At which point I made that crucial mistake of forgetting that actually she's quite a bright cat when it comes to escapology - so when I got down this morning there was no sign of her. At some point in the night, she'd worked out that if she got a claw caught in the edge of the flap, she could pull it towards her and flee; I should have set it on "no entrance or exit". GAH!
So in the end, I took a day's emergency leave; and waited (and waited) for her to show up. I asked the neighbours if they'd seen her, walked round the block repeatedly, called for her, you name it. At noon or so (by which time the day had seemed endless) she hopped in for some dinner and I called the vet; a few hours later we were home with the inevitable week's course of antibiotics, an injection of anti-inflammatories and a diagnosis of a bite-induced abscess... Thankfully a friend offered to take me there and back... And the Bug already had an appointment for Saturday morning, supposedly for a blood test which might or might not happen depending on how quickly the antibiotics kick in... So she should be fine in a few days; and tomorrow I need to catch up on quite an important work seminar which was meant to be the main point of my day.
I'm very glad my manager is also a cat-owner - she realised all I could do was wait, was great about the fact that I was going to be missing a catch-up meeting and the seminar, and suggested that I could work from home for part of the day if I wanted to rather than taking the whole day as leave. But my concentration was completely shot...
While waiting, I could have put in some quality knitting time, but again, the concentration just wasn't there. Luckily, I unearthed this: a sock started at the folk festival last year, which was then lost in one clear-up and found in another... When I abandoned them they were about halfway through the broad yellow stripe, so a fair amount of progress was made while I was listening distractedly to audiobooks while waiting for the noise of the catflap!
These are my Nymphadora socks, knitted in the Tonks [warning; Harry Potter spoilers under link!] colourway from Opal's Harry Potter range, now sadly discontinued... for this reason alone, I think I might be keeping these for myself. Tonks was a favourite character even before I discovered the library/shapeshifter connection... I bet JK Rowling was aware of it though - it's just too good to be a complete coincidence.
