It’s still raining here, though that description feels slightly too casual for what’s happening around the country. Cyclone Vaianu is moving through Aotearoa, and parts of the country are under red weather warnings. We’re on a safer edge of it — wind, heavy rain, that low atmospheric hum of something larger doing more serious work elsewhere.
Inside the house, everything continues, but with a faint sense that personality has been turned up by a fraction. Not louder. Just more noticeable.
Even small behaviours feel like they deserve interpretation today.
🐈 Thomas (Zen / Teen Duality Unit)
Thomas left the house at 10:30am, which now feels less like a departure and more like a deliberate withdrawal from the requirement to participate in shared narrative continuity.
One moment he was present. The next, he had simply stepped out of this version of the day, as if it had been quietly agreed that he would not be required for the next sequence of events.
That’s the thing with Thomas. He can be completely Zen — deeply internal, absorbed, almost unreachable in his focus — and then, without warning, become intensely emotional and vocal, like a teenager discovering that existence has feelings and those feelings urgently require attention.
The two states don’t alternate neatly. They overlap. They interrupt each other. Sometimes he appears to be both at once, which is its own kind of unsettling clarity.
In weather like this, that switching feels more visible. Not dramatic — just perceptible. Like noticing the mechanism rather than just the outcome.
He would deny any suggestion that he is inconsistent. And he would probably look slightly wounded by the implication.
He didn’t leave the house — he left the version of the day that expects continuity to behave itself.
🐱 Cilla (The Performer / Black Velvet Comedian)
Cilla continues her carefully structured approach to household events, where nothing is accidental and everything is, in some sense, scheduled for impact.
A soft “mew mew” arrives first — gentle, melodic, almost ceremonial — like a pre-announcement that something is about to be introduced into the system.
Then the pause.
The pause is where the audience is quietly assumed into existence.
And then the moment proceeds with calm certainty, as though reality itself has processed her request and approved the timing.
Rain does not interfere. If anything, it improves conditions. Better acoustics. More attentive environment. Slightly more dramatic lighting.
At one point, she paused near the Bissell cleaning machine after a post-event situation and looked at it with a kind of still, professional ambiguity — like she was assessing whether it should have been credited in the programme notes.
It felt briefly like the machine itself might have opinions about this.
She didn’t acknowledge that possibility.
She just moved on.
She doesn’t react to the house — she maintains its sense of ongoing programming.
🐶 Milo (Chaos Joy Apprentice / Keith Richards Energy Variant)
Milo is, fundamentally, motion that has learned to resemble a dog.
He moves through the house like space is something that tries to define him and immediately gives up halfway through. Boundaries are not ignored so much as enthusiastically overwritten in real time.
At one point he disappears to my bed without announcement, not as escape but as full-body recalibration — as though he briefly checked in with another version of himself and decided to download a slightly different configuration of enthusiasm.
Later he reappears on the sofa like continuity is optional and slightly old-fashioned.
There is something unmistakably Keith Richards about him — not in appearance, but in energy logic. The sense of a being that has never once asked permission from structure, time, or restraint, and has instead simply continued anyway, slightly scruffy, slightly uncontained, permanently mid-expression of something larger than intention.
Rain does not slow him. It just changes the atmosphere he is moving through.
And at one point he skids past the hallway like he briefly forgot gravity was supposed to be involved, which he did not acknowledge as unusual.
He just kept going.
He doesn’t enter rooms — he sustains a performance that the house occasionally intersects with.
🐶 Abbie (Executive Observer / Golden Constant)
Abbie has been here for 13 years, which means she is not just part of the household — she is part of its emotional structure.
She is a golden Labrador whose default setting is friendliness. Not selective friendliness. Not cautious friendliness. Immediate acceptance, as though connection is always the correct starting assumption.
Except door-to-door Vodafone salespeople, which remains her one unresolved philosophical exception. The reasons are unclear. Possibly red shirts. Possibly method. She is not elaborating further.
And hot air balloons, which she barks at with what feels less like aggression and more like genuine confusion that the sky is behaving that way.
In weather like this — wind, rain, distant systems doing more serious work elsewhere — she becomes even more steady. Not passive, but anchoring. A living confirmation that the world is still basically okay.
At one point she simply moved between rooms checking on everyone, unprompted, as if she had noticed the household mood shift and decided to quietly stabilise it by presence alone.
She has welcomed every animal into this house as though she had already approved them in advance.
She doesn’t respond to instability — she gently refuses to recognise it as final.
🐱 George (Installed Resident / Comfort Philosopher / Gratitude Engine)
George feels like a story that began in a more uncertain world and slowly edited itself into something softer over time.
He arrived as a stray kitten — street-aware, cautious in the way early life tends to require. The kind of beginning that usually produces a gradual, careful negotiation with safety.
Instead, he simply trusted.
Quickly. Cleanly. Without visible hesitation.
Now he moves through the house like someone who has already signed off on the conditions of existence here and sees no reason to revisit the paperwork.
Food is reliable. Warmth is consistent. Humans are acceptable company. Cuddles are not just allowed but actively incorporated into routine life.
He headbutts in greeting like he is confirming continuity — still here, still safe, still good — then settles into a level of calm that feels almost architectural in its stability.
His purr is not background detail. It is structural. A steady, physical reassurance that the system is functioning.
In weather like this, when the outside world is louder and more unpredictable, George feels like a different kind of intelligence entirely — not resistance to chaos, but residence in a simpler agreement with life.
He sometimes looks so relaxed it briefly feels like he has forgotten stress exists as a concept, which is probably unfair to his history, but also kind of the point.
He doesn’t perform gratitude — he simply lives inside a version of life where gratitude has already been resolved.
🎬 And, as for me…
And as for me… I’m here in the middle of it, watching a household of completely different emotional operating systems become more legible against a backdrop of weather that is currently doing something larger and more serious elsewhere.
Cyclone Vaianu continues its path through the country, but here we are in a smaller pocket of it — not separate, just temporarily not the centre of attention.
And in that pocket, everything feels slightly more visible. Slightly more itself. Slightly easier to narrate than it probably should be.
So I do.
I narrate the small domestic weather system as it unfolds: behaviour, comfort, chaos, stillness, and the strange coherence of animals who all believe, in their own way, that the house is exactly as it should be.
Which, for today, is probably enough.
[Soundtrack: Have You Ever Seen the Rain — Creedence Clearwater Revival]
Starring five animals, one very good cleaning system (Bissell), and a household currently operating as a small, contained weather-adjacent universe.
A song that doesn’t explain anything — it simply notices that life continues anyway, slightly damp, slightly chaotic, and entirely itself.
Mostly Fine Life 
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