The little rusted windows (we broke one the night we got locked out) are now history. We replaced the 3 garden-side windows with modern screened windows. And then because we’d like to finish the finished side of the basement, and not have it be a junk storage, we have replaced the frontside basement windows with two egress windows, which brings the basement into code for a guest room. In the event of fire in the kitchen, a guest could easily get out of either of two basement rooms via a sliding glass mini-door, with screen, and a step inside the outside window-well. That adds 700 feet to our floor plan, legally speaking, which is not to sneeze at, were we ever to sell this place. Since we don’t have such plans, what we do have is a basement now with large windows that let in a lot of light. We may build a couple of closets, and end up with multiple bedrooms/craftroom/library places.
Our cats were getting very antsy about Tanner being between them and their normal litter pan, so we did move him to the basement and let him free to roam again—he’s not destructive, and he is very active. He now has sunny windows to sit in. We haven’t yet had our cats willing to approach him, and we may (sigh) end up with one cat ruling the basement and two ruling the upstairs and garden. It’s just going to take time.
We are ripping out the ultra-nasty carpet down there, probably older than the disgusting living room carpet, and replacing it with vinyl plank flooring, that is waterproof, stainproof, and pretty darned durable. We used it in the bathroom, where it has been immune to water, as regular plank is not.
Sigh. I wish everybody had been sweetness and light, but realism dictates this is just going to take the time it takes. We are not willing to have 4 cats if we can avoid it, and we hope that Tanner may gradually get people-ized, let alone other-cat-ized, enough to let us work out a solution. He is gentle and friendly to being petted, but he does not understand being touched when it is not feeding time—not violent, just stand-offish. And this will take some catnip and some work.
Every cat is different, just like every person is different. And every cat (and person) is the sum of its life. Sometimes you have to work out the best compromise solution you can. Poor little guy. This has been a bum year for him, too.
I go to see the orthopod Monday (after having had abdominal incisional hernia surgery Wednesday!)and hopefully I’ll be able to get something done about my knee to reduce the pain of bearing weight on it. I’d like to get back into walking, not just for my heart’s sake, but for my head’s.
4 cats in one household is plenty, thankyewverymutch. We are down now to 4 1/2; after the Kitten Invasion (which is how the 3 Stooges viewed it), we are down to the 2 indoor cats, and 2 regulars outside. Spot, who was always the most standoffish of the 3 outdoors, only stops by occasionally now, whereas she used to come by regularly for breakfast, dinner and supper. Little Brother, OTOH, has taken his usual regal position napping on top of one or the other of our cars, and he and Froofy still are Breakfast Club regulars.
Trying to sort out the indoor feeding schedule is taxing. Junior and Zorro both have food the other shouldn’t eat, which naturally makes it irresistible. Junior in particular has gotten old-man finicky; what he liked one week he won’t eat the next, despite rotating through several flavors and varieties of gooshyfood. He would rather steal Zorro’s leftovers, and vice versa with interest. I have bought a bag of the Hills z/d kibble, which both can and will eat, in the hopes that it will cut down on the food wars.
The new basement sounds purty! (Auto-incorrect wanted it to sound “putty,” haha. I have never noticed putty to make noise, and I think I’d be concerned if it did….)
Tanner. Aww. Well, this sounds like a small improvement. He will like the sunny window space. — I have almost always introduced cats to each other the day the new one arrives; and sometimes, they introduce themselves by their arrival. I tend to think that they’ve now seen and heard and smelled each other over days and weeks, and now that whose food is whose and whether there’s a “gatekeeper” there, has now been removed as an issue, perhaps a cautious first introduction of him into their space again would be in order? I tend think two against one, going into his space is not the better choice. But you know how Tanner, Sei, and Shu are, and I don’t, so…well, good luck getting them integrated. 🙂 Tanner, as an introvert, seems like he would not be too prone to fight them, and Sei sounds like an agreeable and gentlemanly sort of cat, and Tanner sounds that way too, only stressed now, and really, in need of fellow feline company if and when he wants it and they are willing to give it in a friendly way. I suspect Shu is the one who wants to be top cat and raise a fuss, but he likes Sei, so if he can get past his ornery side to see Tanner needs a couple of buddies, maybe it’ll work itself out easily enough. Cats have a way about them. Most cats (not all) seem mostly live-and-let-live, in my experience, with a couple of notable exceptions. Here’s hoping it goes well, and quickly.
CJ: Might some boxes help, giving Tracker a place to hide and feel secure?
BCS: On your PC/Mac with uBlock origin and/or NoScript, you may find Pandora tolerable. Spotify, I suspect not, but don’t know.
WRT carols, I tried Pandora with “Bing Crosby” and didn’t encounter White Christmas in play or the much larger volume of listings I looked at. I found “car surf rock” at least understood as “surf rock”, Misilou et alii.
Alas, Tanner hit the wall of his kennel with claws bared when he saw our pair, and Shu has hit (not scratched or bit) me every time he wants to go past that kennel…he does a rapid paw-slap to indicate he’s miffed about that Thing sitting there. Sei just tries to avoid the Thing and pretend it’s not there.
Ow, Tanner having his claws out does not sound like a positive sign.
On the other hand, you were most worried about Sei’s protective instincts, so him ignoring Tanner in the kennel sounds as if he might learn to accept and ignore him at least.
Shu swatting you, without claws or biting, to express displeasure at the change in his environment, instead of hissing and puffing up at Tanner – that sounds not too bad, like a reaction that might be open to improving once he settles down.
On the other side of the balancing act, once the improved basement is ready for occupation, with the new windows it sounds like a fine place for a cat who doesn’t want to mingle, and a place where a human can spend some nice restful time around said cat, maybe doing some reading or sewing, or working on the computer – he was used to his mom doing so, so that familiarity might be good for him, if you can set up a place to work in your new guestroom.
” He is gentle and friendly to being petted, but he does not understand being touched when it is not feeding time—not violent, just stand-offish.” Huh, he sounds like me.
The basement sounds great, a nice light airy place to display three(!) Hugo Awards. 🙂
Ha! 🙂
It sounds like you are going to have some very nice spaces in your basement. I like the idea of the vinyl plank flooring. From what I have seen and read it looks good and wears like iron.
We are always looking at flooring options on top of all the outside work that needs doing. Removing trees that died from gypsy moth and forest tent caterpillars is a priority. We are probably going to have to get a tree removal service in to take out those by the house. We’re talking sixty foot oak trees here.
We grew from three to six cats last summer when LuckyPeach showed up and had her kittens under our shed roof. We brought them in at about two weeks. Four of the kittens went to the animal shelter (and were adopted within two weeks) We kept LuckyPeach (momcat) along with Ringo and Grayby. Ringo is a big fluffy ginger and white boy and weighs about fifteen pounds. Grayby is a mottled gray and weighs under five ponds. When together he literally looks three times her size.
Peach is a sweet kitty, another ginger and white. It was so sad when she came inside. I think she was no more than six months old herself and was tossed when she was pregnant. She had huge trust issues with people. You could see in her eyes wanting to come near, but being afraid of everything. That she adjusted to the other cats is due to Aloysius. He is one of those cats that loves anything that breathes. We are pretty sure that Peach ended up here because of his meowing in the open windows. He immediately started washing and taking care of her and the kittens. He is also the cat who adopted Winterpup when we brought her home. She was just about his size and still views him as the alpha of the house.
It’s taken time but Peach will eat from our hands and sleep on our beds. (It took us two years to acclimate Bougaloo and Kezar when we get them at thirteen but they did socialize completely and had very happy remaining five to seven years of their lives.)
I always love seeing the different personalities of our furbies. Ringo is a loving goofball who has no idea of his size. We have to watch his play with Peach and Grayby because he probably outweighs their combined weights by several pounds.He loves his tummy rubs and being brushed, which is a good thing because he would be full of mats otherwise. He’s definitely a people cat and likes being on top of feet legs, laps whenever possible. Grayby on the other hand is what I call a sit beside kitty. She loves being near us but pats are strictly on her terms. ‘Just because I am lying here purring doesn’t mean you can *pat* me!’
Mea culpa! I am a crazy cat lady. If I had a lot of money I would be doing rescue.
My goodness, I haven’t done a comment this long in ages.
Toes are crossed that those wh are dealing with hurricanes and cyclones are managing to stay safe.
Best wishes for many Happy Belateds or as the Mad Hatter said, ‘Unbirthdays’. There are 364 of them to celebrate. I have decided that a benifit of growing older is that we get celebrate when we wish to. Proge likes to call it a Stately Age, referring to the idea of elder statesman rather than old.
I have some personal business to take care of tomorrow and the next day, not looking forward to it and feeling unprepared, but have to anyway. Maybe I’ll find the paperwork before needed. Not too happy with myself.
But today is a rest day, because I’m bushed. Ever have one or two days in a row where you find yourself making dumb mistakes, not doing well at creative tasks and decisions, when you need to be (or feel you ought to be) doing fine, and productive? I have somehow had that yesterday and today, whereas I’d been doing better than average for about a week or more prior.
I still got in a little font work yesterday, but not as quickly or deftly as I had been, and not with the enthusiasm I’d wanted. I’ve decided to rest today for a while, at least. Maybe that’ll recharge me. I’ve been doing well and mostly happy with results lately, up until then. I’d entered font ideas and had a few going well. One is at a kind of plateau while I dither over what I really want to do, whether I like it better _this_ way or _that_ way. Another, I got started with a bolder weight and now have had to try to reconcile with the lighter weight, and, hmm, I really like how the bolder weight looks, but somehow, the lighter weight isn’t sending me. Yet I see this as a design problem to overcome, to sharpen my skills, because, why not, and why shouldn’t I be able to work out what to do to “fix” it? It seems like it ought to be doable, and I need to figure it out for future work. So I don’t know. A third idea is going nicely, and ver fun, but needed a little rest time while I work on the others.
Other things I have in development need some attention, but for now, these have my current attention.
I really want to get something out before the end of the year, producing income. I feel I’m closer now and my skills are better andI feel more confident of that. Yet even my most complete drafts are far from finished. These days, the market seems to want very large character sets for full European (Latin alphabet) and Cyrillic and Greek support, with small caps often and other typographic niceties (or musts) and the “alternate features” which I still have not worked out how to do. That’s great, I want to do those, they sound fun as a design challenge (and the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets are so related, why not?) but that also means at least four to eight times the amount of character glyphs. Even when a good number of those are accented characters (a letter plus one or more accent marks), that is still a lot more to produce, and takes time. Add in italics and doing several weights, also a big deal these days, and whew, that’s a lot to do. (They’ve gone crazy with multiple weights, these days, particularly the trend toward too-thin ones.) I am just learning how to get it all to harmonize, to agree visually as a single, unified design that flows together seamlessly. I still have to learn how to “blend fonts,” or do the intermediate weights from the lightest and heaviest weights, or from two adjacent weights. Very geeky.
I am, however, learning, and loosening up some. When it’s going well, I’m really enjoying it too.
But dang, I want to focus on a design and get it completed and producing income. I am concerned that I may subt something and they will say I’ve missed some optical / visual thing I don’t know enough about yet. There are tricky parts to this that are not strictly geometric, that have to do with how our eyes and brain perceive things and what “looks right” to us, and with what is needed for on-screen or in-print. So there’s still a lot to master.
But dang it, I want to get something out there, making me some income, and I want to get a pipeline going for production, so this continues. I like doing this, darn it. I’m proud of what I’ve got, while other parts, I’m still not satisfied with yet, or others are still in draft to be tweaked or polished, or awaiting further decisions / inspiration on what I want to do there among choices for the looks.
I hd thought I’d have some fonts out there by now. I am doing better at it, I have several things in process, but I need things finished.
I keep getting ideas and sketching and sometimes putting things in on computer. This is good, yet it is also distracting me from completing what I have in progress. I don’t know what to do about that except concentrate on my best candidates. I don’t want to stop the flow of new ideas; that’s a good sign. But there are times I wish I could just plug in and tell the computer mentally what I want it to do to build the fonts I want, haha. Or else I need two or three of me. (They’d probably all have ideas of their own, I’m not sure how well it would work in practice, and they’d all want to get paid. LOL.)
Anyway, I am still saying this is progress of a sort, and so I’m pleased, even if also frustrated.
I may nap and then get up and work again and find paperwork. Or I may read after trying those. I wanted to watch a video or two, but last night when it came time, I wasn’t in the mood, which is weird.
So..I hope you all are doing fine, and your creative and other work is going really well.