time's passage; amusing the kitten; idea seedlings

Time goes by so oddly sometimes. It’s weirder now without the usual measurement of roller derby practice—Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday I always knew what day it was because either I had practice later or had just come from it. Without those regularly-scheduled periods of self-exhaustion, I don’t have a way to reliably measure the time.

It’s kind of nice. I just wish I could make myself realize that I shouldn’t be guilty if I waste a bit of time at the moment. I have always been inefficient with time; I have always needed long recovery times after stress, and long adjustment periods to get ready for more stress. I squandered this weekend luxuriously, wasting time on the Internet like there was no tomorrow, shamelessly lying on the floor with the kitten and not making the slightest attempt to multitask. I read widely and insatiably on Wikipedia and on other pages ( ”but )

I at least figured out what scene to write next, and how to introduce The Villain Who Isn’t A Villain Really But Shh, It’s All A Surprise. The fact that I know it’s a surprise is a major step forward for me. I have had to open up the POV in the book—it’s too sweeping to have just one, unreliable POV, hard though I worked on making that succeed. But this means the villain is accessible enough not to seem random. I hope I can get inside his/her head enough to make him/her sympathetic and believable, in which case, I’ll have a real novel. But I have to be careful not to go too far with that.
Anyway.
Almost progress, which is in itself progress. Too bad I have other shit to do this week that I’m way more excited about. I’ll do what I can.

some kinda freakin' cat genius or something

Z is playing with Chita with a mousie on a piece of elastic. It's one of those cheap plastic-shell with rabbit fur and a dyed feather tail mousies, the kind that has a little chunk of plastic in it so it rattles if you shake it, and the kind that a determined cat can chew the fur right off of.
We have several of these. Only one has a string-- when I pulled the paper tag off it, the plastic part of the tag stayed attached. So I tied elastic to it, as she'd lost the others under furniture and it was a pain to have to retrieve them all the time.

When I play with Rattle Mousie I just wave it around a lot and she attacks it until she gets bored and falls asleep. It's classic cat-play, as they hunt by motion and sound, and so the wild movements and rattling of the "prey" excite her until she exhausts herself.
Z has taken it one step further.
He'll fling the mousie around and let Chita chase it, until it lands somewhere and she doesn't see it land. Then he'll hold very still. She'll sit a moment, and then start looking for it.
She almost immediately learned the trick of following the string. He's holding one end of the white elastic. At the other end is the mousie. So look for the string, and follow it to the end that isn't Z, and you've found the mousie.
So Z started hiding the string, tucking it up out of the way so she couldn't really see it.
There were only so many places he could hide it that way. So he started flinging it at me and while she was distracted I'd grab it and hide it somewhere. That was harder, and sometimes she'd stand still, bewildered and a little frustrated. So I'd rattle the mouse, and she'd get excited again and, usually, find it right away.

Then he elevated it to real hide and seek, and he'd hand me the mouse and pick Chita up and hold her facing away for a count of ten, so I could hide it. That was really hard, and I'd have to rattle the mouse several times to help her narrow it down to a general part of the room.

There's another rattle mouse, of similar design, sitting in the middle of the floor where she left it after her last bout of playing with it. She'd stumble across it while hunting for Mousie On A String, and would immediately reject it as not the one she was looking for-- she was as invested in the game as we were.

We're still playing it. The first places she checks, and often checks repeatedly, are places we've hidden it previously. She goes around and checks all the old hiding spots, sometimes insistently. If she gets hung up, checking and rechecking an old hiding spot, or gets frustrated and doesn't know where to look next, one of us will surreptitiously rattle the mouse and she'll get excited and look for it again.
She can sometimes triangulate from the rattling, but if she doesn't see it in your hand she still has trouble finding it. We're listening to the stereo so there is a lot of ambient irregular noise, making hunting by sound tricky at best.
She has a definite sense that there are rules. One time she found the wrong end of the string, and the mousie wasn't at that end. That confused her, so she went away. I picked up the mousie and rattled it, and she looked, but seemed unable to grasp that I was giving away the answer. That wasn't the rule! That wasn't how the game was played, so it took her a few moments to realize that I was cheating.

She's so excited when she finds it that it really makes the game worthwhile. Of course you can't spend too much time hiding it and not enough playing with it, or she'll lose interest. But Z's been very attentive and has staved off every hint of inattention.

I'm convinced she's some kind of cat genius.

Z's ulterior motive is to get her to stop losing her damn mousies under the damn couch all the damn time.
I want to teach her to fetch. I doubt that'll work, but it'd be totally awesome if you could say, "Where is it, Chita?" and get her to go find stuff.


Edit: She's giving me a bath. I took that photo a couple of hours ago. Isn't she growing big? She's huge now!