Warmer

As in the children’s game where your enemies / playmates say that word if you are—what? I can’t remember if it means you’re getting closer to a physical object or if you’ve guessed a guess that is more nearly correct or what, but I as of yet retain the concept of warmer and colder and have rather often thought of this in recent months and years: better. Worse.

Last night I came out of the bathroom after my evening ablutions to find Duckworth hunched outside the door: aww. I let him into my bedroom and closed the door. Often in San Francisco Duckworth spent the night next to me on the bed while Marvin remained cooly aloof in the kitchen until the following morning.

Part of the problem here is that the cats have their end of the house and I have mine, so I don’t see them doing cute or charming things. I mainly now see them at mealtimes, when there are various routine irritations, and when I hear a crash, also likely an irritating situation: Again with that shelf?!?

So the ratio of neutral / pleasant to annoying is way off. Also, Marvin used to sit on my lap when I had breakfast, which took an hour or so, which was a bonding dynamic, as an ex-boyfriend used to say. He said that when he one time made me laugh so hard that I peed my pants. (I miss that fellow still.)

I have salads for dinner here instead of for breakfast, and I read while eating them (yep) rather than just listen to music, so Marvin sitting on my lap for an hour, which was a sweet thing, isn’t happening.

I closed the bedroom door last night after inviting Duckworth in, and he stayed for several hours. A couple of times, there was a meow. I got right up when I heard this to see if it indicated that Duckworth was starting to feel like releasing a giant fece. Is that the singular of feces? I guess feces is already singular, or neither, like “flour”? Straight from the internet: Flour is primarily used as an uncountable noun, so it is considered singular. However, in specific contexts referring to different types, the plural form “flours” can be used. My mother had many flours in her garage-ready chest freezer.

Duckworth did not appear to be on the verge of pooping the couple of times I checked last night. Another time, I heard a scrabbling sort of noise and turned on the light to see him—chewing on an electrical cord? No: Playing with a small tube of lip balm he’d knocked off the bedside table. Okay, good to know that is an attractive item. Somewhere in the wee hours I did let (or usher) him out of the room and close the door.

In the morning, I opened the door and he and his frenemy came in and looked around. Marvin was soon at the very top of a bookcase and, sure enough, reached down to fiddle with the items on the top shelf. (Clearly stipulating here that if he breaks my mother’s wooden metronome, I will kill him.) So: gathering information as to what can be gotten at and what can’t, what is or isn’t of interest, where they shouldn’t go and where they can. Looks like, in regard to those topmost shelves, one would want to make sure not to put anything but books there but could set smaller items on the shelf right below that, which is probably not reachable from the top of the bookshelf nor from the floor.

Next, my bathroom. Those holes near the sink are definitely of interest but neither cat can actually fit through. They could probably pluck the cupboard doors open—the holes are above the cupboard doors, which in turn are near the floor—so I rearranged the contents of the cupboards so it doesn’t really matter if they get in the one that is behind the holes. 

Oddly, they are extremely bad at plucking things open. The cupboards in my bathroom have magnetic latches that barely stick to each other, but I think that, with one exception, it’s good enough. When they were kittens, if they were in the bathroom, they could not get out even if the door was open a quarter inch. They simply could not figure out that they could pull a thing open even if there was an obvious crack, and would sit there indefinitely, trapped.

There is just one cupboard in my bathroom here where the magnetic clasp is as good as nonexistent, and there are things in there that I don’t want them to get to that would not be convenient for me if located elsewhere, so that is the one place a new latch is needed. I left the bathroom door open when we exited, and that immediately lifted my spirits, as it is now light when I look down the interior hallway instead of dark. I see the bathroom window and the greenery outside rather than a blank closed door.

Several mornings here, I found that Marvin had unrolled some of the paper towel on the roller in the kitchen—one day quite a bit of it—without disturbing a single one of the many small nearby items on the counter—but I haven’t seen unrolled paper towel for several days now, even though I didn’t do anything to secure it. With this heartening observation in mind, it was on to the shower curtain in my bathroom. In San Francisco, I had to put the curtain up over the shower curtain rod when it was not in use to prevent it from being shredded.

All I had in San Francisco was a plastic shower curtain, but here I also have a nice more clothlike curtain, so there is more to get out of the way, and also the shower curtain rod here has only a small gap above it. I don’t want to wad a bunch of wet shower curtain through that small opening where it would sit against the gorgeous new paint. My first thought was to have the rod here lowered. It is certainly terrible looking, but so far I am having trouble finding a nice permanent-mount shower curtain rod, and if I did find that, the old one would have to be taken down and the screw holes patched, sanded and painted, which is not the end of the world, but I am now thinking I will dispense with the clothlike curtain, stick with the rod where it is, and get a pile of plastic shower curtains and just let the cats shred them. When one is letting in too much water, I can replace it. I can delay this by draping the shower curtain not over the rod itself, but over the fixture the water comes out of.

Next, the spare bedroom, which currently has piles of my parents’ papers covering a third or so of the floor. I plan to put a lot of stuff in the closet in that room, which was my mother’s bedroom, but need to wait until after the horrible folding closet doors are replaced. I figured there wasn’t much the cats could do to those piles of paper, and that seems to have been a correct assessment. I did soon hear a crash: my suitcase being knocked over against the wall, where it—yep—slightly damaged the new paint, but no big deal. So that door is now also open, another source of light and view of green leaves fluttering in the breeze.

Warmer!

Also literally warmer, or at least sunnier. Yesterday it was overcast—not raining (not raining too much—raining, but the kind where you do not see a single person in a raincoat), not hailing, not chilly, not tornado-ing, but grey almost all day, which does affect my mood adversely.