A tale of two kitties and a couple of screen protectors....

As regulars to this space (three of you at last count) all know, there are two felines in our home.  Zoey, aka Good Kitty, is going on 10, but still remains very kittenish. Michelle, aka Evil Cat, will be old enough to vote in the next election and is, well, evil. She’s the one who disappeared for close to two weeks into early October, before marching back into the garage demanding food. Her time away did nothing to endear her to us any more, and the feline is mutual.

She did seem a lit-tle calmer until last week. I could usually hold off her yowls until something resembling 6 am, and then get back to sleep thereafter. But the past week, she’s been rising close to 3-4 a.m., hauling dish towels down the hall with a vibrato Freddie Mercury would be proud of, not shutting up until fed, and then resuming the act AFTER noms, as if to say, c'mon, wake up so I can go back and sleep all day!

Two nights ago, I done got sick of it, and kicked her back out to the garage for the first time since her prodigal return. This got me two uninterrupted (mostly) hours of sleep before it got close to Dog Park time, and she seemed no worse for wear when she came in.

I say mostly uninterrupted because the first dream I had was of my having left a door open and Evil Cat being stared down by a mean old junkyard dog. Of course I saved her. Later, at the park, I recounted the dream to Ursula’s mommy and joked, “I’d like to meet that dog.”

Ann: “Careful, Ray. There’s such a thing as bad karma,”

Me: “I know. And she’s IT.  No idea what sin we got her for.”

So this morning she got tossed out again- but now she’s got a doggie bed and blankie to save her from the horrible cold (no colder than it was on some of those 10 nights outdoors when she ran away).  Plus, she can hang out with the deer who come right outside the door, and think about who to vote for in the next Presidential election when she turns 20.

Now that’s what REALLY scares me.

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Zoey gives us none of this grief. She sleeps with us, too, but her only noise is a perfectly delightful purr that induces sleep. She’ll rattle around right before feeding time, but nothing meriting eviction.

She does occasionally cop an attitude with the dog, nothing beyond a hiss;  and she’ll tussle with Evil Cat now and again. Biggest trouble she is to us is when her claws get sharp. She struggles and bites while I try to clip them (oddly, Evil Cat is quite compliant when I do hers). Zoey needed a mani-pedi yesterday, and as usual she resisted- but this time I understood why.

One of her front claws was gone. Still sensitive when I pulled back the paw, but by all appearances completely healed. She gave no sign of any blood, pain or discomfort whenever it happened. She walks fine, has never stopped being cuddly, and we wish we could speak Cat so we’d catch these things.

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Some things in life are easier to notice- although Eleanor's usually quicker on the uptake.  Her phone's just past two years old (and, yay!, now paid for), and a few weeks ago, she took it on a bike ride outside its protective case and it fell. It looked to her like she'd cracked the screen. I've done that more than once, and hers didn't look nearly webby-wobbly enough for a clean break past the protector.  So I took it, two weekends ago, to a small iGadget joint near here, where a coworker had had good luck getting a screen repair.  Our karma was even better; it was just the protector (and a teeny chip on the edge, which is under the frame of the OtterBox and unlikely to go further), and the guy replaced it in under five minutes, and for free. His only request was that I recommend them to people. So I am.

Meanwhile, my older version, which has had a protector on it quite a bit longer, had gotten somewhat ratty over the years, and was even peeling around the edges. I finally resolved to get it replaced this past weekend; seemed tacky to ask them for another freebie, so I got a replacement from Tarjay of the same brand that had held up well and prevented any cracks of the phone.

As opposed to cracks in the protector itself: not all of these were visible, but clearly (or rather, not so clearly), it was time:



Of course I dropped it first thing this morning, but it took the licking and kept on ticking without any new cracks.  Maybe I can sell it to an art museum as some kind of modernist glasswork.