Even in Kyoto

So first off, S is back in town!! Yay!

What that means is he is getting a lot of quality time with the cats while I'm off rowing or at work or or or...and S must come up with his own cat management strategies in order to get his work done.

I dutifully apprised S of the catio situation, and in fact he found the video of George's attempted ninja escape rightfully hilarious.

The thing is that Martha has been exceptionally well-behaved when it comes to catio etiquette, and she asks so nicely if she can go out that it's hard to say no. So, how to manage one well-behaved cat and one miscreant? My method had been to open up the catio for Martha, but then close the door at the top of the basement steps. That way, Martha can come back inside the basement when she feels like it, but George cannae go out.

S says he had trouble with George darting down the basement steps when S opened the door, so he came up with a different workaround: use the basement window as a one-way catio valve. Leave the window hanging down but unlatched when Martha is on the catio, then she can push back in when she's ready to come inside.

...anyway, I knew nothing of the one-way valve setup when I arrived home last night. All I know is, I arrived home to see George out enjoying himself on the catio. Lucky George!

It seems necessity is very much the mother of invention, heh. He must have figured out how to push the window open far enough to squeeze out.

Also, somehow or another, a brick that I had used to temporarily seal one of the catio gaps also fell down*, so soon thereafter George was no longer on the catio either. When S went out to see what was up, suspecting a full escape, he encountered George out in front of the house, lolling in the grass, as George does. When George saw S, he trotted right back over to the gap in the catio and popped back inside.

We tried to have our supper out on the catio, keeping the cats company, which they greatly enjoyed, but then it got just a little too rainy and was time to come back indoors. We eventually lured the cats back in with bribes - their favorite freeze-dried salmon treats. But, geez.

Later in the evening, George came along and curled up on my chest for a snooze, prompting me to also have a little nap before heading to bed. This is the first time George has ever curled up on my chest! Emma used to do that far more often. It is irresistibly cute.


*Are we surprised? No, we are not surprised in the slightest.

The cats were asking so nicely yesterday if they could please please go outside, pretty please it's nice out and there are Birds to consider murdering*, so I relented.

I made George wear a purple vest in the hopes it would deter him from jumping around too much.

Here is a photo of George that illustrates how his brain is reduced to a single neuron whenever he goes outside:


He wanted All the Attention.


Plus lots of flopping around.




Martha is a bit more circumspect outside.


You can just tell that her brain can handle the overstimulation of it all, but it IS a lot to contemplate.


She did get interested in investigating whether a cat could jump from the lip of this wine barrel planter up onto the window ledge on the porch, but eventually decided against making an actual attempt.


George, however, is a different story, best told through this short video:
https://youtube.com/shorts/LK2SVg1ECeA?si=hS7nH3kiEZzxdo70

It looked like a rough landing for him but he isn't showing signs of major distress.

After this episode I brought him back indoors. We definitely need to create better climbing structures for him inside of the catio. Ahh, life with cats.



*The goal is to NOT have the cats ever murder the birds, to clarify.

Because Cat News is the Best News.

Here's a carpenter bee that got stuck on the front porch on Thursday:



The cats were quite interested in it.



I released the bee back outside shortly after this video, and it flew off.

Part of the reason George is keen for Catio time is that he loves hunting and chasing things out there. Here he is with his favorite stick:



This video can give you a sense about how much he LOVES to chase this stick, except imagine this video is about 10 times as long and the chasing and pouncing are even more ferociously cute:



In fact, he loves his stick so much that when I tossed it into the basement to try and get him to go back indoors, he jumped back through the catio door into the basement, and, well, see for yourself:



Hilariously, if I keep George out of the catio and just let Martha out, she loves the exact same stick game. I think they like being able to chase and pounce on the grass since it's softer than many of our indoor surfaces.

Meanwhile, here's the part of the catio where George has been making his more recent escapes:



I tried wedging those pieces of wood between the pole and the side of the house, but (a) they're going to fall out, and (b) George just climbed up onto that window ledge on the side of the porch and then climbed over all my handiwork.

So that whole corner is just going to need to get redone, but that isn't something I'm going to manage to get to right now. But clearly it's something that needs to get done, based on how much the cats appreciate their outdoors time.

I think we're up to 6? I could have miscounted in there somewhere.

Yesterday's labs ran long, but the lab is an engaging one and students got a lot out of it, so I can't begrudge them for needing the time. When I finally went to check the weather for the bike ride home, the radar looked quite colorful in a way that posed two options: wait an hour or so, and get home for a late supper; or, set forth but be ready to get very wet. So I suited up in all my rain gear and set out, and the apocalypse struck when I was about a half mile in. It wasn't particularly cold but I was glad for the rain gear more for keeping the grime off than anything else. By the time I got back into town someone was exclaiming about the rainbow visible in the sky behind me.

The recent catio fortifications had been working well, so I've been generally coming home after work and letting the cats out for a while, which they love, of course. It helps that it's now warmer and lighter later into the evening. With the rain subsiding, I let the cats out.

Sometimes they'll go out for a while, then come back in to say hello again, then go back out, and it can be tricky to call them back in for the night, often requiring cat treat bribes. But there's another behavior pattern, where if George escapes, Martha comes and finds me and acts super affectionate. Who knows what's happening in her catty brain, but it seems like some version of, "Finally, that pesky kitten is GONE!"

So, that happened later in the evening, as I was ready to head for bed. I tried shaking the freeze-dried salmon cat treat bag to summon George, to no avail. Eventually I just went out on the back porch to groggily sit in a chair for a while, because there was no way I would actually be able to sleep well if George was stuck outside all night.

...and eventually he came trotting up the back porch steps, and flopped down at my feet, like he does.

They're going to be mad when I won't let them out on the catio this evening.

...we are now up to Cats: 5, Rebeccmeister: 0.

I mean, in this case the catio DID hold for several hours. I haven't gone back out to see if I can find George's latest escape method. And once again, the first thing he did after escaping was go over to the neighbor's juniper tree and rub himself all over it. So it isn't as though he's hard to recapture, at least.

I suspect he went under this time, rather than over.

Meanwhile: things have progressed/regressed to where I can't really tell whether it's just Brandi trying to kill me, or if maybe this is morphing into some form of head cold. I did vacuum the house today, so that could have kicked pollen back into the air. I should know more by tomorrow morning. I moved Brandi further away from the back door but she is still very happily attempting to reproduce out there.

I always have big ambitions for the weekends, then fall short. Today I at least managed the vacuuming, got the grocery shopping done, cooked up a big pot of beans, roasted some tofu and asparagus, made a new batch of muesli and pancakes, and did a whole bunch of dishwashing.

No progress on the oar painting, however. I'm back at the stage where I need to do a bunch of sanding again on the next sets of oars, but I can't bring myself to put on a sanding mask while dealing with a drippy nose.

So it goes.

I've reached that stage of the semester where it feels like I do little else besides teaching and sleeping exhaustedly.

I generally don't use the living room for much, aside from sometimes playing with George or for sitting down in a chair momentarily while grinding coffee beans in the morning. On Monday morning, when I walked over to the living room, I noticed a new source of flashing light (ugh, video short so I can't embed):

https://youtube.com/shorts/wNbGotTv_wc?si=5Ot627re8zZF9cGX

That is one of the monitors in scrottie's office. He has been in California since November. It wasn't doing that the day before. Maybe the recent power outage caused this? Regardless, I dug out the key to his office door and went in to turn off this monitor again. The cats were briefly entertained by the opportunity to poke around in a space they haven't been in lately.

Speaking of possessed electronics, this darn document reader in the classroom where I teach REFUSES to behave.

https://youtube.com/shorts/XOfzN8CHTN4?si=KyggBAjMfkk1zSPB

I keep having to record videos of it because apparently our IT folks can't reproduce the issue. Their most recent hypothesis has been that something about the OS on my computer is causing interference when I have my computer plugged into the HDMI input. But in this instance, my computer is totally unplugged from the system. So.

A silver lining to my inability to function in the evenings is that George likes to come and snuggle. I've been putting on birdwatching videos for him, but decided last night to try out a cat documentary instead.



The cat documentary did manage to hold his attention for a good 20 minutes before he heard some noise and decided he needed to run off.

Cats: 3, Rebeccmeister: 0

I think maybe this time he squeezed out near the door? Hard to tell. At least he didn't go very far and he came when I called him?

Oh cats.

Bureaucratic hell got so frustrating today that I decided I should just go and get out of the house to deal with the lingering project of getting updated passport photos. I believe both major drugstore chains advertise passport photos as a service, but from my recent visits to the CVS I was pretty skeptical they'd have things up and running. So I went to the equidistant Walgreens instead.

The Walgreens has a rack for bike parking, right there out in front of the store. (the CVS does have bike parking, too, but it's around the corner). I actually walked this time, but good to know for the future.

The Walgreens has WAY more inventory than that CVS did, and doesn't have weird markups on things like double-sided sticky tape (price checking it because we use it to tape ant heads onto index cards to measure how wide they are). I was even able to find the type of toothbrush I've had on my shopping list for months now, and a phone backup battery and backup charging/data cable of reasonable quality for prices that weren't outrageous! It's ridiculous but it feels like a major breakthrough to be able to walk into a store and buy the kind of toothbrush I want, in this day and age. Far less packaging to deal with, hallelujah.

I still have no love for these chain stores, but at least it feels like slightly less of my soul got sucked out?

It was 50 degrees by the time I got home, so I set about adding more reinforcement netting to the catio so that Martha can join George outside again (she figured out how to shimmy up the wood and escape onto the back porch last fall).



Not the prettiest addition, but it's on there, at least!

This is a good illustration of how Going Outside blows George's mind:


Martha was a little unsure of things, too, but at least the catio's keeping her occupied while I continue to procrastinate from grading grade more papers.

I also finished getting the front porch plant rack set up:


I'm starting more lettuce in the squirrel boxes, finally. Between the seed starting mat underneath and the sun coming in from the window, this mini-greenhouse does all right, temperature-wise.

I am trying to get caught up on the various things I can't get to in the middle of the semester, but they don't make for particularly interesting blog posts.

So in the meantime, here are photos of Martha keeping me company at home yesterday. She seems to be annoyed at George, so the two of them haven't been cuddling much. Instead, they have some form of joint custody agreement, where George gets some snuggles in the early evening, then Martha snuggles for the early part of the night, then George comes back first thing in the morning.

Anyway, George has been the primary user of the newer cat heating pad, but Martha was so cute sleeping on it yesterday.

I'm so glad to have this view out of the window while I am working. It doesn't photograph well but it gives me something to look at while thinking.



I'm also glad to have the new heating pad in the chair as a cat decoy, because it is helping to keep the cats from constantly crawling all over me all day. Now they only periodically crawl all over.

Cats get themselves into some interesting pretzels sometimes, while napping over the course of the day.



I'm amused by the snow that landed on top of the disco ball especially.



George checking out the snow when I briefly reopened the catio:


The video is more entertaining:


Today I'm back in the office. At least my office also has a window view, although it's limited and not as nice because of being in the building's basement and facing a parking lot. The roads have all been plowed, so we're back to salty winter slop. I need to figure out a better bike chain lube strategy for this winter. When I ride in this stuff, I have to stay diligent about rinsing off my bike after every ride, but that washes the lube off the chain. So maybe it is time to investigate waxing, after all.