Chuffed and miffed

Chuffed
In all the years I've had cats I've never had a cat-flap.  Various reasons - they used to be able to get indoors from under the house until the renovations closed off that option. By then I figured they were too old to change habits.........that and I didn't want to be putting any holes in my lovely new renovation.  I lived for years getting up at 4.00am, 5.00am and 6.00am letting each one of them out for a morning pee as each one's bladder needed to be relieved.  They never did manage to co-ordinate themselves!

With Minnie comes new challenges.  I wan't to keep her in at night to be safe but I also want her to be able to get in when I'm away in the van and have house-sitters in.  I don't want to be getting up at 4.00am to let her out (though, to this point, she's been very good at using a litter tray)........so the catflap won.  Not just any old catflap though - it's a super-duper, all singing, all dancing, bells and whistles cat flap.  Only the best for my lovely wee girl :D

Today, with some guidance from RP a couple of days ago and a trusty YouTube video to guide me I manged to install it.  I'm quite chuffed with my achievement, though I know it's not perfect.  The next challenge - probably a bigger challenge - is to teach her to use it.  I'm figuring it'll take a few days.

Miffed
I, like most of the country I imagine, was gutted to hear that we had 2 new COVID19 cases today.  They're two women who had travelled back to New Zealand together to see a poorly parent.  After 5 days in managed isolation they were granted special dispensation to leave isolation to support grieving family after the parent's death. It didn't take long at all for the sparks to start flying.......Why weren't they tested before being released from managed isolation?  Did they really make the journey from Auckland to Wellington (640 kms, approximately an 8 hour drive) by car with no stops? Can we therefore be certain there was no transmission along their route? There was a swift response from the Minister of Health - immediate suspension of compassionate exemptions from managed isolations.  Someone somewhere made a very poor - potentially disastrous - decision so now, once again, we have to wait and see what, if anything, evolves.


With this, our slow march towards being COVID-free has come to an abrupt end.  We'll need to wait another 2 weeks to see if any further cases develop from the 2 who arrived from overseas.  We were always told that we should expect more cases, but the reality of it is still more than a little unnerving.