When we last saw the New Rescue Kittens, they were invisible. Or jolly close to it; they were hiding under things, and avoiding light. I did finally catch them in a benign moment:

Pipkin, left. Bird, right.

I have a routine in the morning, when I’m home alone. I start up the Mac, brush my teeth, let the dog out, turn on the coffee, dress, feed dog, feed cats, fix coffee, read email or Twitter or whatever. That’s not the order I do those things in, that’s just the list. The order changes, depending on if I wake up remembering where I am before I get to the bathroom, and if there's puke on the landing, and so on. There's a lot of wandering back and forth. It’s not a time for assigning blame, it is a time for finding my socks.

So when I found the knobby bit of the end of a windowblind cord resting on the floor, sans cord, I merely picked it up and set it on the desk and scritched Bird’s ears, he warming my chair at the moment. I could see the windowblind still attached to the window, so I simply went on with booting the Mac. The phrase, “Half the cord is missing” floated through my mind as I turned on the coffee. I let the dog out and went back upstairs. When “where’s the other cat?” made its appearance, I began to feel decidedly Arthur Dent-ish.

I ladled kibble into their bowl and toddled back toward the probable location of my clothes. No Pipkin emerged to join him. As I got into a pair of pants, the two phrases met and merged and I woke up, snatched up a flashlight and headed back into the depths of my study closet, where I found Pipkin under some shirts, the cord wrapped round her waist.

One damn thing after another.