Cat Blogging: The Burning Cat

Omaha and I moved to a different apartment, a few blocks away. It was a nicer place, far quieter, and with better neighbors. Dinah adjusted quickly enough to it.

One evening, when Omaha and I were making love, Dinah leapt up onto the bed to see what the featherless apes were doing. She wandered across the vigorous Elf and onto the bedstand, swishing her tail lazily through the candle.

"The cat!" I gasped, hearing a sizzle and seeing this out of the corner of my eye. "The cat! On fire! The Cat! Is! On! Fire!" I immediately disengaged from the task at hand, grabbed the throw blanket and the protesting Dinah and balled her up in it to smother the flames.

I unwrapped her and saw that the flames had been put out. Dinah was miffed, looking up at me with the most wounded dignity a cat can manage. She sniffed at her tail momentarily, puzzled, then went on her way as if nothing untoward had happened.

Omaha and I did not manage to find the mood again that night.

Cat Blogging: The Bloody Cat

Omaha and I were lazing in bed one morning when Dinah leapt up onto it. I started petting her casually, like I always did every morning, when I realized that my hand was coming back wet. Puzzled, I reached over and turned on the light.

Not only was my hand wet, but the wetness was red. "Omaha," I said. She mumbled something, and I said, "Omaha, wake up! Dinah's covered in blood!"

"What?" She was up quickly, and looking at my hand and the trail Dinah was leaving behind, she agreed with my assessment that the cat was, indeed, covered with bright red blood. After checking Dinah over thoroughly we felt confident that it was not her blood, so now the question became: what had she hunted that had so much blood, and where was the body? We followed the trail out the hallway, but it seemed to fade the further it got from the bedroom. There were two trails, getting heavier as they headed into the bedroom: one led up to the bed, the other led under a table set up in the corner. "I know what it is," Omaha said.

An examination of the box showed that she did, indeed, know what it was. Dinah had jumped into a box of theatrical supplies and overturned a jar full of stage blood. That was why it was all over her belly, and why she was leaving the trails that she was.

Cleaning it up was disgusting and difficult. For one thing, the blood had dried out overnight and gelatinized into the brown carpet. The only way to clean it out was to pour boiling water onto it, then sop up the liquified mess with whatever towels we had lying around. The towels got tossed into bathtub.

Cleaning the cat was a challenge. This was when the Internet was young, and I couldn't ask google "How do you convince a cat to hold still for a washing?" We had a shower massage, of course, but Dinah was one miserable cat and I had quite the scratch along the inside of my right arm when we finally got the sugary, but probably not safe-to-lick-off, stage blood out of her fur.

By the time we were done, we had one very upset but clean cat, one bathtub that looked like a grisly murder scene, and a spot on the floor a brighter red than all the rest of the carpeting.

Cat Blogging: The Cat With The Pop-Top Head

After Kouryou-chan was born, we did the very middle class thing and found a larger home in a reasonable school district. This was good for Kouryou-chan: the house was finally big enough to encourage her to try and walk-- the apartment was so small she didn't need to crawl anywhere to see everything. Dinah, however, was now well into her middle age and settled and the change was a bit much for her.

The second day we moved into the new house, Dinah ran out the back door and disappeared into the wooded area behind the property. Omaha and I had no idea what had happened to her, and we were worried. We called to her all the time, left out her food by the back door, and waited.

She showed up a day and a half later. She seemed to be okay, very meowy but otherwise unharmed. We cuddled her and fed her and were very grateful to have her back.

Two days later, I was petting Dinah when my hand came back wet. The wetness was clear but smelled unpleasant, so I laid Dinah down on the couch and checked her over. There was a nasty, suppurating wound on her neck. "Omaha," I said, "There's a hole in our cat!"

We had an adventure finding a 24-hour emergency veterinarian. The one we found, Emerald, was way up in Seattle proper, a 45-minute drive. We made it, and left Dinah in their care. The next day, five hundred dollars later, Dinah was returned to us, half her neck and shoulder shaved and a huge, Frankensteinian stitch holding closed a three-inch long wound.

The fur took a long time to grow back, and I used to joke that she had a zipper for her pop-top head. Dinah was much more cautious about going outside after that; the greenbelt behind my house was actual forest, and populated with a few racoons.

Still dealing with it...

I said to Omaha last night, "It sucks that our life is so jammed on fast-forward that here we are, taking Dinah home in a box, and thirty minutes later I have to hurtle to the airport to put you on a plane so you can go to Macworld. We should be allowed to put our life on pause for something like this."

Kouryou-chan wouldn't sleep in her bed alone. I wanted to be alone after the kids were in bed. I relented, though, because I understood her fear. Everywhere we turned, there was something of the cat-- the laundry guard, her steps up to the bed, the cat toy under the couch, her food dish in the dining room, the second water dish, the one with the pump to keep it aerated, in the kitchen, the catbox in the bathroom. She was everywhere.

Kouryou-chan said this morning that she wanted a kitten. I said we might get a young cat, but we were committed to getting a shelter cat, because they needed our love more than just any ol' kitten. I guess if someone already has a "free kittens" sign up in the neighborhood, we might go there first, but otherwise we're gonna hit up the shelter.

I was doing okay until I finally got tired of hearing the water dish pump sucking in air. It does that when it gets low. I unplugged it and when the pump stop and the water stopped trickling I just broke down and started crying again.

Bast and Osiris, last.fm is fucking psychic, isn't it?

I can't accept this, we will find a way
Out of this cesspool of doom and dismay
Beyond this dejection there's beauty and grace
A glorious future we long to embrace

All the time, I have waited with rage
All the time, I was promised my salvation.

This can't be legal, can it?

Smoker's Station

The other day, while I was dropping Yamaraashi-chan off on an outing with her friends, I stopped for gas at a Chevron station down in rural King County and while I was filling up, I saw what has to be the most idiotic arrangement yet devised by human minds.

This "smoker's station," much more visible in the inset, is less that four meters away from the premium pump. It's less than a flick of a cigarette across the ramp. That's so obviously dangerous I can't imagine what the idiots inside were thinking when they set it up. More to the point, that can't be legal. Can it?

What Black Helicopters?

What Black Helicopters?

This black helicopter was flying over Seattle in a vaguely grid-like pattern, going back and forth between the docks and the sports arenas. It had a definite military look to it, with the camera pod mounted above the blades, and something slung underneath it that had slight independent movement. It was just a little weird.

I'm also kinda disappointed that the phrase "What black helicopters?" has more or less disappeared from the Internet, by the way. It used to be one of the semi-official mottos of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy.