Chloe's New Adventure (which she would rather avoid)

 

Chloe (AKA Little Girl) is going to the vet today to get spayed. Right now she's in the cat carrier and very unhappy. I doubt the surgery is going to make her much happier. 

Chloe is about 8 months old at this point, and just as much a devil as she was as a youngster. She still bites my toes to wake me up, and she crawls up on my clothes rack to hide. I can't see her getting any calmer as a grownup cat.

I worry a little about putting any cat through surgery, but I also wholeheartedly believe in spaying and neutering cats. There are too many kittens and cats in shelters (as Chloe was an unwanted kitten at the Humane Society). There are too many feral cats out there having kittens. 

So Chloe will go to the vet's, and then she will come home groggy and disoriented and not very happy with us. And we will shower her with love.

A Convalescing Chloe

 

 

 Sorry I'm running late today, but I had to take Chloe to the vet for what ended up being an infected cat bite on her foot. Despite our efforts to keep the other cats quarantined from little Chloe, Me-Me keeps barging in, and occasionally they get in a scrap.

Chloe is sitting next to me today -- no, she's not sitting. She's making an immense effort to stand, which isn't happening because she's wobbly from the sedation she's gone through to get her abscess drained. 

So right now (blesssedly I have a work-at-home day) I am supervising the wobbly little monster. She isn't feeling much like being petted; she's laying on the bed next to me trying to escape ... somewhere. I'm not sure she knows where, because I don't think she can see straight yet. She sort of stands up, wobbles, and falls over. She's scared of me but doesn't mind curling up next to me. I feel so bad for her!

There are worse things than trying to get your work done next to a wobbly cat.

On the Verge of Querying Again.

I have minor corrections to do on Whose Hearts are Mountains today, and then I will query the last 30 agents. Wish me luck.

I don't know what I'm going to do if these last 30 come up empty. Yes, I do. I'm going to query Prodigies (the improved version) in a few months, and start the cycle again. 

I feel like a glutton for punishment. But at this point, I have documents as good as I can make them, and I can't not share them. 

Nothing more to say today, but: here's a cat.

Me-Me, aka "Brussels Sprout"

For a dying cat

My cat Snowy is dying.

My husband and I think she had a stroke because we discovered her laying in front of the dresser and occasionally meowing strangely last night. We don't have an emergency vet here, so we have to wait till the vet opens at 8.

The next morning, she hasn't moved, and she meows piteously when moved. She's limp, except for her two front paws, which seem curled into themselves. Eventually, she doesn't even meow, only breathes. Barely breathes.

I doubt there's anything the vet can do. If she's indeed had a stroke, the chances of her having another are high, and she may not recover from this one. As I've said, it's highly likely we'll say our goodbyes at the vet's office.


I will remember Snowy as a peculiar cat. Black and long-haired with a white locket (we didn't name her), she carried herself like a diva and sat with her front feet crossed daintily. She had a fascination with doors, and would paw at them trying to get to the other side. 

Soon, she will be on the other side of the door, where I am told she will climb a grassy hill to the Rainbow Bridge and wait for us. All pets go to the Rainbow Bridge, it is told, which makes it more charitable than the Christian view of Heaven. We, the humans, stay behind, taking care of our other cats, missing the presence of our Snowy.

My brain is slow today

I can't think of anything to say today. But here's a kitten:

Sasha, my ghost cat

I'm hopeful my ghost cat has moved in again.

I suppose I should explain my ghost cat. Some thirty-two years ago, when I was a graduate student, I owned a small, feisty black cat named Sasha.

I lived in a second floor, one-room apartment in an old house, with the porch roof just outside one window and access to the wooden fire escape out the side window. In the Illinois summers I had no air conditioning, so I tried to keep cool with a box fan and open windows.

I wanted to keep Sasha an indoor cat because I lived on a relatively busy thoroughfare in Champaign. Sasha had her own agenda. She found a way to pop the screen out of the front window, stroll across the porch roof to the fire escape, then bound down the stairs. She would eventually sneak upstairs with one of the other residents and sit outside my apartment door until I returned home.

Until the time she didn't. Tommy, the alcoholic hippie down the hall, strolled upstairs that evening to announce that he put a dead cat in the dumpster and figured it was mine. My friend down the hall and I raided that dumpster at 10:30 that night to find the reeking garbage bag that contained the remains of my Sasha, and buried her on university farm property late at night.

Soon, another cat found me, a grey and white polydactyl I named Kismet, who followed me halfway across town to become my cat. It was fall by then, and I no longer needed to keep my windows open. Kismet, like all young cats, would go into a chasing-nothing sort of frenzy, running around the small apartment, bouncing off the walls.

Except. Except that he would stop at the window, the window that Sasha used to break out of, and peer around the corner to the side of the porch, then run around to the side window as if watching something go down the stairs. And then friends would come and ask me if I had a cat, and I explained that Kismet was out somewhere, and they would ask, "What about the black cat?"

Eventually I moved, and moved again, and moved halfway across the country and back again, and I forgot about Sasha. But then, day before yesterday, my cat Chuckie started chasing around the living room. I thought nothing of it because cats do that. But then he turned a hard right and slammed into the French doors to the dining room. He stared into the dark room as if he saw something we didn't, something that crept away from him.

If Sasha has found me again, I welcome her with open arms.

Buddy the Cat writes a guest column

Hey, I'm Buddy. I'm a cat, as you may have gathered from the title. Suspend your disbelief for a moment and accept that you're reading a furry creature's thoughts.

My people found me in their garage one day hanging out. Most people would be like, "Hey, there's a strange cat in our garage. Let's call Animal Control." My people put out a food dish instead, so I stuck with them, patrolling their yard for intruders and snacking on their food. I let them pet me, of course.

Then one day I cut myself on something in the garage, big cut at the base of my tail that looked like I tried to skin myself. No big deal; I'm an outdoor cat and we're tough. But my people caught me and loaded me up and took me to someone they called "the vet", who stuck me a few times and stitched up my tail. But then the vet said, "Keep him indoors for at least three-four days," and that's how I became an indoor cat.

Indoors is warm, but it comes with five other cats. I'll sit near them sometimes, but I'm not an overly emotional guy. The big cat likes to chase me around, but I set him straight, and now he respects my need for space.

It's nice living with my people. I still go outside sometimes, usually by making a break for it through the basement door before they can catch me. It's important that I guard the yard from miscreants, because my people don't know how to. It's up to me to take care of them.

Gotta go now. It's petting time.

For my cat Stinkerbelle

Stinky bit me in the nose last night.

Stinky -- Stinkerbelle in full --  earned her name as a kitten by crawling up my chest and sweetly punching me in the eye. Adopted as a feral kitten out from under a friend's porch, she hasn't mellowed in her fourteen years on earth.

Stinky has not come a long way since we adopted her. She chooses to stay upstairs, mingling only with our other five cats when wet food is served. She hogs the food and now rather resembles a soccer ball -- black and white and round. She hisses at the other cats, at us, at inanimate objects. She likes to have her back scritched -- until, suddenly, she doesn't, hence the bitten nose. All in all a disagreeable cat.

But Stinky will sit on the bed sometimes, close to my head, purring just out of the happiness of being near me. She will rub up against my hand ecstatically when I pet her and eventually bliss out into a cross-eyed state. She doesn't hate -- she just doesn't know what to do with herself. 

So we love Stinky in the way one loves their problem children. Awkward, unbeautiful, cranky, at times lashing out. She reminds me of me as a child -- roly poly and uncoordinated, unaware of how my intelligence put off people. I did not believe myself lovable, and told the school psychologist only the monsters were my friends.

I study Stinky and find my inner child, runny-nosed and crying, yet still worthy of love.

Guest blog -- Girly-Girl the cat

My name is Girly-girl, which I find a ridiculous name because I am a cat. I answer to Girly, of course, because that's a good way to get petted.

I have a favorite human -- the female one who lives in the house. She usually sits on a specific soft place in the gathering room, and makes clicking noises on the flat surface. It gets enough of her attention that I want to sit on it and get attention too. But she usually pushes me off it, making swears when she does.

I do not sit on laps. I sit near them. I'm sitting on the arm of the soft place next to my human. I try to look vaguely disapproving of everything, It goes with not being a lap cat. But when I get petted, I purr. No sense in playing completely hard to get.

I'm starting to get on in years. I don't feel the need to feel charming anymore, not like that smarmy little Chucky who wants to play all the time. I do not play. But I get along with my human just by being me.

Classism and consumption in romance novels

I used to read a lot of romance novels, probably because I was single for a long time. Over time, I kept seeing tropes pop up that rubbed me the wrong way:

• Vast differences in social class between male and female protagonists. Titles like "The Millionaire's Pregnant Secretary" and "The Sheikh's Prize* make male wealth and female beauty the main selling point in the book. Edwardian romance paints the man as a duke or an earl and the woman as a genteel clergyman's daughter or an orphan or a nanny. And don't get me started with JD Robb's romantic police procedurals -- she's a cop and he owns half the planet. The exchange of her beauty for his money is classic, but perhaps outdated in a society with much more egalitarianism.
• Large amounts of money in the happily ever after -- research shows that, although money changes everything, it does not necessarily change it for the better. Lottery winners are no more happy than us normal people, and maybe even less happy. People tend to throw their fortunes away, and given the bounty the male protagonist drops on his true love, romantic males are no exception.
• Speaking of money, conspicuous consumption. When the male protagonist spends money, we get detailed descriptions about his wardrobe, his car, the dress, the dinner, the yacht, the trousseau, the ... you get it. We witness how the protagonists spend their wealth, because if they didn't spend it, nobody, including us, would know how rich they were. That's the meaning of conspicuous consumption.
• Overdone sex and male prowess. Don't get me wrong, I like sex.** But these invariable rules make me skip ahead to the next scene: If the female is a virgin, she's overwhelmed by the size of the male's penis. If she's not a virgin, he supplies better orgasms than anyone else. No matter how badly the two protagonists fight, they still have better sex than any of their readers. They always have sex before falling in love, and they spend the rest of the book dithering about why they can't marry the other person, and it's invariably that they don't want to subject the other person to embarrassment or ridicule or a life of servitude. We, the readers, don't only vicariously consume the couple's wealth, but their out-in-the-open sex life. 

I admit I'm not the typical reader. Wish fulfillment to me would be living in Canada as a published author, retired, and a cat***.  I like my couples to have more equal footing, and the woman to supply more than just her pretty face to the union. I like strong females and males with depth, not just "strong and silent".

I have to admit that I still read a few romance authors. Robin D. Owens I read for her world building and her focus on emotional baggage rather than "He/she wouldn't possibly want to marry me". Also, her sex scenes are reasonably anchored in reality. I read Barbara Michaels, although her books may not be considered romance, because she has very real protagonists who seldom have the immense social class disparities. I read a few others -- Mary Balogh among others. And I still read JD Robb, but I skip over the sexual acrobatics.

* These may actually be real titles for all I know.

** Oops. TMI.

*** I would not be the first published cat. That honor goes to Lil' Bub, the pint-sized alien cat. 

Decoding a Poem I Wrote in High School

I wrote this poem in high school: *

Quand PJ, ma petite chatte **
vient, elle me demande ***
"c'est vrai, est-ce vrai?" ****
et je répond "c'est vrai". *****



* This is the only French I knew besides
"Bonjour, Guy!"
"Bonjour Michel! Ça va?
"Oui, ça va. Et toi?"
"Pas mal."
People who took high school French in my age cohort will remember this as the first conversation in Son et Sens, the high school French 1 textbook.


** Was PJ a petite cat? Bwahahahahaha, no. She was a watermelon on sticks.

*** Did PJ demand anything of me? Food. She demanded food.

**** Was PJ an existential cat? No, she was Stupid Like A Box of Rocks. She liked drooling on feet.

***** What was I discussing with my obese, slabor cat? (See **** for explanation of "slabor"). What is true? What is really true? It's lost to the ages, friends.



I was so pretentious in high school.