kitten who doesn't have a home" so he finally said yes. We tootled off to the other side of Muscat and met little Bundle.  We resisted her manfully (at least David did) while we were introduced to her favourite toys.  She had been an inside cat for precisely 2 days.  The people who were looking after her had just managed to catch her mother and take her to the vet to be neutered, with Bundle turned up.

Bundle aged 6 weeks

There are many cats in Oman.  They are of course native to the land.  They live in bins and around the wadiis and breed like breedy things.  Vets have started fostering services and will do cheap neutering if people bring them in.  They keep them until they're recovered from surgery and then pop them back into the streets.  Bundle had nowhere to go....so she came home with us.

She discovered quite quickly that we were trainable and that there were certain parts of the house that were her playground.  She went from running and hiding to stalking in about 24 hours.  She's been practising running, jumping, attacking, getting on chairs, attacking, leaping around pouffes, attacking, discovering boxes, attacking, eating, attacking, springing into the air, attacking, demanding attention, attacking skidding over the floor, attacking.  Yesterday she turned on her purr.  She's not a cuddly cat yet, but time will tell (at the moment she's hiding things behind the printer for later.

Our ten boxes o'stuff arrived a couple of days ago.  I now have a study full of papers and books.  Mmmm maybe turfing all those folders and shelves was not such a good idea. I may have to find a little man to make shelves.  It's amazingly easy to get shoe cupboards, but not book shelves.  Maybe the odd filing cabinet as well.  At the moment there are piles of paperwork on the floor.  There is a kitten on the floor.  This could prove messy. Our DVDs and CDs have all been seized by Customs for viewing.  We have no idea what we will get back but it might take a while..........

We are now also the proud owners of some dining room furniture.  We bought a large square dining table with eight chairs and a matching display case/cupboard. We got them second hand from a Canadian who is down-sizing - believe it or not she used to live in Hope - Canada! and has relatives in Australia.  We're both pretty please with them.  The owner also gifted us with a camel, our first piece of non-functional furniture!  It's amazing how much more homely a place is with a camel and a kitten. - even a kitten who is EATING MY EARPHONE LEADS!!!!

The dining room with furniture

Our Salalah Camel

We now have a bank account - no pay yet to go into it - but we are still battling to get a PO Box.  David was given access to one at work, which turned out to be the wrong one and the eight copies of our wedding certificate are now sitting goodness knows where in ROP.  David has tried a couple of times to get a box, but there are apparently none available at the moment "Come back next week" was the answer.  We'll keep doing that and see how things go.

Let's see what a return to health for the weekend brings!