The cats were already outside when rswfire started recording. That was the first thing worth noting — it was winter, and they had never done that before. They had been up at the window, meowing, watching him move the gear around in the yard below. They saw the stuff and knew what it meant. By the time he had the camera up, they were out in it.
The dogs came next, the way they always did. He apologized to the camera for them the way a person apologizes for weather — you know the drill by now — and went to the bacon, handing pieces out one at a time to buy himself a few minutes of recording. One took his and moved off. Another was slow that morning, and rswfire said so out loud, twice, unhurried about it. He knew one of them was Sarge and said the name back to him to confirm it. The other one he didn't have a name for, and let that stand without filling it in. He wished them a good day. That was the end of that.
Then the camera itself became the problem. He had bought a complicated selfie stick — a tripod arrangement, more articulated than the task required — and mid-signal he named the error plainly: he had gotten the wrong kind of thing. He just needed a real simple one. He set the rig a little further from himself so he'd look more natural in frame, corrected the shot, and kept going. The correction was made in the open, not edited around.
The tunnel was on the ground nearby, a three-way, and Bailey was in it — big enough that backing out was the only way out, which rswfire narrated as it happened and found funny. You're so big, Bailey. The larger enclosure piece he'd ordered had already arrived from Amazon. He said, without heaviness, that he was going to miss that kind of convenience. It was a statement about a supply chain, and also about the fact that this address had a shelf life.
He laid out the design while standing in it: the three-way tunnel in the middle, a big enclosure on each end, a little tripod-type arrangement, and that would be it. That was what he would take with him. The rest — the complicated stick, the extra pieces — would go back to Amazon. Real simple, exactly what they need. Every object in the yard was being sorted that morning against a single question: does it travel.
What he wanted from the rest of the day was ordinary and specific. He was hoping the dogs would leave him alone, that everyone would just hang out out there while he got a bunch of stuff done in the house. He would bring the cats water later. They were already out, they were going to have a blast, and maybe — he said this last, almost as an aside — maybe he would actually get some breathing room from them for once.