January 13th

 

So in order to prevent myself from thinking too much about what had happened the night before cat-fight-wise, I studiously didn't mention Squeezmo's absence with the children during the day as we embarked on a few little projects.  I bravely dived right on into the fridge and cleared out all the nearly-on-the-edge-of-usefulness stone fruit we had in there. Because as we all know, if anything is on its way out, you only have to boil it or juice it to suddenly find that it has a new life.  And stewed stone fruit?  It didn't even last 24hrs.

It was the first morning of their intensive swimming week and Harriet was disappointed to find that she had the one teacher she doesn't like.  Bummer.  But she worked through it and enjoyed the  swimming at any rate (just not so much the tutelage).

 

When we returned home there was some discussion about paper planes.  Harriet of course whipped up something she dubbed the 'Calvin and Hobbes Express'.  Express from where to where wasn't exactly specified but hey, let's face it, with Calvin all points in space and time are at one with every other point in space and time, rendering them meaningless anyway.  Methods of transportation are, however, highly important.

We had decided to investigate some of the projects listed in one of Harriet's more often flipped-through project books a few days ago, and the children had happened upon the solar oven idea.  This particular experiment required the implementation of pizza boxes for the task.  Now on a Friday evening this sounded like a particularly pleasant request.  The problem being that it's not something we normally do and it took me around forty minutes just to find the name and number of a local pizza place that had decent enough local reviews.  

However what this did mean on Monday was that our pizza boxes were sitting there, ready and waiting for transformation.  The children set to painting the lower half black (a perfect use of the acrylic black paint Lisa had bought for Ted about two years ago that I have been too terrified to let him open previously.  I'm sure you understand).  After that had dried in about five minutes after sitting in the sun outside, I assisted the children with their foil wrapping.  We then decided to perform a little experiment within the experiment.  One 'oven' held an egg inside a stainless steel container, and the other held an egg inside a black frying pan.

 

 After we placed them out in the sun there seemed to be a level of cloud that I couldn't help but take as a little mocking.  Thanks, universe.  

 

But after a few hours there was definite cooking visible.  The black-coated pan cooked the egg faster than the steel container, in case you were interested.  You can't really see it here but the albumin on the left was crispy on the edges and ready to eat, while there was still a jelly-like consistency to the steel container.  Of course the increased surface area of the pan egg would have allowed it to cook faster as well, so we had to take that variable into consideration.

 

 However by the time James came home it couldn't be denied that we still had seen no  sight of Squeezmo.  As we finished the last remnants of dinner, out came the markers and paper and we made letters to drop off at the ten-odd houses we thought would be most relevant to our search, exhorting them to please investigate their sheds, backyards and under house areas for an injured old black cat.  Our gorgeous Squeezy-boy.  Ted decided to write up his own sign and he even drew a black cat of which he was most proud.  As you can see.

As terrible a motivation as it was, it also couldn't be denied that a walk around the block at 8pm in the summer is a lovely way to wrap up an evening.  The sun was low, the weather perfect and the children, although somewhat subdued regarding the motivation of our walk, were in good spirits.

James and I sat there that night feeling very low indeed.  Little did we know just how close relief was for us all.