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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Beat me with a fish

Last night at about 4:00, I got up and went to the bathroom. When I came back to bed, Bob wasn't there--he had gotten up, too. I got back into bed, he came back a few minutes later. Dinah was crouching down at the end of the bed on my side, but Pyewacket wasn't around. I guess she heard us moving around, though, from wherever she was, because she walked into the bedroom and Dinah started growling.

I reached down and touched Dinah, and said, "What's wrong? It's just Pyewacket!" but she kept growling low in her throat, and started that weird keening noise that is always the prelude to a fight.

Meanwhile, Pyewacket's just standing there looking at her, like "WTF is your problem?"

Dinah jumped down off the bed, growling and hissing, and I said, "Knock it off, Dinah!" and Bob started to go get Pyewacket so he could put her in the office or something, but before he could pick her up, she launched herself at Dinah, and before I knew what was happening, I was in the middle of a catfight.

We both started yelling, and the cats are screeching and rolling around, and Bob and I are both naked, and I do not want to get torn up, so I kind of jump out of the middle of it and into the middle of the room, and Bob picks up this gigantic fish pillow he brought me from Branson one year and starts flailing at them with it. It's the size of one of those body pillows, but in the shape and design of a trout or something.

I'm screaming at the cats, the cats are rolling around hissing and yelling, and Bob's standing there beating them with a fish.

Jeez.

He eventually got them separated enough that he could grab Pyewacket, and he took her out and shut the bedroom door. I went back to bed, and Dinah got up there by me, but she's still growling. I said, "Oh, come on, Dinah, the excitement's over, settle down," and she's looking at me, and growling, and her ears go back, and this time I'm lying in bed with no defense, i.e., I couldn't reach the fish.

I said, "Don't you lay your ears back at me," and about that time Bob came back to bed. He left Pye out, and closed the door, but of course she was immediately scratching at the bedroom door to get in, and Dinah starts growling and building up to something, and I thought, oh, for heaven's sake! Like we need this in the middle of the night.

Dinah was so upset that I really didn't want to go to sleep with her in there, so Bob went back out, stuck Pye in the office again, and I put on a robe (so that if the worst happened and she went ballistic, I could minimize the damage), picked up Dinah firmly and carried her down to the basement. I got back upstairs and reported to Bob that "the wild one is safely locked in the basement," and he asked me if she had food and water down there, and I didn't know, so I went back down and filled up the bowls.

So then we could let Pye out, and the three of us went back to bed, with Dinah in time-out in the basement. But of course, by then I couldn't get back to sleep, so after trying for a half hour or so, I got back up and came down to the computer and did some work.

The cats are usually pretty good together. They don't like each other, but they tolerate each other pretty well. Bob had said he thought he heard them tussling downstairs earlier in the night. What usually happens is that one of them is looking out the window, and there's a STRANGE CAT in THEIR YARD, and they don't like that, and they look around and take their aggression out on the CAT IN THE HOUSE who WASN'T DOING ANYTHING. And the humans whose only function is to protect and serve.

Stupid cats.

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