It’s no ordinary day when I can comfortably sit on the front porch at 9 AM doing desk work this late in October, here in the north.

The sun is shining, but not hitting much of me as I station myself at the round picnic table. A slightly overgrown rhododendron, a porch post, and the tabletop itself, block the sunlight, but I’m still pleasantly warm.

“Unordinary” is guaranteed when Emil and Katie-Kat show up meowing. They leap onto the table (verboten!) and even my keyboard (even more verboten!) to get attention, then romp about, soon captivated by the dangling knobs on the ends of the bamboo shades’ pull-cords. Katie jumps up and clings to the body of a shade to reach one of the pulls. Silly as I am, I get up and readjust cord lengths so she can play without destroying shades. (My husband calls me an “enabler.”) Dangling and swinging, another pair of knobs rivets Emil’s attention. In strike-and-destroy mode, he bats at them like punching bags, klonking and banging wooden knobs against wooden window frame. Clank! Clunk! Klonkety-clunk! Now Katie perches on the porch rail and stalks a rhododendron leaf, grabs it with paws, then tears at it with teeth.

“No, no! Don’t eat that! Rhododendrons are poisonous!”

True, if I hadn’t come out here, there’d be no one to warn and scold them, so why don’t I just ignore them, leave them to themselves?

With all the running, leaping, thumping, and clanking? Not easy!

This isn’t getting much work done, is it?

Or is it? Isn’t jotting all this down “writing work”—especially if I post it on my blog?

What deep meaning can I make of it, what parable? None, I admit. But it does show how little can make a day unordinary—at least around “the funny farm,” and, I suspect, anywhere else, if one just stays alert to opportunity.