shannon_a

My sister & fam are visiting from the mainland. We had a nice dinner out at Hanapepe Art Night yesterday, and I'll see them again at lunch tomorrow. While I was eating a tasty al Pastor burrito yesterday and my sister was eating curry, she mentioned that she didn't really know what was going on with me because I'm now writing journals anymore.

True enough. I've been erratic at my journaling since we moved out here to Hawaii, I think because I'm now writing full-time during the day, but then I got even more burned out when Lucy was sick, a year and a half ago now, and so I've mainly written about our couple of trips since then.

But here's a bit of what's going on.

CONTRACT WORK

In November I took on a new client for my technical writing. I gave them a day a week and we undertook a 13-week contract, which closed out in February. It was my favorite type of work because they had four big documents to write, and they handed them off to me, and I wrote them over the course of about 100 hours as I saw fit. Some required some online research, some required interviews with their staff. But mostly I could just sit and write. At the end I handed them several foundational documents about security practices for their company and about the architecture of their platform that have already proven to be very helpful in spinning the company up.

The hope is that after they've ramped up a bit, they'll call me back in for more work. Maybe as soon as in another month, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much later in the year. But, at the moment I'm very happy to get my day a week back, because it was putting a real strain on getting my personal projects done.

PERSONAL WORK

And my personal work is really getting to some big milestones, which is good after five years of half-time work.

This is Free Trader Beowulf, my system history of Traveller, started hitting shelves in print form last fall.

Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book product history of early D&D products is moving through the editorial process. I got the fourth and final book back from my editor on Friday and have it open in another window to check those edits.

Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, my three new volumes of company histories, is nearing first draft where I will have all the histories written for the new volumes. But, there's lots more to do there regarding updates for both the new and old company histories.

I suck at marketing, so I haven't been calling around to get on any podcasts or in any magazines at the moment. Both of those things happen from time to time, but it's because they ask, not me. So I should do some of that, especially as I close out my current drafts!

(If you have a podcast and would like to talk history, or if you have a magazine and would like a history-related article, call me!)

CATS

When last I wrote we had a cat stand-off, with our new scaredy-kitty Megara and our slightly-older bully-kitty Elmer not allowed in the same rooms at the same time. Which has resulted in tiring months of cats being locked up either in our bedroom (that's Megara most of the time) or my office (that's Elmer and optionally Mango when I'm working or gaming and we want to let Megara roam).

We tried animal behavior work for a while, and there's been some good reactions, but I just don't see it breaking Megara's flee and cower reaction or Elmer's chase and bat reaction.

So we've called our carpenter and he's going to be over in a few days to put a wooden gate at the top of our stairs. See, Elmer has mostly hung out downstairs for the last couple of years, mainly coming upstairs for food. So we want to try and make that more official. He won't be neglected because my office is downstairs, and I do my online gaming downstairs, so he should get 40-50 hours of whatever interaction he wants down there.

(Not that we can actually build a gate tall enough to keep him out if he tried, but we think he mostly won't try, and besides that it'll likely break any chases if Megara wanders downstairs and then gets scared by Elmer. Because she'll go over the gate like a leaf and then Elmer will have to figure out how to jump high enough.)

Fingers crossed this is a solution, because nothing else has been so far. And I'm really tired of our bedroom door being closed all the time and my constantly sealing off my office.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

We also had the same carpenter out last year to rebuild the steps up to our porch in front. As he explained, they'd been built badly originally, with wide planks that bowed, causing them to pool water, and with risers on the back, further preventing draining. So the stairs were rotting out and slimy and looking pretty bad in the process. We called him out not knowing exactly what he'd want to do, and he pretty revamped the whole stairway. Looks very nice now, and isn't constantly wet or slippery.

(Mind you, we've had a VERY dry year here in Kauai, I just saw a report that the rivers are at a 109-year low state-wide. Shades of California and the constant drought panic encouraged by the newspapers trying to sell their stories.)

That carpentry encouraged me to finally get back to work on home improvement projects, something that's been on the back burner since at least before Lucy got sick. (I've got two not quite done: repainting the rest of the deck on our lanai, as I'd previously painted just the new boards we put in on the outer third of the lanai; and putting laminate flooring down in my office closet, to match the rest of the office.)

But our carpenter's work encouraged me to restain the porch as well as paint all the railings around the porch, as he'd had to repair them some and so they were now a motley or old red paint and white epoxy or other patching material. Kimberly and a I chose a rich blue and over several hours on a couple of weekends I sanded and prepped and then put enough of the new blue paint down to cover up the dirty red that we'd never liked. (And the white epoxy; that actually took the most work to cover.)

But that of course requires redoing all of our red highlights. We're thrilled to get rid of all the muted red, which looks too much like the red dirt of Hawaii, but it's a big task. After the porch I also painted trim on the archway of our garage and on the top of a wall just inside the garage. Still to do is the railing on our lanai and one shelf at the bottom of the short stairway in our garage that leads to our house. Then we get to the big stuff: a 3 or 4 foot tall strip of stucco all around the bottom of the house and the trim at the roof line. Kimberly and I are going to figure out how to paint the stucco, and then we'll hire someone to do the roof trim, which will probably require replacing the rain gutters (which is fine, as some of them were off the house and some of them were badly damaged when we moved in, and that hasn't magically gotten any better, so I'm not sure how well they work at the moment).

And after that, I can maybe get back to some of those other tasks.

UKE

Oh, and my mom and Bob got me a Uke for Christmas, so I've been playing with that a bit. I'm not practicing every day like I'd like, but I'm gaining familiarity with chords and how to hold the strings right and strumming and all the rest. I'm working on "Here Comes the Sun" as the first song I actually know how to play, as it's got some fun finger-picking riffs in-between the main strums.

Still a ways to go.

So that's a little bit of what's going on at the moment.

I should lead off saying that the cats are totally integrated at this point. Once we started letting Megara roam free, Mango was totally OK with her thanks to the weeks (months?) of careful integration, mainly focused on churu-feeding and then a gate that allowed non-threatening new-cat sightings. More than totally OK: they chase each other back and forth in a totally fun way! We were still locking Megara up at night, but one night she refused to come back to her room, and I said, well, I guess that's that.

Beyond that, Megara is getting increasingly friendly. She spends all of her time upstairs, much of it hanging out at the corner of our couch. (Though we learned there's a not great reason for that.) She's also getting better and better about being petted when she's laying around. (Less so when she's up and about.) And we've learned that though hands still scare her, feet don't. (Petting a cat with your feet is difficult, but possible, and fairly safe when you're lying on a couch and she's at your feet.)

But we're also having a variety of cat problems that have increased in stressfulness since we're shortly heading out of town to visit friends and family on the mainland. Fortunately, we've come up with a variety of solutions too.

PROBLEM THE FIRST: THE EVIL BLACK CAT

I've written previously about the evil black feral cat that torments Mango at night by hanging out on our porch or patio. He growls and yowls and throws fits, waking me up, but he also gets aggressive and sometimes attacks his brother. (Displaced aggression is apparently a common problem with cats; we had the same issue with Callisto.) My last solution was to lock up the boys at night for two weeks, to convince the evil cat that our house was uninteresting and to spray the outside with citrus.

Which worked for a couple of weeks, but the black cat came back on Wednesday night, first threatening the boys in the laundry (mud) room in the evening then taunting Mango until he woke up the whole household at 5am.

I was at a loss, but fortunately Kimberly came up with a solution. We'd had a similar issue in Berkeley with Cobweb, where an evil outside cat (Tuxedo Max, I think) would climb on our garage and Cobweb would throw herself at the window such that we were afraid she was going to knock it out. We eventually taped a few pieces of paper on the window to block her view and wrote BAD CAT on them. Problem solved.

So Kimberly suggested we do the same. The problem is that our house is made of windows here in Hawaii, so it was a lot of work. We used butcher paper to cover the bottom half of our front door and the thin windows on either side. Then we did the same with the sliding glass door in back. That was all a LOT of work. Maybe two hours. We were able to just put printer paper on the double-hung windows that overlook the patio and the small window that overlooks the garage roof (where the evil black cat has also appeared).

We had about half of that up last night with no trouble, and it's all done now. We might still need to put some up in the mud room, but doing so would destroy the usability of the jalousie windows there, so I'm reluctant, and the only time the evil cat has appeared there was that one evening, never at night.

So, we'll see if this solves that issue.

PROBLEM THE SECOND: A COUCH ACCIDENT

Someone had a pee accident on the couch last week. Almost surely Megara. I initially blamed it on maybe confusing her by laying out a blanket on the couch, which she might have taken as litter-appropriate. Though I think that might be true, it was surely encouraged by Elmer problems, more on that in a sec.

The solution here is pragmatic: Urine remover and baking soda. I figured that out when we had sick cats over the last few years. I haven't managed to clean all the smell out yet, but I'm getting there.

PROBLEM THE THIRD: ELMER DON'T PLAY

So this is the other big problem. Elmer has taken to chasing Megara to the point where she's hissing and growling and goes flying under the bed and then won't come out for a few hours.

It doesn't happen whenever Elmer sees her, but it does happen once or twice a day.

More notably, it seems to happen when she goes downstairs, where Elmer spends most of his time. When she and Elmer go flying through the house, Elmer chasing her, it almost always seems to originate in the downstairs.

We really noticed this when we came to the realization a few days ago that Megara hardly goes downstairs any more and seems genuinely afraid to do so.

Downstairs is where the litter boxes are.

So, we have a variety of solutions for this.

#1: I got a collar for Elmer today with a bell on it. We haven't had the boys collared for two years, because Mango constantly slipped his, and eventually started slipping it off when he was under the bed. There in fact may still be a Mango collar there because it's almost impossible to access.

When Elmer got his collar today, he was horrified that he now jingles. Now he's just lying around looking mopey, accepting the fact that he just jingles now. We're hoping this will reduce the fear factor for Megara, because she can track where he is.

#2: We're probably going to lock Megara in our master bedroom while we're gone. She'll hate it, but we'll leave her plenty of toys and a cat tree and it's a pretty big space with the bedroom and attached bathroom and walk-in closet. Obviously, this will keep any fights from happening while we're gone, but we also hope it'll reset the dynamic.

#3: We've got some squirt bottles. I've been pretty adamant based on my recent readings that we not discipline the orangies with squirt bottles. But, I just want to be able to bring the chasing to an abrupt halt. So we'll see how that all goes.

PROBLEM THE FOURTH: SCREEN ADDICTION

On Wednesday night, I was woken up three times in the night by cats. The second time was the 5am black cat visit. The third time was Elmer chasing Megara at 6.30am. But the first time was at 12.30am, and that was all Megara.

I woke up to Alexa talking in the kitchen. Not the first time that's happened. It really spookily happened not long after we moved here, with some weird lady talking on our Alexa in the middle of the night. This time, a video about ostriches was playing. As I came into the kitchen, I heard it talking about how ostriches were unusual because they had wings but couldn't fly.

And then, as I advanced into the kitchen further, Megara jumped off the counter and fled.

She'd turned on Alexa to watch a video about ostriches in the middle of the night!

No solution to that one, other than the fact that I've told her not to do it again.

It's now been two weeks since we put up the gate to Megara's room. At the time, we said that we thought the 51" barrier was likely to keep the orangies out, because they're big boys and that would be quite a leap for them. We were less sure if it would keep Megara in, though. Much like our beloved Lucy cat of years past, she is so small that she seems to be lighter than air.

(Spoiler: It did not.)

We put the gate up two weeks ago on Saturday. Megara made her first escape that Monday or Tuesday night.

I'd heard mass scrabbling at the gate, which had been going on occasionally since we put it up. But when I looked over the bannister to the downstairs, I could tell that Megara was using the cat gate to climb. I rushed downstairs, and as I got down there I found her having leapt upward, with her paws on the top of the gate, trying to pull herself over. I didn't want to startle her, and in that moment of hesitation, she was over.

Kimberly was already asleep, so we then had five minutes or so of Keystone Cops, when I non-threateningly chased Megara around the house and tried to shoo her back into her room. At one point she was running around the upstairs, and Mango looked on with some interest, but did not hiss or attack.

Obviously, I eventually got her back into the room. By the next morning I'd found a piece of cardboard that I thought would block all of the gate top around the cat gate and Kimberly put it up using cable ties.

That served for almost two weeks, but Megara has been growing increasingly aggressive about getting out. It probably hit a peak last night because we'd had a carpenter in during the day (more on that in another post) and the orangies were very spooked and so we didn't do our regular nighttime churu routine. We heard much scrabbling in the evening, but I've given up running to look at the gate every time that happens.

So yesterday evening, Kimberly and I were sitting around upstairs in the living room, and I thought I heard a mew. Then suddenly Mango jumped on the coffee table and started looking around very alertly. I said, "Is there a little cat up here?"

(Spoiler: There was.)

We let Megara run around a bit. Mango again watched on with interest and not necessarily fear or anger. At one point, he did suddenly leap down and chase her, and I don't know what to make of that entirely, but we're hoping it was just cat-instinct because there was a little thing running around. He didn't keep chasing once she went under the couch, nor was there hissing or growling.

Eventually I decided that Megara needed to be herded back into her room, as it had already been late when she escaped. I fruitlessly tried to shoo her out from under the couch for a while, and eventually went downstairs and summoned her by banging the cat dancer against a wall. As is usually the case, she came running.

This morning Kimberly went downstairs with another piece of cardboard, since we theorized that Megara must have gotten over the part of the gate not above the cat gate. I figured she must have made a sideways leap from atop the cate gate, but nope, Kimberly saw her make another escape attempt first thing this morning, and it was a sitting high jump from the floor under the non-shielded part of the gate. So now the entire gate has another 6" or so of cardboard along the top. Classy!

Meanwhile, the cat integration, or at least the stress-reduction, is continuing. Every night since the gate went up (minus two nights for various reasons) we've done churu feeding by the gate: Megara inside, Mango and (usually) Elmer outside. We are slowly bringing the cats closer day by day, as long as they don't show stress. I think we've got maybe two feet (and one gate) between them at this point.

And I think the gate has made Megara's presence and smell much more obvious in the house, helping Mango to slowly mellow.

So, fingers crossed that this is working, for the moment that Mango and Megara end up in the same room, on the floor, together.

(And meanwhile, Mango was again terrorized by the outside cat at 5.30 am this morning, leading to yowling and threats against his brother. Sigh. I don't think that's helping the integration with the alien cat *inside* the house, though I think he's figured out they're separate creatures at this point.)

It's getting somewhere around six weeks and we have not been able to successfully integrate Megara. There are certainly minor issues all around, like Megara is a scaredy cat and Elmer got comfortable enough with Megara that he decided they could play, and this involved grabbing and biting her just like with his brother. But the big problem is that Mango remains very hostile. He can look at her now (but he prefers not to). He can be a foot from her without hissing or growling if churu is involved. But if he encounters her without me in between them, there's usually the warbling growling yowl that we take as an indication of incipient violence.

So we have a new plan: (1) get a tall pet gate. [We have ordered it. At 51", I think Megara could get over it but I'm pretty sure the boys couldn't]; (2) install it; (3) take away the cats' free range feeding; (4) begin feeding them on opposite sides of the gate twice a day, initially with a blanket over the gate so they don't have to see each other. This is part of the Galaxy Jackson method (and the appropriate part for where we are).

So, it's going to be a pain in the neck for everyone, but we'll see how that goes. Gate should arrive in about a week.

In the meantime, the orangies often enjoy spending the day "working" with me in my office. So some days we close my office door, open Megara's door, and let her roam mostly unsupervised. Today, Kimberly took a pile of pictures (over on Facebook) of Megara making a circuit of all the upstairs windows she could find.

It's been almost three weeks since we brought Megara into the house. (That date will actually be on Monday.) And we officially adopted her on September 1st. Which ironically is Ginger Cat Appreciation Day.

Everyone got wet food on the 1st, a gravy covered food that everyone enjoyed. For Megara, it was her adoption feast, and for the orangies, it was appreciation.

Megara is still a very nervous cat who constantly flees under the chair in Kimberly's office. But, she's made great strides. Sometimes she doesn't flee when we walk in or out of the room. We can even scritch her if we patiently wait for her to come up to us, sniff us, and then present herself for petting. I can even walk up to her to give her a treat (though she's iffy if she'll eat treats or not when someone is right there). She seems like a really friendly cat, now that we know her better, we just need to encourage that despite his childhood trauma (whatever it was). I feel like one of the big goals is to get her to the point where she'll actively seek us out, and not hide from us, when she's offered the run of the larger house. So she's been getting a couple of hours a day from us to encourage her to appreciate humans. I even slept in her room last, but she mostly hung out on the cat tree from what I could see.

We've also been working hard to integrate her with the orangies through supervised visits.

Elmer has been the most interactive. He's less fearful than Mango (definitely) and more curious (maybe). One of the biggest challenges is that Megara likes to charge the orangies because she wants to PLAY. (She seems not at all afraid of other cats, unlike humans.) The orangies don't like that!

The first time we had Elmer in with Megara I was playing with everyone with the (felt) ribbon toy and at one point it got wrapped around Elmer, as it tends to. He started hissing at it, certain that Megara had gotten him! Another time he was in her room and she scared him and he ran and hid in the cat carrier and had to be carried out of the room.

(I've since realized that maybe we should move the interactions out of Megara's room, since the orangies are currently the scared ones and she's not.)

Yesterday, Elmer and I were sitting outside Megara's room, watching her, and Megara started going crazy, flying up and down the cat tree like a trapeze artist. Kimberly and I were pretty sure she was inviting Elmer to play. She also kept running behind the door too, I was pretty sure hoping to spring out at Megara. Well, Elmer finally decided to go into the room, and I'm not sure if Megara sprung at him or what, but it ended with Elmer hissing and bopping Megara in the head. Sigh. But I can't blame Elmer when Megara was waiting to get him. He couldn't know it was play.

Mango is likely to be the bigger challenge. He's the one that's been yowling about cats outside in the night for the last few months. He's let out that yowl a few times when we had him in the same room as Megara, so we've mostly had him watching her from afar. Which seems fine. He might figure it out on his own. Or, he might see Elmer is OK with her and decide he's OK with her.

We'd of course love them to be friends. That of course doesn't usually happen with cats. But, the boys are just under 3 and Megara will be 1 in December. And, she'll be the only girl in a house of boys. So we figure the chances are as good as they'll get, especially if we're very careful about the integration.

And we're trying to be, but of course this is all very tiring. We'll see how it goes!

The room is quiet like a tomb,
We've locked up our little guest feline.
It is her little pleasant womb.
To the corner she always makes a beeline.

Me-garrrr-a, Me-garrr-a,
She hides behind a chair.
Me-garrrr-a, Me-garrr-a,
She's hardly even there.

Yellow - Like a scaredy cat,
Gray - Striped like a tiger.
She acts like we're constantly saying scat,
She think we're aliens like Geiger.

Me-garrr-a, Me-garrr-a.
Still scared out of her wit.
Me-garrr-a, Me-garrr-a.
You poor frightened little kit.

==

No progress. After quite a bit of exploring when Kimberly hung out with her Friday night, we've had tropical storm Hone approaching and it's been gusting winds across Kauai. That level of wind still frightens our orangies, let alone the little girl who is clearly still scared witless from her time at the Humane Society.

The Humane Society had initially said that they might want her back in a week if we weren't ready to adopt her. Given we haven't even been able to touch her, let alone get a read on her personality, we're not ready to make a lifelong commitment. But I really can't imagine she's going to find another home when she just hides.

Likely Kimberly will talk to the foster coordinator tomorrrow and we'll see what's up. Whatever they think is best for Megara is fine with us.

It has been a busy day.

In the late morning, I took the folks out to the airport, for their semiannual trip to see daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and new national parks on the mainland. Except this year it's three times, so I guess that's quadrimestral more or less, if you want to avoid the ever-ambiguous "triannual."

Kimberly and I will be all on our own on the island for the next three weeks, which breaks many of our normal routines. Which means I need to make an effort to get out and get my exercise, as I won't be walking or swimming with my dad. And we need to make an effort to play games since we won't have our normal Sunday game day.

OK, I totally buried the lede. The big happening is that we have a new cat lurking about Kimberly's office. Her name is Megara, and the local Humane Society highlighted her as the cat of the month and we felt very bad for her because she's 8 months old and has been at the Humane Society for most of her life, so we wanted to see if we could help out.

The problem is that she's a super scaredy cat (though the foster coordinator called her the angry cat, which we have yet to see). When we saw her at the Humane Society, she wouldn't even come out from under a tower to eat treat. She apparently was friendlier when she got there, but the Humane Society seems to have been a very bad environment for her.

We weren't willing to adopt her, because we'd barely even seen her, but we said we'd be happy to foster and see if she will come out of her shell. So we brought her home and we've got her for at least a week. If she turns into a great cat for our house, great, and if not hopefully we can at least calm her down and make her more adoptable, so we'll see how that goes.

There was a 4-year-old orangie female(!) named Peaches that was in the cage with Megara and super friendly. I felt bad for her too, because she'd been surrendered by her owner with another cat, and the other cat had been readopted and Peaches had not. I totally would have adopted Peaches, but I suspect someone else will take her despite her age, and there's no way we want four cats.

So for the moment we'll see if #3 can work out.

Lucy was my once-in-a-lifetime cat. She was deeply bonded to me. She'd often wake me in the morning. She'd follow me down to my office for work, and sit down on the top of my MacMini's small case, to watch over it. And at night she'd leap up onto my side of the bed, and would lay down right on the edge, at shoulder level, so I could put an arm around her as we slept. She was there with me, all day, every day.

The funny thing is, we almost didn't get her. We went out to Your Basic Bird, where Hopalong Rescue was doing adoptions with the intent of adding a new kitty to our family and there were a bunch of six-week-old kittens. But Kimberly vetoed them because they were all monochrome black and thus plain looking. Then we went back four weeks later and those black kittens were still there, and I picked up two of them, and one of them climbed all over me, and we adopted her. That was Lucy.

We were given a cardboard box to carry her home in and she yowled the whole way home. We considered calling her "Siren" as a result, but sticking with the mythical names of many of Kimberly's cats and my love for Mike Carey's comic series, we decided on Lucifer instead, sometimes Lucyfur, but Lucy for short. That's what we almost always called her. Unless she was in really big trouble ("LOU-SEE-FUR!")

Lucy was the cat that knew every one of our other cats: Cobweb, Munchkin, Callisto, Elmer, and Mango. Even our occasional Guest Cat, Tai Chi. We'll probably have other cats than the boys at some point, though we are getting up there in age, but we'll never have another cat who connected so many generations of our furry friends.

But she really didn't care for most of them.

Oh, when she was a little kitten, she was sweet with Cobweb, even let Cobweb bathe her. But she was a little monster to both Cobweb and Munchkin, most memorably running after them and then literally leaping onto their backs as they tried to escape and riding them away. It's a wonder that Cobweb was able to tolerate her. Lucy and Munchkin had a hissing relationship.

Tai Chi was the only other cat that Lucy sort of got along with. She was fascinated with him, following him from room to room when he visited, and occasionally cornering him in the bathroom. But I never saw any hissing or fighting. She just wanted to see who he was and what he was up to.

Sadly, Callisto didn't get the same respect. We introduced Callisto to Lucy when Lucy was just 5 or so (and Callisto was under 1), but Lucy never liked her much. Callisto spent 10 years tried to be friends, often sitting down right next to her and even trying to bathe her. But then at some point Callisto would make the mistake of FLINCHING and then Lucy would start batting at her and drive her away.

As for the boys: well right now we mostly remember Lucy hissing and growling at them in the last few months. But I'm pretty sure her attitude toward them got worse when she was on steroids and especially when she was sick these last four months. Looking back I find a lot more pictures where she was willing to be within a foot or two of them as long they didn't bug her. But the boys were both obsessed with her, so they did bug her. Elmer was a total stalker who would sometimes try to get her to play by bopping her in the head, which never went well. Mango was not quite as bad, and sometimes actually managed to sit down next to her, reaching out his paw to touch her. (On the few occasions that happened, she pretend she didn't notice so that she didn't have to get into a growling match with him.)

I think Lucy was less tolerant of the boys mainly because they were wild little animals. I mean, obviously, she didn't care much about other cats in general, but their frantic, crazed, wild escapades, including running at her, running past her, zooming up the stairs, and bopping her in the head was just too much. Which is funny, because Lucy was a wild little animal when she was a kit too, and we told her, "Just wait until we get new kittens some day and you're the old lady." And thus it was. But cats don't understand irony.

Lucy was the cat who used to get the cat dancer caught on her claw when she was a kit and would twirl around and around in breathtaking circles. (That cat dancer was her favorite for many, many years, though we never told her that we changed it out from time to time after she destroyed each one. And then the laser pointer was her favorite for many, many years, and we could get her to run circles with that too.)

Lucy was the cat who was given a bowl of water as a kit that had peppers painted in the bottom and started trying to bat at those painted peppers at the bottom of the bowl.

Lucy was the cat who found a tiny flaw in our the wall of our sun room in Berkeley and ripped a huge hole in it that stayed that way until we had the sun room repainted in the year or so before we left, as part of the prep for our move.

Really, she was a hugely destructive and active monster as a kit. Kimberly said we should have gotten her sister who DIDN'T climb all over me.

Lucy was the barbarian. We tried to keep a collar on her in her early life, because that was a requirement from Hopalong Rescue, but she just didn't cooperate. She'd pry the collar forward and end up with it caught in her mouth(!) and then she'd try to gnaw it off. We finally gave up after two or three collars, and she became Lucy the barbarian. Many years later, in the run-up to our move to Hawaii, we tried again, because we wanted to make sure she had ID if she got lost at the airport. She scratched that thing to heck, but eventually she settled into it.

Lucy was a fraidy cat, at least for a while. I put that down to keeping her in my office at night when she was a kit, as we were slowly introducing her to the other cats. One of those nights there was an earthquake, and I didn't think much of it. But when I went into my office the next morning, I found some of my piles of to-be-read books had fallen over and little Lucy was nowhere to be found. Eventually I found her in the closet, squeezed back into the smallest corner she could get to. Poor baby had clearly been terrified by the falling books and had no one to comfort her! I told her it was OK and she regained her little kitten spunk. But for the first few years we had her, she'd hit the floor whenever anyone moved to fast, and even for a few years after that she'd revert to that behavior when we returned from trips. (Poor baby!)

Lucy was definitely my cat for the first part of her life. She stayed with me while I worked, she laid on me while I read, she laid by me while I slept, she begged me for treats, and she followed me around the house. I think that only changed when I started going to my RWOT workshops and/or when Kimberly was less able to get about for a variety of reasons in our final years in Berkeley, then she became Kimberly's kitty too.

Lucy was the leaden cat. She'd lay down on your legs, and somehow her 6-7 pound frame would weigh down on you more and more over time, until you couldn't stand it any more and had to move her. (Well, me at least; Kimberly was less willing to move the weighty kitty.)

Lucy was the thirsty cat. She was always drinking. And when she did, she'd do the weirdest thing where she'd put her head in the water and than pull back her front paws, with claws extended, like she was dragging herself to the water.

Lucy was the obstinate cat. She would cheek a pill until it was entirely dissolved rather than swallow it. If she got highly annoyed at you, not that she did a lot, she'd bat at you with claws extended. Yowtch! I've never before seen a cat who batted like that not out of fear or anger, but just because she was pissed off.

Lucy was the huffer. When she was displeased at something, before she'd hiss or growl she'd often just HUFF, expelling a bit of air. It read to me like mild annoyance, like how dare they do that!

Lucy was the treat cat. She wasn't super food-motivated, like Callisto, but she LOVED her treats. She'd be waiting by my office closet door in the morning, since that's where the treats were, and she'd wander down there again at night, 30 or 40 minutes before bedtime. She was very insistent about her treats and had a little clock in her that told her when it was time to get them.

Lucy was the alarm-clock cat. Unfortunately, her alarm-clock wasn't that good. Somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes before I was ready to get up in the morning, she'd often start poking at me, jamming her nose into my face, and sometimes her paws as well. I'd turn over and over trying to get away from her, but it usually wouldn't work until I pulled the covers fully over my head, and even then she'd sometimes crawl under the covers to get at me. The reason, I always assumed, was so that she could get those morning treats.

("No treats for the orangies when I get up in the morning," I've told Kimberly since.)

Lucy was the drippy cat. Whenever she started purring, which was very often, she'd also start dripping snot from her nose. Now refer back to that picture of her poking me with her nose in the morning, purring the whole time, and you can see even more why it was so disturbing.

Lucy was the climbing cat. We'd hear CLAW, CLAW, CLAW and look over and see her destroying the corner of the couch, and we'd yell "LOOOOOO-CY". And then she'd climb the couch where she'd been clawing, and we'd say, "Oh, she was just climbing."

Though Lucy obviously didn't like other cats, she also definitely wasn't a loner. After we lost Cobweb and Munchkin, Kimberly and I left Lucy home alone during our yearly visit to Hawaii (with daily cat sitter visits, of course), and after we got home, Lucy saw us and let us the loudest, most plaintive, and looooooooooooongest whine that we'd ever heard. We got Callisto not too long after that, and though Lucy just barely tolerated Callisto, she also never again expressed that much loneliness when we made our annual pilgrimage.

I was always a little concerned about moving Lucy to Hawaii because she seemed small and fragile and had been losing weight prior to the move. But she did well enough on the move over and seemed to greatly enjoy the climate out here.

Lucy was sleek and elegant. She loved sitting in the sun. She loved being with her people and jealously guarded that right. She was always purring whenever you picked her up or petted her or were just near her. She used to visit with gamers on my Thursday nights by jumping on the arms of their chairs, but would only settle down with me.

She was very much an active part of our family and will be dearly missed.

I've been waking up at 8am the last few days, but today I set my alarm for 7am, to make sure I'd be ready to go to the airport without rushing. So, we hang out. I eat a piece of toast because my stomach is still unruly, as it has been through much of this trip (stress!). I gather up my stuff (hopefully all of my stuff), and we eventually head out around 10.30. It's just late enough to miss rush hour traffic in San Jose (we pulled the same trick in Kauai, but to avoid rush hour traffic there, we left at 8, just as it died down).

It's been a very nice trip other than occasional stress over what's going on with Lucy. I'm glad my mom asked me to extend my stay beyond a day. I'm really reluctant to be away from home as long as I will be, but 14 days and 13 days are pretty similar.

The United App helpfully tells me which door to stop at when we arrive at the airport: #12. So my mom loops around the international terminal and we count doors 1 to 4, and then I note that #5 says United. But there's a door #6 that I spot beyond, so I suggest we keep going, and then we're back in the open air away from the terminals. So we circle around, fortunately a short loop at SFO, and this time she drops me at door #5.

(Thanks app!)

The app is also continually telling me to go to the Baggage Shortcut as a benefit for my Business-class seat. But neither the descriptions or maps tell me where it is. Which isn't very helpful. (Thanks app!) After one or two confused minutes, I shrug my shoulders and just jump in the short Business-class line. I show the clerk my passport, hand over my baggage, and accept my boarding pass like I'm the most overprivileged a****** in the world. No lowly computer kiosks for me! (And now I don't have to depend on my phone for my boarding pass, which is acceptable, but always a bit of a pain.)

At the United Lounge, they check both my passport and my boarding pass, which is one more than the PreTSA line, where they just checked my passport. I guess we know who's the most concerned about keeping the riff-raff out.

The United Lounge is much as I remember it. I have an OK salad, which I might have defined as very good if not for the delicious salad that my mom fixed Tuesday night. And some shrimp and scallop over macaroni, which seems a little déclassé. I'm sure they should be using fancier pasts. I'm again shocked how crowded the lounge is. I mean there are teeming, entirely full gates downstairs, but there 100s of people secretly stowed up here too!

This year, my United app has been ticking down the minutes until boarding begins. (I would never allow it if not for the fact that I know I should have effectively unlimited power on the plane.) So I exit the Lounge about 10 minutes before boarding is supposed to begin, and arrive at the gate just in time to hear that they're boarding customers who need extra assistance.

Except the gate area is a WRECK. There are people standing as far as the eye can see, and it turns out to be because they've already laid out lines for both the zone 1 and zone 2 boarding. Except there's an elevator in the middle of the gate that blocks the whole front of the gate area, and everything else is jammed, so it's very hard to see where and what the lines are. I watch the people with disability and infants having to push through these lines for a while, and then when that settles down I realize the leftmost line is where I should be standing. But what a mess!

And then I'm on the plane and in my ridiculously luxurious cubicle of a seat. And as I planned, learning from last year's experiences, it's one of the cubicles set back from the aisle, since they're little triangles that have one on the window, one on the aisle, back and forth. Given that the whole intent is to avoid COVID, it was definitely the window that I wanted once I figured that out. (I always get windows now, since I read a study just before COVID that analyzed that you were much more likely to get sick on the aisle than the window.)

(The downside of getting the set-back cubicle is that I'm in the back half of business class, because that's the only place they were available, which means that everyone files past me. But I think it's probably a good tradeoff: people filing past three feet out at the start of the trip, when I'm fully masked, and not meandering by much nearer me when I'm eating.)

As usual I ignore the water or wine course before we take off. See above about people filing past my seat.

Next up is the hot towel course, which I always find bizarre. But sure, I'll clean my hands (and make sure I grab my backpack and hand sanitizer before the food begins).

The heated nuts course is next, and I'm surprised none of this has changed in the next year. I can *just* about eat nuts now without my teeth hurting.

The lights come down between 5pm and 6pm, which will be the middle of the night in Germany, and I can't believe how tired I am. (But I've been tired for days, and really for weeks and months.) No more than an hour or so napping on the trans-Atlantic flight is my rule, though, so I'm good and tired by the time I'm ready to align with CET, which is 9 hours off California and currently 12 hours off of Hawaii.

Around 6.30 I manage to doze off for about 5 minutes, and that's enough to rejuvenate me for a while after (the gummi worms probably help).

I'm hearing a few different sneezers in the Business section, which is unpleasant, but none are particularly close to me. Hopefully that's not COVID they're releasing into the recycled air systems. (Or any disease, really.)

I bought wifi for the trip, and it's atrocious. I take a look at the network, and it's literally dropping every other packet. The rest are getting round trip times of 600-700 ms. (But it's those dropped packets that are really killing connectivity.) Yikes. Probably won't bother with that on the way back even if Delta offers it, even though the dropped packets do clear up after a few hours.

(Too much time to think on the flight. I get depressed about Lucy, who, word is, really isn't eating back at home. Kimberly and I talked some during the flight, and it's been two days mostly without eating, maybe more, it seems. Lucy's got a vet appointment tomorrow [today?] where we'll hear what her weight is and what the vet thinks, and I definitely want to hear that before I try to sleep, but it's going to be like 8.30-9pm CET, and I'll also want to be crashing about then as I'll have been up for about 29 hours by that point, minus my 5 minutes thus far on the plane.)

The sneezing has now delightfully turned into snorting and snuffling.

As we passed through the night, the hungries settled in, so I wander up to the business-class snack bar, which is surprisingly spare, and secure a bag of salt and pepper kettle chips that sounds delicious. I then go back to my seat and spend at least 5 minutes trying to rip them open to absolutely no available. No precut slot to help out, not enough flap on the back to pop them open. I finally drop them into my backpack with some embarrassment, determined that I nonetheless WILL have those chips, just that they'd likely require a knife at my AirBnB.

A few times we've had enough turbulence for the fasten-seat-belts light to come on, and both times a flight attendant has come back saying sssssssseatbeltssssss, sssssssseatbeltssssss, sssssseatbeltsssss so soft and sibilantly that I didn't think it was even words the first time.

And we're now about an hour from landing, having been served breakfast at what my watch reads as 11.30pm but what is 8.30am down in Frankfurt. The cold fruits and hot eggs in the breakfast *do* hurt my teeth some. Could their sensitivity be increased by 10 hours at pressure? Hope that's it.

Time to post. It'll be a new day when we land. And tonight I'll try to connect with Kimberly about her vet visit, to give her every support I can for any decisions she has to make.

OFF TO SAN JOSE

Off to the airport this morning, to hop on an airplane to San Jose, where I'll stay a few days before heading on to Germany. Having a layover like that is the only way (currently) to avoid two consecutive red eyes traveling from Hawaii to Europe, which would absolutely trash my sleeping schedule.

I have been actively dreading this trip for so long that it's no big surprise that I'm feeling sick to my stomach all morning. It lets off enough for me to get from home to the airport, but then settles in again when I have a hurried Burger King meal in Maui. Bleh.

It's not that I'm dreading the trip. I love seeing the folks in San Martin, and I love traveling to Europe. It's that I've long dreaded leaving Lucy with all the problems of the summer.

But honestly, things are better than I could have hoped. Lucy's feeding tube is out for a week now. She's been eating. She isn't willing to eat as much at a sitting as we'd like, but she returns to the food again and again if it's one of the more acceptable dishes (which unfortunately is a constantly moving target).

At Lihue, the PreTSA line seems to be longer than the regular line. For quite a while at Lihue, the lines have been comparable, but this is the first time PreTSA was longer. But there's no way I'm taking off my belt and shoes or subjecting myself to the naked photograph machine, so I definitely hop into PreTSA, even if it's a few minutes longer. Still, it's probably only 10 minutes total.

I have no seat mate on the trip from Lihue to Maui. In olden days, it was just a matter of comfort, but today it's a matter of health too. So I purposefully picked the left side of the plane, which only has two seats on those little puddle jumpers, and far enough back in the plane that it shouldn't be seen as super valuable. So in a non-full flight in a world where most people travel to and from Kauai in groups of two to eight, my companion seat is most likely to be occupied. Sure enough!

On the flight over to Maui, as I thought would be the case, we pass right by Lahaina. I'm more surprised that the pilot points it out. It's a big blackened stretch, but there are some other buildings fairly close to it. But we'd seen that in the news reports, that there were some houses right in the middle of the destruction that survived. It's sobering.

On my flight from Maui to San Jose I have another row to myself. This one was more hit or miss, but one of the exit rows on these Hawaiian Airbus 321s only has two seats in it, along with a pull-down seat for a stewardess (that's scarcely used). Those were fortunately available when I made my reservations, and so I took the window seat, and the other seat, which looks like a center, was untaken. Yay. Overall, that means a pretty safe flight, disease-wise, all the way from Lihue to San Jose.

Had a Pineapple Rum on the on the second flight, as various Rums are an occasional treat on Hawaiian Airlines. Spent the next hour struggling to stay awake and/or struggling to sleep in the confines of the plane, which is still not super comfortable for sleeping despite my awesome, empty exit row.

On a plane leaving Hawaii, one wonders how many of these people are thinking, "Well, that was a once in a lifetime experience." It's certainly how Kimberly and I felt about it back in 2001.

I get less work done on the flight than I'd hoped. Mostly on my Traveller history book. I do a third-draft edit of chapter 3 and get most of the way done with revamping the maps for that chapter. I also incorporate comments on chapter 9, I think. And then the 5 hour flight is done. Huh. I guess that means the work at least served its purpose of making the flight go by.

We have a failed Popeye's dinner. Bob remembered I'd asked for it last time, so he and my mom have their order ready to go. Except we fail to use their horrible website to order. Then we do it in person. And when we get home, about 30 minutes south, find they'd given us the wrong order. So no popcorn shrimp for me. We eat kinda' OK chicken nuggets and cajun fries instead.

And now I'm hearing about Lucy long distance. After a great breakfast she's apparently not going back to her food constantly, or really eating at all, at lunch time. Hopefully full from the breakfast? I dunno, I guess we'll see, but I do have some concern that she's going to literally be off her feed from me being at our town.

But at this point we've literally done what we can for her, and hopefully it's enough.

Now I have to see if I can manage to sleep at any sort of reasonable time, three time zones over.