House Arrest (and "The Undying")

My cat has been under house arrest, lately, or, as everyone else likes to say it, he's grounded. What did he do? Was he beating up the other cats on the street? Did he steal some catnip? No, nothing like that. He just keeps getting himself hurt. And, actually, he's the cat that gets beat up, so that's probably how he ended up getting hurt. He's just too curious for his own good.

A couple of weeks ago, he got this new wound on his back just above his tail. It's still swollen, but, at least, it appears to be healing up normally and won't require a trip to the vet like the last wound (which I talked about here). However, it was the fact that he come home limping a few days ago that got him grounded. And I don't just mean he was limping; he couldn't put any weight on his right foreleg at all. It was bad enough that he told me, "hey, that hurts," when I had barely touched it trying to check it out. So, yeah, for this week, at least, he's become a house cat. Here is how he spends his days:

People talk about a "dog's life," but, seriously, no dog has it as good as any cat.

Being an outside cat, we've never had a litter box for him; there's never been a need (except that one time when he had a potty emergency in the middle of the night and I wasn't able to throw something on quickly enough to get him outside). However, one of the first things I did after he got himself grounded was to go and buy him the requisite materials to take care of his needs in the house, which he has done very politely.

Now that his leg is getting better (in fact, this morning, he was back to being a total spaz and acting as if nothing is or was ever wrong), I'm torn between going back to the normal routine or making him an inside cat. On  the whole, he seems to be adapting to being inside all the time pretty nicely. Not that he hasn't had a few... episodes. Like yesterday when he kept jumping up on me and typing in my document. He said something like, "xxxcdxccd." I'm not sure what that means in cat, but I'm guessing it must be something like, "Help! I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory." Or, maybe, it was just "FEED ME!" That's the big change for him: he doesn't get to hunt lizards anymore.

For me, though, aside from the fact that he's constantly getting banged up from playing outside all of the time and the fact that I have to go and chase The Orange away several times a week, him being inside relieves the worry of him getting trapped in someone's car and getting carried away by accident. Being right next to the park, we have foreign cars out there all of the time, and my cat is obsessed with them. He has to go smell every car that parks out there. He gets up in the backs of trucks. And, if anyone leaves their windows open (which they frequently do), he hops up onto the door and explores the inside of the car. In fact, when the guys were delivering our new washing machine a few weeks ago, he did his best to get inside the delivery truck. The delivery guys thought that was so funny.

The verdict is still out on his final sentence. I suppose we'll have to see how crazy he ends up driving everyone by being deprived of going outside. If he ends up being as bad as my daughter is when she's sick and can't go to school... well, let's just say that's not a pretty sight and leave it at that.

In other news, today is the FREE! release of "Part Twenty-two: The Undying"

This is the chapter where Tib well and truly begins to understand just how weird the Garden is. Or, at least, the denizens of the Garden. Basically, every time he thinks he knows what's what, something changes.
FREE! today, Monday, May 27:
"Part Twenty-two: The Undying" (Also FREE! Tuesday, May 28)
"Part Twenty-one: The Chase"
"Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire"
"Part Nineteen: Lost in the Garden"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and the Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part One: The Tunnel"

There's 15 of the 22 parts of Shadow Spinner available for FREE! Go download, enjoy, and tell all your friends. Oh, make sure you read it with the lights on. Or so I've been told.

As a special bonus, I'm also gonna throw in The Evil That Men Do for FREE! It's kind of Tib part 0, but it's not going to be in Shadow Spinner, so grab it now. Don't forget to let me know what you think of it!

"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.