What with everything, Mila accidentally got closed out of Alex's room sometime yesterday evening. I saw her being Brave in the hallway. I went off to get her a bit of cheese. Then she ducked into our room, and I saw her slink into the closet (a good Hide).

Around that point I realized that this was an Accidental Out Of Room situation. So I told house chat. I peered into the back of the closet. There she was in the end corner of one of the shelves, balled up. I petted her a bit. She hissed me just a little. I didn't grab her.

Alex tried to retrieve her. Then she slunk under our bed. Given the hour and other factors, Alex brought in their cane to shoo her out.

And asked her what she thought biting the cane was going to accomplish.

Eventually we shooed her out, and Alex opened their door for her. She slunk in and disappeared under the bed. Belovedest handed in the dish with the dab of cheese.

Pippin, downstairs, is who we usually mean when the household says "peecat".

Yellface, upstairs, was observed screaming at the door frame on Thursday, in a way that could have just been Cats Are Like That, Man. Then on Friday, observed variously screaming and crying and squatting on various parts of floor. With, yup, pink droplets.

A Friday vet appointment was not forthcoming. We put her in bathroom isolation, with a puppy pad and some crumpled paper towels so she could feel like she was burying things. (Otherwise she goes looking for random portable items in the room to bury her excretion zone, and we do not prefer this.)

She was feeling substantially better by Saturday morning. But she is a Little Old Lady and prone to bladder issues. So we kept the Monday appointment that Belovedest had managed to book.

(I tanked up on coffee, because the timing was ... very much what it was.)

We're keeping an eye on her kidneys, she got a 14 day shot of antibiotics (much easier than a twice a day medication for two weeks), and (crucially) a liquid pain medication that we can pull out the NEXT time she starts to display pain symptoms right before the weekend. (Because cats.)

Then Belovedest went straight to work and Yellface and I went home while listening to Long Live Evil in audiobook (she cries less in the car with spoken human voice content) and I tried to fall over but had to keep getting up because I'd misjudged my caffeine dose. Again, I cannot recommend --

(This time was much less Terrible than last time, for reasons.)

After I'd had sufficient, if non-sleeping, downtime, Nora called. And I located my fluffy white skirt, my lace parasol, my off-white sweater, and some beads that I could use in a particular crochet-and-beads project that I suddenly decided that I wanted based on some observations of fellow Creatures of the Night in the wild (some Goths in Costco).

And now, armed with jello, I shall sleep before my infusion.

Kittenpants has started to assist me with my physical therapy. Almost all of it is things that can be done lying down, because I know myself, I still don't trust my hip, and requested horizontal stuff for my program. (In the last two appointments, we've added a supported tiptoes exercise, a supported lunge, and some Shit You're Slouching shoulder exercises as well.)

So when I have woken up enough to start my day, and throw the covers aside and begin rearranging myself in interesting new ways, Yellface comes to investigate. And stands on top of me. And purrs.

She's offended by the clamshell exercise, because that means her standing surface is substantially disrupted.

After a few days of decreasing misery, I am feeling confident enough in my legs to not feel immediate terror, woe, or apprehension at the idea of walking to the bathroom that I think I can say I'm nearly functional again. (I may still hold off on driving for a while.) Last night I managed a bath with supervised exit. It still hurt a lot this morning when it had been about eight hours since my last ouch-pills, but after I had the morning ibuprofen on board I was able to get back to sleep.

Yellface continues to be pilled. Belovedest continues catching her. Last night she scrammed from the bedroom where she had been hiding, then they employed the collar beeper and found her under the dragon-sized chair. Several more days, poor little thing.

Belovedest got Yellface an appointment on Tuesday the 6th, on short notice. Ordinarily Tuesdays are their WFH day, so they have some options to flex time on the not temporally bound things and work early or late, but of course this Tuesday morning they had an obligatory offsite-onsite (onsite-offsite?) item. (School visit, so on site at the school, off the library site.) Therefore they called me twice, first to take my phone off mute, second to wake me up to request the favor of my awake functionality and get Yellface dropped off at the vet. Which I did. She was isolated in the bathroom again, and not in favor of any of this. I knocked over her water bowl while attempting to stuff her in her carrier. So her carrier was damp, and she was damp and sorry for herself the whole way there.

She likes having human voices, even if she doesn't put much stock in them if they're coming from a device, so I had the radio on (https://989kpnw.com/ ) to keep her quiet if I could.

And the phone rang.

I am about to be in for a lot of frankly obnoxious appointments in the coming weeks? months? so I saw wisdom in not letting it go to voicemail. And lo and behold, it was someone from the place I'd been referred to, reaching out to get first contact with me. I conveyed that I was not actually in a place to talk about this, given that I was driving the cat to the vet, and I would probably be free about 11.

Yellface remained sorry for herself the rest of the way to the vet.

Eleven rolled around. I was back home, minus cat, phone in full view. I saw the voicemail pop up. Of course my phone hadn't made a peep. I tried to call back, and got silence instead of the sounds of dialing out. Motherfucker. I rebooted my phone.

I learned, the next day, that the callback number is technically the number for the scheduling team, and not the First Outreach person. And the routing goes perpetually to voicemail; the scheduling team passes along any messages for the outreach person when they get them. I spent the rest of the day in irritated ignorance of this fact, attempting to get through to a live person.

Yellface was released from the vet with a note and a 14 day prescription of antibiotic pills. After bacon grease the first two days was not to her liking, we have switched to butter, which is still no compensation for being made to eat a pill, but she does prefer butter as a high energy thing to eat when she's ravenous and some is left where she can get at it. (This is why the butter is not on the counter, but up in the dish cabinet.) I have therefore flipped the prescription lid to the side that doesn't need push-down-to-turn, and filled the other side with a convenient pat of butter, so we can butter the pills as needed.

(Wednesday, I got a voicemail from the outreach person again when my phone was still on DND; she called back fairly quickly after that and we talked a bit. I'll be getting a packet of information soonish, and then some contact from the scheduling team.)

Yellface jumped on me and did a 4-something AM scream. I was semiconscious and turned back over to sleep, after noting the event in my sleep log.

( effluvia )

So, it was some kind of emergency. Poor meep. Belovedest has emailed the vet.

Yellface stood next to the litter box and sniffed delicately. She turned around and left Litterbox Alley. She sat down pensively by the couch.

I addressed her, and asked how she was doing.

Apparently to her surprise, because she tore off sideways towards the hall. I heard her scream once or twice near the bedroom.

Ah, cats.


Plumbing update: plumbers have been and gone, and we got our kitchen back. Expensively. But it's functional.

Yesterday, in refilling the bathroom soap dispenser, I managed to get a large amount of hand soap all down my front. Since I wasn't inclined to change my clothes at that point in the day, I hopped in the shower (clothed) and rinsed it off.

When I sat back down on the couch, Madam Yellface started her usual path towards sitting on my tits. She put a paw on my shoulder. Put a paw on my chest. Hesitated. Patted. Instead of leaping down (I told her a while ago that she could use me as a ladder to get down off the back of the couch if she wanted, given that the arm has things on it, and sometimes I regret this when she uses my stomach as a springboard) she backed up fully and sat on the back of the couch and complained mightily.

Later, when I'd mostly dried, and pulled a blanket over the remaining dampness, I invited her back onto me. She considered ...

... and descended to my chest via the other shoulder. Since the last time she'd used the usual shoulder things had been Wrong.

Escape Calico is at least vaguely aware of time. She knows that at a certain point in the evening, she is stuffed back into her room (so Cat Swap can take place, and Yellface can ascend like a bat out of hell cat out of the basement and demand dinner at the top of her little lungs.

Escape Calico has started to fight back in the little subtle ways that Escape Calicoes can.

She evades capture.
She hides, and only emerges when the sound of bribes are evident.
She hides and resists being scooped up when found.

Tonight, Alex was running around calling and looking in odd places. Clearly she was still in the house! No one had opened an exterior door since she was last seen, and while there had been a containment breach from the basement, she had been in a known and not-downstairs position after Yellface was sent back down. So she had to be inside. She wasn't in any of the usual places. She wasn't on our bed. She wasn't in the window behind our bed. She wasn't behind the living room curtains. She wasn't in the unmonitored space under my desk. The under-bed domain in her room is blocked to avoid just these moments (and also to avoid effluvia, as her stomach is Sensitive™).

Roomba-pet had run aground in our bedroom. I took a thought and looked under the bed. And there she was, in her smug calico-loaf glory. I couldn't quite drag her out from my angle, but I was able to put hands behind her and start prying. She shifted under protest until I did have a good angle. "Found her!" I called, and emerged with an armful of quietly indignant fuzz. She was stuffed unceremoniously into her room and the door shut behind her. I released the Yell.


Other recent events:
* Over-sink rack is deployed
* Replacement chopping boards located, old holder removed from cupboard, new baskets installed, place found for knife sharpener
* Magnetic spice racks installed
* New magnetic spice rack installed (necessitating moving the others elsewhere; nothing wrong with them but this one was the one that could fit only on that side of the fridge)
* Side of the fridge magnets removed
* Magnetic spice rack rearranged over where the magnets were so the tablet arm won't interfere
* Covid exposure notice for me, from either the day of All The Fucking Contractors at Ev's, or the day with the blood donation and mandatory snack and the vaccination visit with the respiratory medical emergency in the waiting room ( details on that last ) and due to that situation I was waiting for just under an hour after appointment start time
* Moments after that dropped, trip from Steph called on account of other miscellaneous viruses
* three negative tests in about 36 hours
* the aforementioned vaccination 2 of 3 in a preventative series, rendering me again unclean for blood donation for the next 3 weeks, but fortunately the blood donation cycle is longer than that
* I have suggested, productively, to Ev that while Getting It All Done At Once Like Clockwork is lovely in theory, what about Getting All The Floor In Except That Fucking Closet, then Getting All The Interior Paint Done Except That Fucking Closet, and having the floorers and a paint person (any paint person, doesn't matter as long as you have that particular paint color available) come back after the rest of the work on That Fucking Closet is complete. The flooring guy is down for this; not sure about the painting person but as stated before, any painting person will do here. So the new timeframe for starting living there (and not having to pay mortgage + rent) has been moved up substantially.
* I should probably start funding my next tooth nonsense, coming up in a little under three weeks and thank the fucking gods that Twitter's delightful scam mechanism doesn't work on DW
* Scam mechanism: find an account that's doing a fundraise
* clone that account's profile pic and display name
* make a very close copy of the account name, such as substituting a capital i for a lowercase L
* block OP
* reply to someone asking "hey what's your paypal" with their own info
* gather money
* change information once they've harvested money so it doesn't look like they were doing anything bad, just piggybacking on a place where someone else is making a request

Dear Escape Calico decided to take advantage of the open window (due to the oven's clean cycle) and sat on her perch and observed the outdoors and the birds. (She can't see the neighboring chicken coop, I think.) She's found a new path, behind my monitors. I am somewhat resigned to this, but she's still not allowed to go in front of them. (Despite my robust keyboard protection.)

I failed to photograph the moment when she was trying to barge forward and I was holding her back with my leather fan, but the mental image will remain with me a while.

Topics in therapy included how there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire (and how Dolly Parton keeps giving her money away), the yelling about delayed sleep phase and the terrible doctor, CBT-I and how it's incredibly unsafe to try and gaslight yourself into thinking you can drive when seriously underslept, what makes a disability socially constructed, the additional burden of dealing with doctors' offices while delayed sleep phased, the general AAAAAAAAAA of last week and the testing. Terrible Tuesday is probably on the docket for next time.

After that I went through the packet of papers that needed signing and discovered that I probably also want a list of the accommodations I would need at minimum if I ever needed to go inpatient (honestly probably wouldn't need that in the foreseeable future but it's a good thought exercise).

Then I set up a spreadsheet helping me rule out words for Wordle, because none of the other tools had the thing I want. This splits the word into component letters and will conditionally format it based on known yellow and green. (I sift out Nope letters by find and replace with a space.) It keeps my brains entertained, which is the point!

Mama has set up a group text for just us chickens, which is not a phrase I previously would have considered. She's sending some keyboards.