We don't have any more leaves. On the trees, that is. We have them on the ground! Nice and crunchy for the most part. Very fun to play in...
This means we can now see up the hill behind my brook.
Very tempting. Very tempting indeed. I've been all over the property on THIS side of the brook. Now I want to go to the other side! There is no clear scramble across for a cat. Even a game cat who doesn't mind getting his paws and underbelly moist.
I've tried to get across from my usual crossing to my rock midstream. No go...big water just on the other side, too fast and deep. I've tried another approach from the neighbors' yard: nice big tree trunk more than half way across, then a big pool. But there are so many trees to be scaled over on the other side.
I'm drawing up plans for a cat bridge.
Speaking of engineering feats...
Look what we've been doing for the past few days.
Oom and I have a natural proclivity for walling: building walls from stone without mortar. We've been inspired by the wonderful wall at Storm King by Andy Goldsworthy.
Okay, to be frank, I prefer standing and running on top of stone walls. The whole laying stones thing is more Oom's fascination. But I was very supportive of Oom throughout this wall building enterprise. I pushed boulders, criticized placements, and considered strapping on a harness to haul in some material.
Turns out that walling is a pretty boring process for a cat. There's a lot of standing and looking at stones, figuring out if they fit, trying to get them to not wiggle. The guys who do this all the time probably aren't as boring as Oom, but she's a beginner.
The end product was nice, though. The base of much of the wall has been there well over 100 years. We built on that. It contains our blackberry farm quite nicely. And I look good up there, don't you think?
Now I need to get her focused on my bridge.
