captainsblog: (Bash penguin)
Some people dream in black-and-white. Some dream in color. As of about 15 minutes ago, I was dreaming in blog.

I couldn't tell you what it was about- most of my dreams dissolve faster than a wicked witch in the rain- but I still have the after-image of the page I was staring at, looking much like this one:




So yeah. Definitely color. And just as definitely an illness.

(That's from the S2 Style samples menu, incidentally. Most of those are written in gobbledygook, and from my no-longer-working knowledge of Latin-based languages, I have no idea whether that is gobbledygookvs or not.)

----

If you can't raise a bridge, lower the river. Just make sure you lower it enough.

We've been taking, for several months now, to stowing Tazzer, our 7-year-old part-Siamese male cat, in Ebony's crate at night. She doesn't stay in it full-time anymore, but it's sort of a comfort zone for her to sleep in with the door open at times, so we've left it in the kitchen. Even Taz will go in there sometimes on his own during the day and strike a particularly alluring kitty pose.

For about 22 hours of each day, this cat is the sweetest thing who ever lived, sleeping quietly, or playing by himself with rubber bands and similar fetchy toys, or just sitting in a window looking beyootiful. But the hours before feeding time turn him into a raging, annoying little beast. The drill on this has worked well except when we either forget to board him or just can't find him at bedtime, which usually results in a disoriented Ray (and, yes you needed to know this, a sometimes nekkid Ray) trying to corner and crate him at 4-ish in the morning.

Boy is smart enough to know this is coming and thus runs away at high speed, usually heading through the cat door for the cellar. Most times, I just chase down after him and manage to corner him. This morning, though, I wasn't in the mood for playtime when I heard him making an unimprisoned 4 a.m. annoy-the humans run; I'd had something of an upset stomach and some equally weird dreams, if not in S2 format, had also preceded the round. While I did dutifully try to catch him in the cellar, the other two cats, sensing an extra feeding, were also getting under my feet while I tried to trap him.

Thus, I decided on a new approach. We keep an old baby gate down there, to limit the movements of Tasha the dog (our beloved but fearful-of-others Lab mix who we can't have upstairs when company comes), and we usually plant it at the bottom of the cellar stairs. A basement-appropriate 40-watt light bulb came on over my head and I said, a-ha! THIS time, I planted the gate at the top of the stairs, blocking the access of all three of them to the cat door. I smugly headed back to bed.

Where, about an hour later, Tazzer's little sister Michelle (the Oreoish one sitting in the crook of my arm at this very moment) marched right over to the edge of the bedchamber, gave me precisely one harumphish "meow," and stalked off.

We held out until just before six; Eleanor did the slopping of the dog hogs, I the cats. As soon as I opened the door, I could do the math. There was maybe a two-inch gap between the baby gate and the actual cellar door. For a not-quite-10-pound animal with no shoulders, this was a piece of cake, as she slithered up, between, down and out without upsetting the assembly. (Either that or she crawled out through the ductwork, another of her favorite tricks.) Biggsy never would have made it, and Tazzer? He's probably small and lithe enough, but I don't think he'd resort to anything that undignified just to wake us up a mere 45 minutes early.

Yet.

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