High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Last week, while combing through his parents' house, Karsten found an old book called "The Cat and the Captain," and kept it for an art project he's dreaming up using old book covers. But he just now walked into my office and handed me a page cut out from the book, saying "I think they wrote this about Black Cherry."



On the page is a poem called "The Bad Kittens" -

You may call, you may call,
But the little black cats won't hear you,
The little black cats are maddened
By the bright green light of the moon.
    They are running and whirling and hiding,
    They are wild who were once so confiding,
    They are mad when the moon is riding ---
You will not catch the kittens soon!
    They care not for saucers of milk,
    They care not for pillows of silk,
Your softest, crooningest call
Means less than the buzzing of flies.
    They are seeing more than you see,
    They are hearing more than you hear,
And out of the darkness they peer
    With a goblin light in their eyes!

And that, I swear, is EXACTLY why we have to lock the cats out of the bedroom at night.

Karsten and I have often talked about disaster preparedness, and a lot of our concern has to do with our six cats. In an emergency, we want to be able to get everyone to safety, of course. That seems marginally feasible with six, but having now seen this picture, I’m so glad I haven’t had to try. My heart goes out to both of the men shown in this picture, as of course it does to all the Iowans trying to make life right again, but I feel a special kinship with this man who appears to put saving his cats above saving anything else in his home. I suspect I’d be that person, too.

(I also can’t help but think that those terrified cats are probably scratching the hell out of him, poor guy!)

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Why it’s not easy to get anything done in my home office on Saturday mornings

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Check it out:

“The anonymity of the Netflix Prize dataset has been broken by a pair of computer scientists from the University of Texas[…]. It turns out that […] it’s straightforward to find a match by comparing the anonymized data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)[…] in the process possibly working out their political affiliation, sexual preferences and a number of other personal details”

Oh no! Someone’s going to figure out I’m a bleeding heart bisexual liberal/progressive.

I suppose I should consider this a privacy violation of some sort, since I’m almost certainly represented in the data set, but whatever.

For that matter, my ratings data may very well have been one very useful data set in helping the computer scientists crack the anonymizing code.

Whoops. Sorry I’m such a movie geek.

In honor of my likely indirect contribution to this situation, I offer my first-ever LOLcat.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I finally managed to pull up the blinds in the morning without scaring all the birds away from the feeders.

Normally the cats are looking at me like “gee, thanks, dumbass.” Now they’re entranced by the dozens and dozens of birds on the ground and on the feeders.

Hey, it’s the little things.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I think it’s really great how, even though Black Cherry and Barbra don’t have sex anymore, they totally aren’t awkward about it.

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OK, right off the bat, here's the sucky thought du jour: I can't decide if we should go through with the trip we were planning to Europe. Though I'm in luck if I need to travel, because I've got bags under my eyes that could hold my entire wardrobe. Why? Because we spent the night in a hotel room with all six cats while we fogged the house for fleas.

I cannot properly do justice to the level of annoying this whole flea thing is. And it's not just fleas annoying me. Allow me to whine for a moment.

• I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that it's the hottest August ever on record in Nashville. Even if it's not, it should be. So let's just get that out of the way right now, 'cause the extreme heat sure isn't making anything (or anyone) easier to deal with. 



• Remember the rats? Well, they've apparently nested underneath and in the walls in the back of our house. (One of my coworkers suspects that this is where the fleas are coming from, but I don't know if there's any way to be sure.)
  
  OK, and side note -- this is a bad story. Feel free to skip to the next bullet -- Karsten went out weeks ago and got rid of the junk pile, busted up the old deck, and started digging out the weeds around the house. He hit a nest with tiny wriggling ratlings (it's easier to call them ratlings than "kittens" when your aim is to get rid of them). It was an awful scene and he was devastated at having hurt them but the aim is, after all, to eliminate the population from our property. So as a compromise, whichever babies weren't already killed from the impact of the shovel got carried off to an empty lot a few hundred yards away.
  
  But anyway, even after all that there are still rats in the walls, and we're not sure how we're going to win this one.



• Baby Clyde is doing better, we think. He apparently had a blockage in his digestive tract so when they x-rayed him, his stomach looked totally full even after a day of intense vomiting. Not sure how or why, but the next day's x-rays showed his stomach clear and his lower digestive tract filling up, so the vet was satisfied that things looked to be on the right track. But I'm still nervous because we don't know why he was having trouble in the first place. Which in my mind means it could happen again anytime. But considering I thought he might be dying on Sunday night, I'll be relieved if all we're dealing with is a bad case of indigestion.



• And the fleas! The fleas are driving me nuts. I mean, it's just exactly the kind of thing that really gets to me. I can't take any kind of insect in large quantities. I won't even release ladybugs in the garden 'cause they freak me out en masse, but individually I'll let them crawl all over my hands and arms. A whole mess of bugs I don't like under any circumstances invading my living space? Definitely gonna mess with my mind.



• One of the other cats, Blackberry, has had a long-standing problem with urinating where he shouldn't. We've fought it for a while, but it had been getting worse recently. Took him to the vet and found out he has a pretty serious bladder infection. Uh, OK. Now I feel like a terrible cat person. So we've been giving him pills twice a day for weeks, and if you've never had to give a pill to a skittish cat, well, you just haven't experienced life.



• Between the overages in the house renovation and the flea/rat/vet/hotel expenses, we've depleted our checking account to levels we haven't seen in years. It really sucks and it makes me feel anxious. I think having had the experience of losing nearly everything we owned and getting as close as you can get to bankruptcy without actually filing, I'm having traumatic flashbacks to my anxiety level at that time. Our situation right now in no way resembles our situation then, but it's hard to shake an experience like that.



• Oh, and I'm trying to accomplish about a million things simultaneously in the next few months at work. So there's that, too.

I'm really trying to keep everything in perspective by remembering that we have a house, we have our health, and we're not broke (yet). But the amount of stuff we're having to deal with is enough to make me whimper.

So yeah, I can't decide if we've now spent enough unbudgeted money on all these various problems to mean that we should hold off on our long-awaited vacation. The vacation that coincides with our 10 year anniversary. The vacation we've been trying to take since 1999. The vacation we could really freakin' use right about now.

You see what I'm saying? We've been really looking forward to this. So to put it off, while it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world, would hurt and would suck and and and. Yes, we'd get over it. But it would be a big disappointment.

Anyway, it's not time to decide yet. For one thing, I don't think we're out of the woods with the whole pest control issue, so there may actually be even more money to spend. But also because we still have a little time before we have to make the decision, and I may yet come up with some genius plan to make everything work. Hey, it could happen.

Mais il y a peu de chances. Le sigh.

Well, we're finishing up at the emergency vet. They're treating Clyde's symptoms because most of his vital signs look OK. But the vomiting has the vet concerned and he said if that's still going on tomorrow, we should take him in to his regular vet. For now, he's had forced hydration and an anti-nausea shot, and he has to sleep in a cage at home so he doesn't eat or drink, but there's hope for some sleep tonight.

Baby Clyde has been throwing up since this afternoon. He looks pretty ragged. I'm sure we'll take him to the vet in the morning if he's still acting and looking this bad, but I can't decide if we need to take him to the emergency vet now.

Is there a chance, however remote, that this is a delayed reaction to the Hartz flea treatment? You all got me really spooked with that. Should we be calm and wait until morning or freak out and take him in right now?

This is my most beloved cat. He's wonderful, and he deserves the best treatment. I just don't know if there's anything to be gained by taking him in right now.

Ugh. I know I won't be getting much sleep tonight either way.

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we'd "treated" the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn't do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I've been busy with work so I couldn't do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn't want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can't see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn't seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I'd been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn't lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they're still dropping off. It's gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I'll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I'm melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day's flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn't go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie ("Becoming Jane"; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I'll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn't about that. So I did.

On top of the issues I've been having with the weakness in my arms and legs, etc, I now look as if I attempted suicide on my wrist. With a cat.

We're having our new windows installed today, and the installer showed up surprisingly early -- 7:30 AM, in fact. So we scrambled to round up the cats (well, Karsten scrambled -- I shuffled) and lock them in the cat room. We got all except one, the smallest one. Bopper, the Ninjakitten (see icon). The one who was a feral kitten when we adopted her and who reverts to wildcat behavior when she's scared. For 20 minutes, Karsten and I chased her back and forth across the house, frightening her into a panic state. Karsten was ready to give up. I was ready to try a different approach.

She was cowering in a corner of the living room, ears down, hissing, when I approached her slowly and made soothing noises. I took my time reassuring her, and she gradually began to relax. After a lot of convincing, I was able to pick her up and carry her all the way across the house with only minimal struggle on her part. Only when we got to the cat room door did she start to freak out, writhing wildly and carving a 5-inch gouge into my left inner wrist and a puncture in my right palm. But by god, I got her into that cat room.

And then I started cussin' and cryin' about how bad it hurt. Yowch! I should have taken pictures of it, but it was kind of gross. I'm all bandaged up now, and had to put on an extra-long-sleeved shirt to cover my wrist so my coworkers wouldn't think I was making a desperate cry for help.

What a week this has been!

On a discussion on flickr group "Cat in the Bag":

We have six cats: three littermates, and three who are not related.

Bonnie and Clyde (usually known to us as Baby Clyde) are two of the littermates, and despite their outlaw names, are the most incredibly sweet blue tabbies you could ever hope to meet.

Barbra Streisand, the third littermate and the alpha male (yes, an explanation is coming!), came to us as a beautiful Bengal-like cat with the undignified name of Billy (undignified because it was presumably short for Billy the Kid). We thought he needed a more dignified name, so we started calling him "Noname" for a while until we figured it out. Eventually we realized that he had the same profile as Babs herself, and it just stuck. Also, he has the most sing-song meow of any of the cats, so it fits.

The next adoption was Blackberry, an exotic-looking Bombay-like black cat who came to us as Magellan, and Cocoa before that. I don't remember exactly how we decided on Blackberry, but he's very sweet, so it stuck.

A few months later, we adopted another black cat -- a kitten -- and she was named Angel at the time. It was definitely an ironic name because she was about the most terrifyingly energetic kitten we'd ever seen. Irony is good, but by now we were on a roll with the "B" names and we renamed her Black Cherry.

Finally, we decided that we needed a sixth kitten to round out our Brady-Bunch-esque cat clan, and for parity, it needed to be a female brown tabby with an entertainment name. Luckily, my husband tracked down the world's most adorable kitten, we named her Bopper, and our family is complete.

Until the next round of kitten adoptions, I suppose. :-)

I guess I left out the part about Bopper being a ninjakitten.

If you dig this kind of thing and want to share your own cats' details, go check it out.

As in, we have them. I mean, what's the point of living with six cats (including one ninja kitten) if rats aren't afraid to come near our house?

Not that the cats can actually get to them. The rats have only made it into the walls in a few spots. But it's so weird -- I can actually hear them thumping and squeaking in the walls.

We think there are only a few. Karsten already trapped one a few days ago and more traps are going out today. I'm pretty sure the bird seed all around the house is attracting them, but whatever -- we're not going to stop feeding birds just because a few rats decided to crash the party. Get ready for the snap trap, suckers.

Karsten has been putting this together as a fun side project and distraction during the landscaping work he's been doing. It isn't fully finished yet -- he's got some faux leopard fur fabric that he'll upholster it with -- but the cats are already enjoying it.

Barbra's the best on a leash -- he'll actually heel and everything.

Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I was working in MasterWriter when I got up to admire a bluejay outside the window. When I came back, Barbra was sitting on my laptop keyboard, writing a song. Here’s what he wrote:

yttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttgyuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
- (c) 2006 Barbra Streisand O’Neill-Soltauer, aspiring cat songwriter

I’m not sure what the melody’s supposed to be. If anyone has any idea, please let me know.

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I was working in MasterWriter when I got up to admire a bluejay outside the window. When I came back, Barbra was sitting on my laptop keyboard, writing a song. Here's what he wrote:

yttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttgyuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
- (c) 2006 Barbra Streisand O'Neill-Soltauer, aspiring cat songwriter

I'm not sure what the melody's supposed to be. If anyone has any idea, please let me know.

I'm sure there are those of you who wanted nothing more than photographic evidence of cats on leashes. Well, here you have it. Bonnie is enjoying herself immensely in this photo, and now Baby Clyde is out here nosing around, too. :-)

How wrong is that?

But at least I'm warm. I'm sitting on the front steps and I can just barely pick up the wireless signal from the back of the house. Cool.

And Karsten is walking Barbra on a leash. Double cool.

Karsten is hard at work putting the finishing touches on the verse melodies for "My Evil Twin." I feel like I should be working, too, but instead I've been messing around on LiveJournal.

I might do some baking today. It would be a good excuse to have the oven on and hover near it, basking in its warmth. We're going to a dinner party tonight and it would be nice to be able to bring a dessert along. The hostess says the menu includes a Chinese broccoli dish and a squash soup -- so what should I bring for dessert?

Also, could I possibly be more excited about getting together with tubenerd and oiran tomorrow? I don't think I could.

OK, wanna see a cute kitty? You know you do.