Yes, I know how to use it... (pictures I like)

 

...How do you think all of those cat pictures get online?

Licked by a Horse, among other Things

Well, this is awkward.
Sure, it's an awkward of my own choosing, but that doesn't make it any less awkward.
We're going to talk about being licked.
And I'm going to assume that everyone, at some point or other, has been licked by a dog. Yes, I'm sure there are people out there who have never been licked by a dog or who think it's gross or whatever, but it's a fairly normal thing, so we're going to go with that.

I, of course, have been licked by a dog. In fact, I am licked by a dog pretty much on a daily basis. This dog, in fact:

Isn't she the cutest.

Yes, that's a statement, not a question.

Along with the dog, however, I've been licked by quite a few other kinds of things.

There are, of course, humans. Anyone who spends any amount of time working with young children is, at some point or another, going to be licked. Usually because said kid finds it utterly hilarious. Especially if he catches you off guard and you suddenly have a smear of slime down your arm. Yeah, hilarious. Right?

But for most animals it's to show a kind of affection, not to be obnoxious. It's a "here, I care about you; I'm going to clean you," or whatever, kind of thing. Of course, some dogs love everyone. heh Or just aren't very discriminating.
Anyway...

So... other animals I've been licked by:

My cat. Being licked by a cat is not the most pleasant thing, but he means well. As well as a cat can, anyway. I've been injured more than once by the cat's tongue, though, so I've had to dissuade him from licking me when it looks like he's settling down to give me a grooming.

My rabbit. She's no longer with us, but she used to lick my hands and fingers when I would hold her. It's somewhat similar to being licked by a cat by softer and more tentatively. I did some research on the rabbit licking thing at one point because I'd never heard of that before, and it seems to be rather rare with them. They have to really like you.

A gerbil. When I was in high school, I had a pair of gerbils and the female would sometimes lick my fingers. It was a little weird, kinda of like being nosed by a fish. Sometimes, she would hold onto my fingertip while she was licking me.

A cow. When I as a kid, my grandfather had cows down on the farm, and one of the cows, a cow named Pig, would occasionally lick me. I don't know if she ever licked anyone else, but I'm sure it was all about getting food. At any rate, I don't recommend the experience. If you want to know what's like, go find a cat and get it to lick your arm, then imagine that on the magnitude of a cow's tongue, let's 100x more intense. Plus the slime and what it did to the hair on my arm. Let's just say that there's a reason a cowlick is called a cowlick.

And, now, a horse. Or a pony, as was the case. The pony's name was Lucy; I wish I had taken a picture of her, but it didn't occur to me until after the fact. We were at one of the local parks a couple of weekends ago, and they offer pony rides there. My niece and nephew wanted to ride the ponies, so I was hanging out near the fence where the waiting ponies were and one of the ponies, Lucy, started nudging at me, for scratches I guess. That's how I responded, at any rate, first up around her ears then her nose. It's not like a horse is able to scratch its own nose, right?

A surprising thing happened, then; Lucy licked my hand. Except it was more like a tongue press. She pressed her tongue against my hand. I want to say it was like being touched by a cloud, but I don't think that analogy really works. Let's just say it was soft, surprisingly so. Gentle, maybe. So I held my hand out to her like I would for a dog to smell, and she began licking my hand repeatedly. You know, pressing her tongue against my fingers over and over again.

My younger son was with me, so he held his hand over to her (he had been scratching her ears), but she turned her head away from his hand. She was definitely choosing to lick my hand, so it wasn't that I had tasty food on it or something (we had just finished eating), because my son had had the same lunch I had so would have had the same food on his hand.

After a few minutes, I had to go take care of something, but I went back over to see Lucy again a little while later, and she got all excited when she saw me walking up and greeted me by licking my hand again; she still wouldn't lick my son's hand. When they came to take her away a little while later, she got upset and didn't want to go.

I don't know how common it is for horses to lick people (and I'm not going to do any research about it, because I'm not curious enough to spend the time on it), but it's not a thing I'd ever heard of before. I seem to have a thing with animals, which, actually, is true enough.

Or, maybe, I just taste good.

My Left Knee

I think my left knee is eating my pants.
No, really, the last several pairs of jeans I've had have all worn out over my left knee before the more obvious places of, say, like, my right pocket where my keys stay. That used to always be where my jeans would wear out first. But, now, it's the left knee.

Why would it be the left knee? Is my left knee sharper than my right knee? It doesn't look like it is. Does the cat have something to do with all of this?

It wouldn't surprise me.
Maybe he's mad because I didn't take him to the opera, and he's taking it out on my pants?

Whatever it is, it's a mystery to me.
All I know is that it's time for a new pair of pants.

Dogs and Cats Living Together... (pictures I like)

Now You See It... (pictures I like)

The Summoning Circle (pictures I like)

Trinity 2015: Part Three -- Other Stuff

Trinity this year was a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, because I was going to be away from the Demon Cat for a week (also known as Jack (here's a picture of him feeling ashamed of himself

(I'm lying; he's never ashamed))), I thought that I would actually take advantage of that by getting, you know, some sleep. Now, previously, when we've been, I've gotten up earlier than everyone else and sat on the deck with my mocha and used the time to write, but, no, this year, I slept in. I was under the false... um, no... I just had some bad logic that told me that I would somehow be able to write during the day when everyone wanted to do things. Yeah, that didn't happen. I didn't wise up and get up early to write until the last two days. Next year, I'll know better than to take the sleeping in option. I do think I came back slightly more rested than I went, though.

Here are some other pictures I took while there that I really like.

We found it this way, but I thought it was cool that someone took the time to make that.

Unless, of course, this is some kind of weird, naturally occurring formation.

We found one other before we left, not as tall as the first, but, see, maybe they are naturally occurring, and this one just hadn't grown as big yet.

Love Hurts (or What the Cat Did)

I know he looks all calm and peaceful in that above picture, but the cat and I have a rather contentious relationship. It's not that we don't like each other, either. In fact, the cat likes me rather more than I'm comfortable with. That doesn't stop him from threatening me with laser eyes!

No, just kidding. He never threatens. It's just a "do or do not" thing. Okay, fine! I'm kidding!

I think...

I mean, he's never shot lasers at me, but that doesn't mean I don't think he could if he wanted to.

Actually, the problem really is that the cat has a great amount of affection for me. So much so that during the middle of the night, as I've spoken about before, he will decide he needs me to come and just sit with him. He wants to hang out in the living room and stare out the window, but... it's like he's scared to be alone in the dark and needs me on the couch. Sometimes he comes and sleeps on my lap. Fortunately, now that it's colder, he's been pretty content to sleep at the foot of the bed and not worry about the window and what might be out in the dark.

But that's not what I want to talk about...

The actual problem is that one of the things cats do to "loved ones" is groom them. Have you ever been groomed by a cat? Let me just say: it's not a comfortable experience. If you want to know what it's like, go buy some sandpaper. Of course, I'm assuming you don't just have some around. When I was a kid, we always hand sandpaper on hand but, then, my dad had a tool closet full of all kinds of stuff that he never used. Including sandpaper. Because, if anything needed to be sanded, that was my job. Anyway... Go get some sandpaper and tear off a piece about the size of the end of your pinky finger. Now, take that paper, find a place on your forearm, and stroke that piece of paper in the same spot on your arm for, say, five minutes. Can you do it? No? Hurts, doesn't it? Imagine that going on for half an hour.

It leaves abrasions on the skin just like the kind you'd get when you were a kid and fell down on the concrete. The next day there will be little scabs all over in the patch of skin that he groomed, and it hurts for a couple of days. One time, he did it to my collar bone, which didn't hurt while he was doing it, but it left a mark that looked like a hickey. heh My wife wasn't amused.

Speaking of my wife, she always asks me why I let him do that to me. Her position is that I ought to just throw him off of me when he starts the grooming behavior. And, well, maybe I should, but I look at it like this:
When a baby grabs your beard... Oh, you don't have a beard. Okay, ladies, when a baby gets a fistful of your hair in its little baby hand and starts flailing its little arms around, do you throw the baby on the floor? Only if you want to be charged with child abuse, right? Yeah, yeah, but it's a cat; it's different. The cat will land on his feet.

But it's not really different. The cat doesn't know what he's doing. I mean, the cat doesn't know he's causing me pain. It's like if your kids make you breakfast in bed for your birthday and, then, sit there and stare at you so they can watch you eat it... and it's the most terrible sawdust you've ever put in your mouth. But you eat it anyway. For love. Well, so as not to hurt someone trying to show you love, because I am not saying I love the cat. [Trust me; if I had to pick between the cat and the dog,

I'd dropkick the cat out the door before you could count to three (don't tell the cat (though I suspect he already knows)). But that's beside the point.]

Which brings me to the point:
Sometimes, we do painful things for love, our own or someone else's. Even though we know whatever it is will be painful, we do it anyway. And we should. Intent means a lot. Basically, I don't want to punish the cat for something he's doing for the right reasons, even if it does hurt, and that's how we should be with people.

Oh, and by the way, I tried to take some pictures of the wound on my arm after the last time the cat did that to me, but my camera got confused by all the hair and couldn't figure our what to focus on. Maybe next time.

My Cat Caught a Lizard, and Other Things

Oh... I can't resist mentioning the grammar in the title...
Can't... resist...

It's just that it's such a good example of using a comma for clarification of meaning, not for telling someone where to pause or take a breath. See, these two sentences mean different things:
"My cat caught a lizard and other things."
"My cat caught a lizard, and other things."
The first sentence means my cat caught other things along with the lizard, which, with my cat, could be almost anything. Actually, I think he caught a spider this morning, too.
The second means that my cat caught only a lizard and there are other things I'm going to talk about.
Commas. They're important.
And not for telling me how to breathe.

I've made no secret, even though I haven't mentioned it in a while, of my antipathy for Windows 8. It's like a book, a horrible-bad book, that your English professor wrote and then made you read as an assignment. But, not just read it, read it over and over again. And it never gets any better, just... you get used to it. But, then, he tells you that he's made it better. You know, major re-writes and edits and all of that, but people start reading it and they tell you it's pretty much just the same. Maybe worse. Definitely not better. You don't bother with the new one.

That's me and Windows 8.1. I haven't known a single person who has said to me, "Oh, yeah, you should definitely switch to 8.1. It's way better." No... Pretty much everyone has told me that it's pretty much the same. A few of said they liked it less. So my computer has been prompting me to "upgrade" to 8.1 for a while, now. Months. Every time it prompted me, I told it "no." Why bother for just more of the same. I am, at least, used to Win8.
I guess it got tired of asking.

The other night, it just up and told me, "Heya, I'm upgrading to Windows 8.1. I can do it right now, or I can do it tomorrow. When do you want that to happen?" What I wanted to tell it was "NO!" but it wouldn't let me. I tried... well, I tried all sorts of things and it wouldn't let me stop the "upgrade" even though my stuff in the "Should I upgrade?" section told me that I could opt out.

Then it told me I needed to backup all of my files, which was fine except that I couldn't. I backed up my document files, but I have all of my photos on the computer, and I didn't have anything to put them all on nor did I have time to do it by the time I realized there was no way to stop the 8.1 installation. Really, I wouldn't have had time to do it without at least a week of notice. I was pretty furious by that point. Sort of a walking rant.

When the computer finally prompted, "I'm going to install Win 8.1, right now," I thought I had beat it by simply turning the computer off... but I was wrong. An hour or so later, the prompt came up again. And I turned the computer off again. But, when I turned it back on, it said, "Screw you! I'm installing this sucker, right now!"

Have I mentioned that I hate computers? Yeah... Kind of like how I hate cars. They should just work. Period. And they should work in the way you want them to work.

Anyway...
I have Win8.1 now. Here's what's changed:

• Everything is slower now. The computer takes longer to boot and pages take longer to load. You know, it's the heightened security or whatever.
• I no longer have to sign out of Windows before I can turn my computer off. Seriously, why was that even a thing? So that's one positive thing, although I still have to go to the start screen to do that.
• All of my files are now backed up to the "cloud." Because, as we have seen with the recent cloud hacking of celebrities "special" pictures, the cloud is more secure than having things just on my computer.

All of that and my cat caught a lizard. In the house. It was a western fence lizard

which I think are pretty cool because they're immune to Lyme disease. He was playing with it under the kitchen table, but I didn't pay any attention to him, because that's where he likes to play with pieces of cardboard he pulls off his scratching box or with the little strips off the Netflix envelopes. But he just kept going and going. Usually, he's only good for entertaining himself in that way for 5-10 minutes, but, once he crossed the 20 minute mark, I began to wonder what he was doing. At some point, I checked. He had a lizard. Amazingly, it was intact. Apparently, all he was doing was batting it around and throwing it in the air. However, it was still dead.
It was sad-making.

There was another thing, too, but I can't remember what it was. That's what comes of being interrupted as many times as I have. Always am. Probably, it wasn't important, and this is long enough anyway.

Aim for the Cat!

My boys have started up their very own blog. Sort of. Okay, well, yes, "they" have started a blog, but they started working on it... oh, I don't know, months and months ago. However, the older boy hasn't been able to be bothered with actually getting the thing going. Either he's not home or he's texting. Theoretically, they were supposed to make the whole thing live back during the school year, but that just didn't happen. I finally told my younger son that he needed to just start doing it if it was ever going to happen; waiting for his older brother to sit down and work up their first post together was never going to happen. So he did that. Their blog (or maybe just his?) is now live and his very first post is up. Remember my review of the new Transformers movie? Well, now you can get his take on it first hand.

All of that said so that you can click on

Aim for the Cat!

And, seriously, you should. Maybe, next week, they'll explain what that means. In truth, I have no idea what they have planned, so you should hop over and sign up for the ride.

Probably, they won't actually be aiming for any cats, although maybe I should start keeping a better eye on ours.

I think he's trying to hide? 

* * *

Also, just to remind you, the July issue of Indie Writers Monthly is out. It has all kinds of good stuff in it including part six of my series "Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers." For only $0.99, it's hard to beat.

But there's more!

For a limited time, the April issue is absolutely FREE! So you should definitely go pick that up. I mean, you can't actually beat FREE!

The Cat Stands (Stays) Alone

My wife and I had a disagreement. It wasn't a huge thing; there was no yelling or fighting or anything like that; it was a just a disagreement. It all started with the cat. Remember him?

Yes, he is walking on the back of a chair. No, I'm not sure what he's doing with his eye. Aiming his deathray? It's always hard to tell with him. But I digress...

Two years ago when we went camping, our cat didn't have us. [Yes, I could say "we didn't have the cat," but, clearly, the cat decided that we belong to him, not the other way around. He did move into our house like a little, furry squatter.] We took the dog with us and there was no problem. In anticipation of the camping trip last year that didn't actually happen, I bought a leash for the cat.

The leash was so that we could take the cat with us, but we didn't go, so the leash just sat around and I never bothered to train the cat with it. He acts like he's dying when you put it on him except when he's walking backwards, which is what he's doing in the below picture.

One time he walked backwards right up the wall and only stopped when he was looking straight down at the floor, then he just stayed like that, like he was lying on the wall.

So, when we started talking about camping this year,

I resumed my plans to take the cat... right up until my wife let me know that she didn't want the cat going with us. The conflict spread to the kids at that point, because they, also, wanted the cat to go. There was a lengthy debate. Well, sort of. It wasn't a debate that happened all at once. It was spread out over about two weeks with occasional comments that were always interrupted by one of the kids saying, "I want the cat to go." That always ended the discussion, because we didn't want the kids getting involved in the decision since they wouldn't be the ones to be taking care of the cat.

Long story short: The cat stayed (because, man, who wants to have to lug a litter box with your camping gear?) at home. Alone.

Now, before anyone says anything about the cruelty involved in leaving the cat locked in the house for a few days, I didn't just decide to do that. At some point, I had done some research about cats and what to do with them when you're going to be away from home, and I found that this is what a lot of people do, just leave the cat at home. They are, after all, pretty self-sufficient and, before Jack (the cat) came to live with us, he had lived alone outside for a long time.

Still, it was not without some trepidation (and anxiety) that I did it. Going off and leaving your pet, unless it's a fish, locked in your house is no small thing. [And before you start giving me options, I considered them. (Especially the one about having someone come in each day, but Jack is an expert at waiting just inside the door and hopping out as you come in -- sometimes without you even knowing he's done it -- and I didn't want to have to deal with a missing cat while I was not home and able to deal with it).] But I made sure he had plenty of (dry) food (there was still some left when we got back, so I did okay on that), what I thought was plenty of water (that was almost gone, but I think that's because he normally gets wet food, so he drank more water to make up for what he wasn't getting from his food), and a big pile of fresh litter.

When we got back, the first thing we noticed was that the house was still here. That was a positive, because I wasn't sure the cat wouldn't box it up and run off with it while we were gone. Heck, that could have been his plan all along (that cat definitely has some kind of plan). I went into the house, first, and the cat met me as I came in the door and was actually more interested in seeing me than in hopping out the door (he saved that until a few nights ago to do to my oldest son as he was coming home from rehearsal). So all is well, and the cat has been way more affectionate this past week than he has been in a while.

And, hey!, the house wasn't even booby trapped Home Alone style when we got back, so I guess the cat really does like living with us. Or something.

Still, I'm going to keep working with him with that leash. Either I have to get him to go forward, or I have to learn to walk him backwards. That could be interesting. I'll have to try get some video footage of that.

* * *

In other news, I have a new thing that I'm finishing up. The draft writing, that is. It's all in notebooks (because that's how I write when I'm off at softball practices or accordion lessons or whatever), so it still has to be typed up and all of that. Why am I telling you this? Well, as I have been doing, I'd like to add a bonus story by some other author to go with it, so I am officially taking submissions. Or requests. Or something. Look, if you have something that's, oh, say, around 5000 words and you'd like me to put it in with my new thing (which I'll tell you more about later), let me know. Or if you want to WIP something up. You still have time. Just leave me a message or email me or whatever to let me know you're interested.

"This is no time to panic."

"This is the perfect time to panic!"

Okay, so no one is really panicking, but that's one of those lines that pops into my head anytime anything is going wrong. Sometimes, it's joined by the corollary to the first part of that exchange: "Don't Panic!"
It always makes me want to grab a towel.
Speaking of which, it was Douglas Adams' birthday this week.
And all the loose computer cables we have running everywhere right now makes me think of him, because he had things to say about loose computer wiring and cables.
Which brings me back to what all of this is about. Or one of the things this is about.

We are in the midst of restructuring our computer set up, because I was gifted a computer by my good friend that works over at Lucasfilm, which is very timely, because I'm sure my wife's (old) computer is going to drop dead any day now. It's just like the one I had drop dead back in the fall, and we got them at the same time, and it's sounding really bad, lately. Like a guy with lung cancer or something. I'm halfway expecting it to explode or some such. But I digress...

So we have this new computer, which is currently set up across the room from the place where it will eventually be, so there are cords stretched all over the place. The worst one is the one running from our phone socket on the wall in the kitchen over to the modem. Earlier this week, my oldest son stepped on it and jerked it forcefully from the jack, breaking the clip that holds it in. Of course, that was accompanied by a loss of Internet connection, which was accompanied by me losing what I was working on, because I couldn't save it.

Why couldn't I save it? Well, because... That's the best answer I have. Once I got everything set back up again, my computer wouldn't recognize the connection. The other computers did, but my computer kept saying, "Hey, Buddy, what do you think you're doing? We got no connection here."
No, I do not know why my computer talks like that, but it does. And I said, "Why, yes, we do have a connection," and I held it up and showed it and said, "The other computer recognize it; why not you?"
And it replied, "I'm tellin' ya's, we got no connection."
And we went on like that until I shut it off. When I turned it back on, it said, "Oh, hey, you plugged us back in."
But I didn't get to save anything, because I had to re-boot to get the computer to recognize that I had re-connected everything.

Then, Wednesday morning, the dog jumped on the phone line.

It wasn't exactly her fault; she thought she was getting a treat and got all excited. Well, actually, she was getting a treat, so she had a reason to get all excited; my younger son just didn't think about where he was standing when he was offering it to her.

Whatever she did, she did it good. I spent around 30 minutes trying to get the connection working again and hadn't managed it by the time I had to get the kids to school. Once I got home, I spent another hour working on it before I got everything working. It's like the sudden disruption just fired everything, and I had to go over every piece of equipment and every connection. I don't know what was actually knocked loose or what, but, eventually, I did something that got it all working again.

And, while I was doing all of that, I had Bill Murray screaming in my head, "And if I can't work, THEN I CAN'T WORK!"

Which just makes me glad I'm not more plugged in than I am, because I hear too many stories about people that don't know what to do with themselves when they lose or break their phones. No, sir, I don't want one of those.

Then there's the cat...

As I've mentioned before, the cat, my cat, Jack, has some kind of weird abusive relationship with this orange tabby from down the street. I call him The Orange. The Orange will come down to my house and pin my cat down and make a horrible mewling noise. This noise greatly disturbs my dog, and she goes crazy barking, but I can still hear the horrible sounds The Orange makes even over her barking.

It started up yesterday, and I opened the front door to find Jack huddled at the bottom of the steps with The Orange standing over him going "merow" "merow" merow." However, The Orange knows enough not to hang around when I come out, so he turned tail and ran. But, see, my cat can't just let him go. Jack always follows him anytime anything like this happens. And they go through bushes and crap that I can't go through, but I have to follow them so that I can get in between them, which gives The Orange a chance to run all the way off, and, then, Jack will come home.

But, yesterday, I didn't get around the hedge in time, because The Orange was really running much more quickly than normal, and Jack was chasing him, so I got around just in time to see The Orange turn on Jack and attack him.

You know how in cartoons when animals fight they always show these dust clouds with the occasional paw or whatever popping out of it. Now, I know why. This looked exactly like that. It was, like, three seconds of a squalling blur. And you know how they say "the fur was flying"? Well, I know where that comes from, too, because a great cloud of fur flew out in every direction, which only heightened the sense of them fighting in a dust cloud. I just stood there and blinked and wondered if I'd stepped into a cartoon. Then it was over, and The Orange was running for home.

I don't know if that means Jack won or not. He watched The Orange run off and, then, walked away. Actually, he came home with me and lounged around in the house for a couple of hours which isn't something he generally does at  that time of day unless it's raining. I couldn't find any wounds on him, although he can be kind of difficult with being examined.

The thing that disturbs me is that the owners of The Orange acknowledge that their cat is a bully (and I've heard complaints about him from other people in the neighborhood -- on the other hand, everyone in  the neighborhood loves Jack (heck, people come to my house just to see Jack if he's hanging out in the driveway)) and, yet, do nothing about his behavior or his comings and goings or anything. It would be one thing if Jack was going down to their house and these problems were happening, but, no, The Orange comes here, and I have to run him off (at least) a couple of times a day.

Which makes me want to sign Jack up for martial arts training. Or something.

I think I need to just get a towel that I always carry with me...

Cat Angst

I've taken ownership of  the cat.

As you can see, I've got him all packed up and ready to go. Actually, no, that's just the cat taking ownership of my daughter's accordion case. Anything that looks like something he shouldn't be in is something he decides he wants to be in.

But back to my original statement: I've taken ownership of the cat. Not that I know what I would do if the technical owner showed up at my door tomorrow and said he wanted the cat back. I suppose I could say, "Let's leave it up to the cat" (because I'm sure the cat would pick me, since,  in effect, he already has), but I don't know if that's a thing with pets like it is with kids.

See, although the cat clearly wants to live with us and has been living with us for quite some time, it still fills me with angst knowing that there's some guy in the neighborhood that is the technical owner of the cat. The fact that he could, theoretically, knock on my door and break my daughter's heart fills me with all sorts of angst over the whole cat issue and what we should do about  the cat. But no more.

As of today, I'm declaring the cat ours. Sort of like planting a flag. See, now, I've had to spend money on the cat, real money, and if I'm going to have to take the cat to the vet for medical attention, the cat is mine. That's just all there is to it.

Let me explain:

A few weeks ago as we were walking out the door to go somewhere, the cat came limping up with a swollen left shoulder. It looked rather like someone had stuffed an orange in  there, but that wasn't the first time the cat had hurt himself, and we had somewhere we had to be, so we let him in and left. The swelling had gone down by the time we got home, so that was good. We did see, at that point, that he had some kind of wound in his shoulder.

There's an orange tabby cat in the neighborhood that is the neighborhood cat bully. He likes to stand over other cats making this horrible meowing, pinning them down. He does this without actually touching them, but I've had to rescue Jack (my cat) from him several times, and I've seen him keeping other cats hiding under cars or against walls or whatever. We don't like this cat, and I think it and Jack may have gotten into a scrape that resulted in Jack's wound. That or the dead gopher Jack left as an offering for us (and, yes, they are actually offerings) managed to bite Jack before he partially skinned it.

But Jack didn't "belong" to us, so I decided to just keep an eye on the wound in the hopes that the actual owner might show that he was still keeping an eye out on the cat and do something about it. But that didn't happen.

Still, the wound seemed to be healing up just fine. Jack quit licking it all the time, and it had closed up and everything. Until a couple of days ago.

This may be coincidence, but Jack and The Orange (my name for the bully cat) had another go at it. The Orange was making his horrible noise, and I went out to see what was going on, and The Orange had Jack trapped up against the gate to our backyard. I got in between them, and Jack took off toward the car (where he often hides from The Orange), but The Orange went for him, and Jack turned around and took a swipe at him. Good for him, right?

So, maybe, the cats went at it, and Jack's wound got reopened. Or, maybe, it was just itching because it was healing. We don't really know what started it, but Jack started licking at it again and licked all the hair off of it and the surrounding area. It was pretty gross, but the wound was smaller than the nail on my pinky finger, so, again, I thought we should just keep an eye on it.

Today, though, something changed in all of that. The wound broke open, doubling in size, and was actively oozing. I don't know if he scratched or licked it open or if he got into another fight or what. It was fine when he left the house this morning, but, when he came back in around 2:00, it was a mess.

That was the end of the angst. I took ownership of the cat and took him to the vet. He got all kinds of shots (both immunizations and an antibiotic) and a couple of staples in his shoulder.

I figure for $300, the cat is mine. Especially since he has to go back in two weeks and again in four weeks. The good news is that the vet said he's a strong, healthy cat. In fact, everyone was admiring him. The cat has got some charisma is all I can say; after all, he got me to like him. I mean actively like him, not just kind of like him in that way I like most animals.

And here's the allegory:
A lot of things in life are like Jack. There are these things out there, situations or whatever, that someone else should have responsibility for. However, for whatever reason, those people won't take responsibility for whatever it is. Maybe, they just don't care. Or care enough. Or, maybe, there are some sort of extenuating circumstances. Who knows. In the end, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that, if it's something you care about, you take responsibility for it. Just do it. Don't wait for someone else to step up to the plate and do the job. Most of the time, if you're waiting for that happen, you're just going to be disappointed.

Let's look back at the situation with Jack:
Initially, it was apparent that the cat was just out on his own nearly all of the time. He wasn't really being cared for. That included being fed on a regular basis. Whether this was the fault of the cat not going home to eat or the fault of the "owner" not providing food, doesn't really matter. Now, we didn't know if the cat had an owner at the time, so we started slipping him so food, but, even after we found out who the owner was, it was clear the cat was still going unfed. Eventually, it was also clear that the cat only ever stayed at or around our house. We took on the feeding responsibility because the cat was (is) important to my daughter. It was something that needed to be done, and no one else was doing it or doing it adequately. All of that lead to us taking care of the cat's wound. Because someone had to do it. The person that should have been responsible didn't do the job. Because we care about the cat and don't want him to die from something that is completely preventable, we took care of it.

And that's kind of how life needs to be. People need to pick up the responsibility for the things they care about and quit waiting for other people to do it. Even if those other people are the people that ought to be doing it. Sometimes, those things are even our things. Things that we ought to be responsible for, things we say we care about, but we're too busy waiting around to see if someone else will come along and do them for us. Those things can cause all sorts of angst.

It felt good to actually say, "You know what, I'm taking responsibility for this cat. This cat is now mine." No more angst. So, if you have a Jack in your life, pick him up and take responsibility for him. Scratch him under the chin and listen to him purr.

The cat also plays the piano.

The Cat Came Back (part 2)

This whole thing with the cat took place over months worth of time starting last spring some time. It caused my daughter no small amount of anxiety when we took our trips during the summer, and we still didn't know if "Sam" had an owner. Who would take care of the cat? Not that we were taking care of the cat, not exactly, but we were keeping an eye on it and slipping it some food every so often. As it turned out, many people were slipping that cat some food every so often.

In fact, a woman a couple of doors down would feed the cat every few days as a distraction to keep it out of her garage after the cat got closed up in there one day. That might have been okay except that she has a couple of dogs (that don't like cats), and she discovered the cat when it dodged into her house as she was going into the garage through the door in her house. After that, she would give it food in her driveway so that she could close her garage door without the cat slipping inside.

And that cat does like garages. He got shut up in ours one morning as I was getting the bikes out before school. I did actually check for him before I locked the garage back up because he'd been hanging around outside, and, when I went to lock up, he wasn't outside anymore, but I didn't see him in the garage anywhere, so he got locked in. I found him waiting to come into the house from the inside of the garage a few hours later by the surprisingly loud sound of his meows. Talk about animals being shot from cannons... that's how quickly he sprang into the house.

When we did finally find out who his owner is, the man said jokingly to my daughter, "Well, don't feed him, or you'll never get rid of him." I didn't tell the man we had already been feeding him. Not that I didn't already know that piece of wisdom, but we (my wife and I) had already had the discussion about the ramifications of feeding the cat before we started doing that. Besides, the cat was being fed by many other people, many of  them feeding the cat that-was-now-Jack on a much more regular basis than we were. But we hadn't known if Jack had an owner and it was often apparent that he was hungry.

Then, Jack started wanting to come into the house. For a long time, we wouldn't let him. At least, that was the idea. But he's a cat, and the kids don't always know what to do about such things as the cat sliding under the open door, so he started coming in on his own, much to my daughter's delight. At first, we'd just snatch him up and deposit him back outside, but he really wanted to be in our house, so, eventually, we just kind of let him. He is, after all, a nice cat.

We started talking about what we might need to know about cats if he was going to hang around all the time until my wife finally said, "It's time to look up cat behavior." What we found out is what I already knew: cats are weird. But we also found out some very interesting things about them, not the least of which is that "they" (they being the people that know and study cats) believe that cats adopt people rather than the other way around. Rather like wands choose the wizard in Harry Potter. This is something I also sort of knew but not to the extent that it was presented. I mean, cats actually adopt their owners.

It's not like with dogs. You go and get a dog, and the dog is like, "Yea! A human that wants me!" It jumps up and down and licks your face and forms a bond with you rather like when you spend time with a kid or another person. Dogs socialize. They respond to affection with affection. The dog becomes your friend.

This is not how a cat works. I mean, we joke about it all the time, but it's really not how a cat works. You go get a cat, and, yes, it will let you feed it and take care of it, but it is not "yours." Not to the cat. The cat is just using you. Unless, of course, it decides that it wants to "own" you. Adopt you. It may well never decide that, though, and you would never know. Not until someone else comes along that the cat does actually want, at which point the cat may just take off. It no longer needs you.

All of this stuff about cats made me think of readers, but I'll get to that next time.

For now, it seems we have been adopted by this cat. It was kind of sealed when we kicked the cat out one night, because, you know, he's not ours, but he was waiting at our front door the next morning at 5:30 to come back in. It was clear that he hadn't had anywhere to be all night, and it had been cold, and I felt really bad. The next night, we didn't kick him out, just waited to see if he would want to stay or ask to leave or what, and he went and snuggled into bed with my daughter.

He doesn't always stay, and, if he asks to leave, we let him out. We also let him in, now, if he wants to come in. We've let him adopt us while being fully aware that he doesn't "belong" to us. It's clear, though, that we belong to him. At least from his perspective. It's kind of surreal, and the dog doesn't know what to think of it. But, for now, it is what it is.

It is highly amusing, though, to watch the two animals trying to figure out how to play with each other. They clearly have two different styles of play and can't figure out how to get them to work together, even though they want to.