52 Photos Project: First Thing I See In The Morning

I can sleep as late as I want on most days.  My husband is a naturally early riser (he is also a naturally go to bed late person & a bit of an insomniac, but that has gotten better in the past few years).  This means that by the time I get up, even if that time is 6:30am which it rarely is, the coffee is made, the dogs have been let out & fed....& that's it because that's all there is to do, indoors anyhow & outdoors is mine. 

As late as I want is mostly as late as I can & there are so many variables in that.  At least two of the dogs & sometimes three do their morning business & then get back in with me, which is fine but one of them (Lilly) feels the need to summon....& by summon I mean bark, loud & high pitched the others when I start to move.  Or she thinks I start to move.  Or she gets bored.  She is getting old though & her eyes are clouded over & her hearing is not so sharp.  I have been sleeping right through to 8:30 for months now.

Except that once or twice a week when A forgets to turn off the alarm, or hits "snooze" instead of "off" or his phone rings (& yes this happens way too often, even at 4am).  Then I have to move & Lilly starts barking & I may as well just get up. 

The past week or so has been different.  Katje Kat (a cat) is missing.  She has gone on excursions before for a day or three but this one is longer.  Like all of our cats, she was a dump job that we took in, vetted, fed & she has lived more or less in harmony with the matriarch (all animus has been on Katje's side, Bianca does not care really).  She has free range of the barns, the yard, the pasture (they all do), gets two square meals a day, plus treats for heartworm & treats for her teeth & just plain old treats.  But she loathes the kittens; she has since day one.  It is a damn shame really because the one remaining little girl (who is now a full-grown girl) wants to be her friend,  I mean really really wants to be her friend.

So Katje Kat has been AWOL for more than twice as long as she ever has been before & I have been putting out second supper, after everyone else has eaten in the hopes that she will come back.  As a result, I have been woken up very early every morning by dogs barking out the sidelights around the front door.  For a week or so, this has been the first thing I see in the morning: