dragonlady7

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Chita has gradually been recovering from being Abandoned at the Cat Spa for two weeks while i was at the farm doing thanksgiving things and such.

She spent a couple of days being really clingy, whenever anyone was in the house she was either sitting on them or yelling. But she’s eased up on that; she’s still a little more interested in being in the room with us than formerly, but it’s mostly chilled out. Her fur has gone back to normal too, I didn’t really realize it when I picked her up, but now that she’s had a couple of weeks of better eating and grooming she’s sleeker and fluffier. Poor baby.

She likes to sleep on me specifically, because I make room for her less awkwardly and am more likely to wake up and pet her. She pushes my shoulders slightly out of the sockets though, so I have to kind of wake up and deal with that. One night she settled down on my arm and it hurt and I was kind of tensing up trying to get it into a better position, and then suddenly one of the ligaments went thunk and it went into a different position, and Chita immediately started purring.

I do wish cat purrs could actually heal damaged joints, that’d probably help me a lot. As it is, I keep fucking up my elbows in my sleep now, which is sort of new. But it’s okay mostly.

Last night she got into a different position, though; I’d rolled away from her favorite pose because I really needed that shoulder to go back all the way into the socket, so I was lying on my back. She nestled herself in the crook of my other arm, actually on top of my body, which she rarely does. It wasn’t uncomfortable, she’s not too heavy, but I woke up so sweaty. Cats throw off a lot of heat.

There was a lot of purring though, so I’ll take it.

gratuitous photo behind the cut

[image description: a slightly blurry webcam photo of me, a fat white woman, with a smallish gray cat perched on top of my boobs with her paws on my shoulder, her shoulder blades pressed against my mouth. She is looking out a window over my shoulder, with the tip of her tail twitching around my hands, which are supporting her back paws. (Your picture was not posted)

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So we got new exterior doors this year. Dude’s on like a slow project of kinda sprucing up our house, which used to belong to his mother and now belongs to him after some complicated shenanigans last year that I wasn’t directly involved in. Anyway the house has been not uhh super well maintained and hasn’t at all been updated in a long time so there’s a lot to do and he’s got a plan and anyway. First thing was new doors, and a new furnace, and next year we’ll look at windows and the kitchen, and slowly we’ll get to the point where the place is actually nice. We’ll see.

Anyway. So the front and side doors of the house, we had replaced with basically-equivalent things. But the back door– so there’s a sunporch on the back of the house, which we use as a living room all summer long. And the entrance to it is an interior door from the guest bedroom. But that interior door leaks cold air all winter, something awful. So, we replaced it.

Instead of a half-glass interior door, we put in an all-glass exterior door. Quite expensive, extremely nice. Like, double glass and all that, super insulatey, bougie shit.

This means the cat could look out the window. She doesn’t understand this, and cries for us to open the door all the time so she can go sit on the porch. Dude has been trying, and trying, to get her to understand that she can look out the window there. It even gets direct sun, in the winter when the sun is this low. He put a box there for her to sit on. She keeps ignoring the box, or pushing it away so she can get to the door to cry for us to open it.

She has an identical box on his nightstand, so that she can look out our bedroom window onto the porch. This is where she sits for several hours each morning, loudly bathing herself and commenting to us every time one of us rolls over, when she thinks it’s time for us to be awake. (This is usually from 4 to 5 am, and i get up at 5:30.) So it’s not like this box is too unsteady, or too tall; she has no problem with the one on the nightstand, which is rickety now because her ass has compressed it somewhat.

Well– anyway, Dude sent me this photo this morning with the caption “I’m so proud of our dumb child”

[image description: a small gray cat is sitting on a cardboard box in front of a glass door in a room with a wooden floor. The cat is turning to look back over her shoulder and seems mildly surprised. The photo is blurry because Dude is not great at using his phone’s camera which is also not great.]

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I had one moment last night where I saw a news update and got catapulted forcibly into a visceral recollection of how I felt four years ago– I was staying at MM’s house and spent the whole night rolling around in that guest bed with my entire midsection filled with dread that felt like sloshy gravel, so like– I haven’t really read any news stories, I’ve skimmed just enough headlines to recognize approximately what’s up, and I feel very fortunate and privileged that I’m able to just turn my head away at the moment. It worked and I went to bed at 9:30 and fell asleep thinking about dumb Keira/Lambert story beats.

So anyway. Trying to keep on that energy for just now.

This morning we had to take the cat to the vet. I was up sort of early, so I let her go pee in the yard, which she prefers. Then I got up because one of my hips was hurting, but not in the usual way. Like, the hip itself is sort of okay, but I feel sort of like my whole leg and torso are mildly electrified, especially the knee joint on that side? Experience suggests that while it feels more weird than bad, it’s definitely Bad. Like, don’t get old kids, it’s fuckin’ weird.

cut for length for your Tumblr dash, but no warnings or anything.

Anyway I did some yoga about it but it didn’t do much. I was feeling pretty good about the cat not suspecting anything, and had stealthily crept through the house collecting all my necessary items– phone, keys, wallet, jacket– had them collected in my jacket pockets, and was about to put my shoes on. Dude began to put his shoes on, which like, not ideal, she’s gonna twig something’s up because he doesn’t leave the house, but it was cool until he got his boots on and THEN was like OH I SHOULD FIND MY WALLET and went CLOMPING through the house DIRECTLY AT THE CAT who was sitting in the bedroom door and CHASED HER into the bedroom (like many smol cats, she fears booted feet, and runs away, partly because her favorite other sport is to throw herself under sock-clad feet in the dark so she does very much get kicked a lot; cats are great at incorrectly recognizing patterns) so he could get his wallet from the nightstand. (With me hollering “NO I HAVE MINE LEAVE IT” but he doesn’t like that, that’s not his style, he disregarded that.)

So she hid under the bed, which is what she does when chased with boots, and also she had just undeniably seen that Dude was preparing to leave the house, which like, RED FLAG he hasn’t left the house in months.

So we had to heave the king mattress off the bed to retrieve her, hauling her out from between the bed slats with great trauma. I was prepared to just scoop her up, but I could not retrieve her alone from under the bed, and since I also had shoes on and she was now on red alert, no fucking way was she going to creep out of there before like 10am.

On a good note, I also discovered like a hundred pairs of my socks under the bed, which she may have had some hand in but gravity may also have done the trick somehow, I can’t imagine how. So I have to clean out under the bed at some point and then I’ll have a whole lot of new-to-me socks, which will be great because just now I have like eight pairs of socks and have to be real strict on laundry.

I don’t know I’ll get them all out but I’m also grateful that we broke the light fixture in the bedroom ceiling a decade ago and never replaced it, because removing a king-size mattress in great haste in a room too small for it to go anywhere but up would absolutely have rained broken glass down on us again. Best to just. Not have a fixture up there, I think…

I’m two hours later to work than I normally am but I took the mental-health-self-care time to hang out the load of laundry I’d put in before we left for the vet, outdoors, to dry, in the sunshine, since it’s a beautiful day out and I won’t see the sun for the rest of the day. At least my socks can smell of sunshine.