No better

Things aren't improving. In fact, they're getting worse. I stopped for dinner on the way home, and got home about 8:00. Pyewacket was in the living room at the back window, and Dinah was in the dining room at the front window. I sat down, and Dinah sat on my lap, but she was uneasy and couldn't settle down. A few minutes later, Pyewacket walked in from the living room, stopped and looked at her, and Dinah started growling, so I got up and stuck Dinah on the basement landing and shut the door.

I got up and did some stuff--changed my clothes, cleaned off the dining room table, went through the mail--then sat down and watched television for a little while (a totally bizarre program about female body builders), then went to let Dinah out and see if we could have a little peace. No, of course not. She stuck her head out of the basement door, Pyewacket saw her, and they both immediately started hissing.

So I shoved Dinah back into the basement, then got a bottle of water, my book, and a scoop of cat food, and went down to spend a little time with her. Of course, every time I go through the door I have to be sure that one cat doesn't come in and one doesn't go out. What we need is an airlock . . .

I spent about a half hour down in the basement with Dinah. We have a bed down there, and I sat on it, propped up against the headboard, and she curled up on me and purred and purred, and it made me feel so awful, because I still have no idea of what we're going to do. Bob keeps telling me not to worry about it, that we'll work it out, but I don't see how. It will be better when he gets home tonight, because Pyewacket will be upstairs with him rather than wanting to hang out with me, but it's all so tense that I can hardly stand it.

Since Pyewacket spent Sunday night in the basement, last night was Dinah's turn, and I left here there around 10:30 and came up and went to bed. I didn't dare leave them both loose in the house, and although I felt guilty about it, I didn't want to shut Pye out of the bedroom, although I don't actually think she slept in the bedroom, at least I don't remember her being there.

This morning we had the same fiasco--I got up, showered, and dressed, came down and let Dinah out, she sat on my lap for about five minutes before Pyewacket came around the corner and stared at her, and they started hissing, and I stuck her back through the basement door before anything could happen. I try to break the mood by yelling or waving my hand in front of them, or trying to distract them in other ways, but Pye has gotten aggressive and won't back down. I'm not blaming her, I know it's because Dinah has attacked her so many times, but now it seems the roles are reversed.

As far as we know, they're okay at home together, that is, we haven't found any bloodstains, and neither of them are limping or appear to be injured in any way, so this week I've just been opening the doors and going to work and trying not to worry about what they're doing. I mean, obviously they're not just fighting all day long. I assume they head off to various spots and sleep most of the day and avoid seeing each other, but once we're home, they want to be with us, and hence the problems.

Bob has said he's tempted to let them go at it and see what happens--that maybe Pyewacket needs to establish dominance again as the alpha cat, but it's SO scary when they fight, and so dangerous.

Someone said the other day that it would be like having your kids fighting all the time, and I suppose that's sort of true, except it's more like having your kids fighting all the time with knives. And screaming.

I've been listening to The Time Traveler's Wife in the car. I thought it was the unabridged version, so I was really annoyed to find that I had purchased the abridged version from Audible. I never listen to the abridged versions of books, I have a real objection to that.

But I'm enjoying the book, and actually now I'm kind of glad that it's the abridged version, because now I want to actually read the book. I already ahve it--someone sent it to me a few months ago because I had it on my Wish List. Several people had recommended it to me, but I had resisted because the premise sounded so strange. At first, thinking about it was making my head hurt, but now I'm just enjoying the story and not trying to figure out the physics.

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No clue

Boy, did I ever speak too soon.

Or may I just didn't have my fingers crossed hard enough.

It's been a hellish week around here. I have no idea what we're going to do. I think it was Tuesday night -- Bob and I were in bed, asleep, and he jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, and I was still trying to wake up. I never did hear anything, but he said the cats were fighting downstairs. He threw Pyewacket in the bathroom downstairs and I went down and got Dinah and threw her in the basement so that we could let Pye out.

I can't even remember what happened Wednesday night, but Thursday night everything seemed to be okay until Bob got up and went into the bathroom to shut the shower faucet off--it was dripping--and Dinah was in there, and hissed at him, and Pyewacket had to come see what was going on . . . Bob was so angry that he actually left the house--this was about 2:00 a.m.--to keep from killing her, and I just sat there and shook.

He came back, and we talked, and he was still angry, and Dinah spent the night in the basement. And Friday night I put her down there just as a preemptive measure, because we're just constantly afraid that something is going to set them off, and it's getting to the point where I'm almost afraid to go to sleep if Dinah's around.

Bob left yesterday (Saturday) for a few days at the lake, fishing, and we just had one minor incident last night where one of them--I can't even remember now which one--came out from behind the living room drapes and saw the other, and the growling and hissing started, and I jumped up from where I was sitting and knitting and watching television (BBC America - "What Not to Wear") and threw Pye in the bathroom, then threw Dinah in the basement for an hour or so. I tried letting her out a little later, and everything seemed fine, so I left her out overnight.

Nothing happened. I slept late--10:00!--and woke up thinking, wow, how nice, a whole night, a whole long night, with no cat fights! The cats had spent the night in the bedroom, too, Dinah on the padded stool beside the bed, and Pye at the foot of the bed, and there weren't any problems. Then, as I was waking up, Dinah came in and got on the bed and snuggled next to me, and not five minutes later Pyewacket came into the bedroom. Dinah saw her and growled, and Pye jumped up on the bed to go for her. I shoved her off, and she jumped right back up, and went for Dinah, and there I am, right in the middle.

Sometimes when I think about what might happen if someone tried to steal my purse or something, I wonder if I could scream. Well, yeah, now I know, I guess. I can scream. They didn't get me, I wasn't hurt or anything, and in retrospect, of course screaming isn't going to get them to stop anything, but it's so disorienting, and so scary, and so outside anything that I usuallly have to handle. I guess I'm getting used to it, though.

I have no idea what we're going to do. What seems to have happened now is that Dinah has attacked Pye so many times that Pye is constantly on edge, and has decided to attack Dinah as a preemptive strike rather than waiting for her to attack. So all Dinah has to do is growl and Pye's on her.

This morning after an hour or so, I let Dinah out, and things seemed to be okay, then they were both sitting at the back door and one looked at the other, and it was just immediate--they're rolling around, screaming and hissing--and I sprayed them with the water bottle and separated them . . . and my throat is still sore from screaming, and my stomach is in knots. I don't know what to do. This can't go on, but what can we do? If I went down in the basement now, Dinah would be thrilled to see me. I would lie down on the bed, and she'd come up and lie on my chest and purr and purr.

The vet thinks maybe it's a territorial thing. He says cats--unlike dogs--aren't meant to live in "packs." They're solitary creatures, and in general don't do well when they have to live in close proximity to other cats. The irony is, I suppose, that one of the reasons we took Dinah in was that Pyewacket was attacking me, and we thought maybe another cat would diffuse the tension. It seemed to work at the time.

I have no idea what we're going to do now.

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My fault

When I make a mistake, I admit it, and I made one with the scanner. Not buying the one I did, but in installing it. At the suggestion of the Customer Service representative, I tried resetting it, but it didn't help, so I took it back to the store and exchanged it for a new one, figuring I'd give it one more try. This time when I set it up, I realized that I had missed one of the steps--when you turn it on, it prints an alignment sheet, and you're supposed to put it on the scanner glass and scan it, and that supposedly sets the alignment. I don't really know why the first one worked until it got shut off and then back on, but this one seems to be working fine.

It isn't really a very high resolution one, but I think it will be fine for my purposes. I was looking for something over the weekend and found some old pictures of Doña, so I used those to try it out.

What a beautiful cat she was!

Dinah's body type is very much like Doña's was, and her fur is kind of the same, too, very soft and fine. Black, of course, rather than white, but with the same long tail and long legs.

I took both of the cats to the vet last weekend. It was time for Pyewacket's annual check-up and innoculations, and we had been having such a terrible time with Dinah that I called and asked if I could bring her in, too. They said it was fine, so I loaded them up in separate carriers and took them up on Saturday morning.

Pyewacket loves the vet, and walks right out of the carrier and says hello to everyone. She rolled around on the floor and presented her tummy to be scratched, and marked all of the examining corners, the vet's shoes, and his assistant. Dinah, on the other hand, had to be poured out of her carrier--the vet simply opened the door and turned it so the door was pointing down, and she kind of fell out. We used to take the carrier apart to get her out, but this was pretty efficient.

We still don't really know what her problem was; he said it sounded like a territorial thing (she was growling and hissing any time Pye came into the room, so things had gotten pretty tense arond the house), and he said that it sounded like we were doing all the right things. We had set up food, water, and a litter box in the basement so that one or the other of them could retreat if they needed to, and Dinah had been spending a lot of time down there.

He also asked if we had been using the "kitty drugs" -- actually cat pheromones that come in a spray or as a plug-in like an air freshener. We had them, but he suggested moving the plug-in up to the bedroom closer to the bed, since that's where most of the problems seem to be. And he expressed her anal glands, which get plugged up, and that would make anybody grumpy. The Felineway is extremely expensive, but if it works--and it seems to--it's worth it.

Things are still a little weird, but they've calmed down a lot. Dinah isn't freaking out every time Pyewacket walks into a room, and she isn't hissing at Bob everytime he turns around, so for whatever reason, things are going better. We're just keeping our fingers crossed that it stays that way.

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Scanners

Ever since Bob upgraded his PC, I haven't had a scanner. He upgraded to a newer version of Windows--XP? I don't know, but I think that was it, and the scanner wouldn't work anymore, and there weren't any new drivers to be had for it. The scanner--not a terribly expensive one, but still--was suddenly just a large paperweight.

It was inconvenient, anyway, because it was connected to Bob's computer, so any time I needed to scan something, I had to go upstairs and use the PC, and it doesn't have Photoshop on it, so I'd have to save the image and email it to myself, then open it on my Mac to edit it. Better than nothing, certainly, but not very convenient. And I never wanted to bother him when he was in the office, even though he wouldn't have minded, of course. But I ended up saving stuff and trying to do it all at once on the weekends or something, and it was just very unsatisfactory.

Until I lost the ability completely, which became even more unsatisfactory.

So on Friday night I stopped at Best Buy and bought one of the all-in-one machines--scanner, copier, printer. I've never had a printer, I seldom have the need for one, but I'm sure I'll find uses for it now that I have it. And we've neede a copier--Bob uses his fax machine as a copier, so he'll get some good out of that, too.

I had a TON of stuff to fax for a website that I was finishing up this weekend, so I was able to take care of that, and thank goodness I did, because it's broken now. Yes, the scanner lasted all of, um, three days.

Now, I can't swear that it's irretrievably broken, but it sure seems to be. It's noisy--makes those little scanner-like "whir, whir" noises at irregular, closely-spaced intervals, and it's right by my desk, and it was driving me bonkers by startling me at odd moments, so after I mentioned it to Bob for maybe the tenth time, he went over and turned it off, and when I decided I wanted to use it again, and turned it on, every scan is a solid, very brilliant color, either green, or red, or, currently, blue.

I tried everything I could think of last night, I turned it off and on again, rebooted the Mac, eventually uninstalled and reinstalled the software. I moved the scanner as far as I could away from the monitor after reading a tip on some website or other--of course, I could only move it to the length of the USB cord, which wasn't very far. Finally, after searching the company's website in vain for information, I sent off an email to tech support. They responded today with the extremely useful information that I should clean the scanner glass! Now why didn't I think of that??

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Time out

Dinah slept in the basement Monday and Tuesday. Not that she chose to sleep in the basement, but that she was banished to the basement.

Things would seem to be going along okay, but once it got close to bedtime, she would start to freak out. Both nights I had gone up to the bedroom to change my clothes, and it's kind of become a tradition to lie down on the bed and she jumps up and gets some cuddle time and usually Bob will lie down, too, and she'll sit on my chest for awhile, then his, and it's very funny, actually. I sing to her.

But the last few nights, if Pyewacket walks in the room, Dinah starts growling, and if we don't immediately get up and separate them, they'll fight. Dinah's always a little weird, but for the most part everything's fine everywhere else in the house, but she doesn't seem to want Pyewacket to come into the bedroom.

Last night it happened, and Bob grabbed Pyewacket and went into the office with her, and I picked Dinah up, took her downstairs and deposited her in the basement. She sat right on the other side of the door, crying and scratching, and Bob and Pyewacket came down and played with her through the door.

Bob was shoving her wire toy through the door and moving it around, and she was grabbing it on the other side.

After awhile, after she'd had a chance to calm down, we let her out, and she was fine. We decided to shut them both out of the bedroom over night and see what happened, and everything seemed to be fine, although Pyewacket spent most of the night in the hall, I think, not understanding why she couldn't come in the bedroom.

I'm taking Pye in to the vet on Saturday for her regular check-up, so I'll talk to him about the rest of the situation, too, I guess.

Bob thinks Dinah's mentally ill, and she certainly could be, I guess. She has quite an attachment to me, as Pyewacket does to Bob. She doesn't like it when I'm out after dark, and if I go out for a walk in the evening, Bob says she spends the whole time I'm gone howling and crying, and pacing in front of the window. I remember the time when Pyewacket seemed to be trying to intimidate me into letting her have Bob all to herself, and maybe this is something like that, although I suppose we're attributing them with more motivation than is probably realistic.

When I was taking the picture off the memory card, I saw a bunch of pictures of the back yard that I had never posted, I don't think. My green, lush jungle of a backyard:

And the ash tree I grew from a seed:

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