Cats in Need of Therapy

Our cats needed lots of love and reassurance today, after the barrage of fireworks last night made them all hide in safe corners. 

Normally, the sisters Rani and Chaiyya don't like to be too close to each other, but today they both wanted to be on the sofa with me as much and as close as possible, even if it meant having to tolerate each other as well.

I am feeling extremely tired now, without even being able to blame it on a wild party. P and I only shared a bottle of bubbles at midnight, toasted the new year, and then we tried to calm the cats down. Like last year, Rani was especially scared by all the noise. In the end, I hardly got any sleep all night.  

Some people in our neighbourhood have always loved to spend thousands of Euros on pyrotechnics for New Year. This time they were mostly using those newfangled cake fireworks that are firing entire salvos of rockets and bangers, sometimes for minutes at a time. 

If they had done this for half an hour after midnight, I wouldn't be this grumpy. But they started firing their fireworks just after it got dark, and finally stopped - believe it or not - at 8 A.M. this morning. By which time they still had some left over, since they have now started again, and poor Rani is once again glued to a corner in the staircase.