It was early, about 3 a.m., when I woke up to Romeo snuggling up next between us in the bed and purring loudly. I grabbed my phone, which happened to be handy, and managed to get a recording of him in action. Make sure your speakers are on.

Luckily, I rank purring along with other instinctively pleasant sounds like mother hens clucking and pigeons cooing. Your mileage may differ.

Of course, a few minutes later, he started pawing at me, then biting my feet, all in an effort to wake me up and feed him. Unfortunately, it worked. Later, he was back fussing at my side of the bed, demanding to be picked up and placed on the bed again. Yes, Romeo’s back end still works well enough to get onto the chairs in the living room, but the top of our bed seems to be out of his range. Hence his demand for human intervention.

Meanwhile, Meda continues to rebound quickly from her hip replacement surgery. I expect that she’ll be transitioning from the walker to using a cane within the next few days.

We now place this hip replacement along with cataract surgery as things we should have done sooner rather than later because they have (or promise to have soon) improved our lives immeasurably.

And here’s an update on the medicine cabinet ordered from Amazon that arrived damaged. It turned out that the return was easily accomplished online. I followed a link to returns and exchanges that was part of the record of the original order, selected a return and refund, and was immediately provided a return UPS shipping label with instructions. After printing the label, I taped it onto the box as instructed, and took it up to the nearest UPS Store (luckily, just three minutes away, at most). I wondered how long it would take to get the refund, calculating when the box would reach the Amazon warehouse. But I got a quick surprise. Almost as soon as label was scanned and accepted by UPS, I got an automated message from Amazon that the refund had been processed. No need to wait until the box was actually received by Amazon. Getting it into the hands of UPS was enough for them to process the refund.

Yes, I was not happy that the product arrived damaged. But it’s very hard to fault Amazon’s handling of the return and refund.