sounds before morning coffee

background noise at the beginning of the clip is the hot water warming for my coffee.

Calliope has the tiniest little girl meow, while her brother Oliver has the deeper meow.

Lucy appears at the beginning of the clip in the background and is the angry hiss and spit in the middle of the clip.

video ended when my phone dropped in the chaos.

last week...

The waterfall buffet has evolved from boho witchy ^ to Art Nouveau glam.

Tuesday after physical therapy, I had planned to go into the new art & craft shop I found the week before.

But.... I spotted some used furniture in a shop I had forgotten was on the same street and got side tracked.

Which I'm grateful for, but it also came with a hiccup which I'll explain in a moment.

First ... I got a gorgeous Art Deco period waterfall bedroom set that matches what I already have.

This footboard ^ was HEAVY and came with a matching headboard.

Four drawer tall dresser with mirror.  Handles match the cabinet that I just got a few weeks ago.

The nightstand now has a new era appropriate knob (and not this random oriental theme knob). It is now a printer stand and paper storage.  While I love the waterfall style, my current nightstand has two LARGE drawers and is wider/not as tall and suits my needs better.

This extra wide catch-all chair will be recovered with the fabric below.

My sister brought me these two paintings that had been in Mom's stuff.

They were painted by her (Mom's) grandfather (so my great-grand).

I got frames for them and now have them hung.

The hiccup came when I realized that my bank card had been compromised by the woman who rang me up for the furniture purchase.  She ordered something online from Walmart and charged it to my card, which I realized the next morning when I was putting entries into my checking register and balancing my account.

I made a call to my bank to cancel my card and dispute the $19.96 charge.

Reported the fraudulent charge to Walmart.com to confirm who placed the order and where it was being sent.  Was told I can't have that information without a police report made.

Reported the issue to the police who've never heard of Walmart doing that. 

(Probably because no one ever follows through with Walmart's fraud reporting process because it is a royal pain in the a$$)

Went back to pick up the police report the next afternoon and uploaded it to Walmart.com after getting my affidavit notarized. 

(see above comment about it being a pain in the a$$).

(I'm annoyed enough now that once Walmart provides a name and address for the purchase *attempt* that I will press charges.  It's not the money that is the issue since the charge will be disputed.  It's the hassle of having to do all that.  It's the distrust I now have.  It's the gas I've had to use to drive back and forth getting documentation.  It's the inconvenience of having to wait a week for a new card, and all of the domino-effect fallout of any automatic payments that will not go through against the old card #.  And it's just the principal of it all.)

morning...

Sunrise coffee.

A chilly 45 degrees.

Friends, old and new.

Canadian geese, unseen in the fog,

Heading south and sounding off in formation.

A ruby-throated hummingbird buzzes by me,

Grateful I've kept feeders out for her.

Tap tap tap, and the call of a woodpecker,

I watch as it hops up and down the old,

Dead tree by the edge of the not Dry Creek.

if I were a betting man...

   Several days after their near encounter with the spotted black caped elves, Lyri noticed that Thalion had been especially quiet since leaving that part of the forest.  Finding him at the edge of a creek while she was gathering wood for their evening fire, she sat beside him.

  "Do you still hear Vondran's voice in your head or in your dreams?"

  Thal continued looking at the water, watching tadpoles in the shallows.  "No, and it is starting to worry me.  What if all of it was just my imagination, and I've put our lives in danger?"

  She put a hand on his arm to comfort him.  "It hasn't been your imagination.  Elder Elowin confirmed some of the things that he had told you before we left.  You mustn't let doubt enter your thoughts, Thal.  I know we've put a lot of pressure on you to lead us.  Perhaps we should rest another day or two here."

  Thal nodded, and Lyri left him to his thoughts and returned to where Eldrin and Kael were setting up makeshift lean-tos as they did every evening.

~*~*~

  While the elves were sleeping on the ground for their part of the journey, Alexander was choosing more modern amenities for his portion.  Five-star hotels were far and few between, but he would rather not settle for less so long as he was still able to meet with the gnoll's Chieftan each evening before he slept.

  Now, Alexander and the elves traveled by day and the gnoll's by night.  In the beginning, he had kept the same schedule as the gnolls and traveled at night.  But sleep evaded him during the day, and after a particularly bad case of influenza which took all of his physical strength and left him bedridden for a week, he realized that he could no longer drive at night.  He may have had gnoll DNA, but his body and organs were weakly human.

  His original anger and desire to destroy Kael and all the wood elves had manifested into a small, pea-sized bilirubin pigment stone, the color of pumpkin orange, in his gallbladder.  For now, its presence was only an occasional twinge in his right side that went away after three or six shots of bourbon.  But as the days passed without any sign of the elves, and Alexander's evening "nightcap" increasing in frequency during the day, there came another, as the original stone became larger.

  There was now a race within Alexander's body that his mind was thus far unaware of.  Would he die of an infection caused by the stones?  Would he die of a heart attack from the stress of the journey?  Or would the gnoll Chieftan finally have enough and make a meal of him?

  The gnolls were already placing bids for his appendages, and bets for how much longer Alexander would live....

 [This is an ongoing chapter a week story that began with the first Words for Wednesday for 2025 on 1 January. I'm hoping to continue it through 31 December, the last Wednesday of the year. To start from the beginning, click on the Words for Wednesday 2025 label to the right and it will pull up all of the weekly posts, beginning with the most recent. To start from the beginning, continue to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page until you get to 1 January 2025, then click "Newer Posts" to read the next date. You can thank Blogger for the inability to list them by chronological order under the labels.]

This week's Words for Wednesday prompts can be found here.