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Diane in the greenhouse
Wednesday, December 27 2023
This morning Gretchen left for her bookstore shift without having walked Charlotte, who usually gets a nice long walk every morning. So I attempted to walk her instead, even though I knew she was unlikely to go anywhere with me if Neville didn't also come (and he never has it in him to walk anywhere until at least the mid afternoon; apparently he needs to warm up his old joints first). I brought some peanuts with me to reward Charlotte for peeing outside, since we're close enough to the last time she pissed on something inside for me to need to reinforce her urinating in the proper locations. This time she was more motivated than usual by the peanuts, and she stuck with me much longer than she has in the past when it was just me and her. Eventually I ran out of peanuts, and we continued nearly to the southern end of the Farm Road. By the end there, we were even playing, with me crouching down and calling her name in a high-pitched voice, causing her to come running towards me at full tilt (and she can run fast!). We then climbed the escarpment and headed back northward. At some point she'd had enough of me and continued home on her own. Still, it marked real progress in our relationship.
I spent most of the day watching more of the first season of For All Mankind. Initially I'd been more interested in the late-60s outfits and settings than I was in the actual plot, but by episode 8, I was pretty well invested in the characters. I was also finding the alternative history, which featured both the Soviets and the Americans mining water ice from the inside of a perpetually-shaded crater near one of the moon's poles sufficiently intriguing.
After failing to get Neville (and thus Charlotte) to go on a mid-afternoon walk (Neville might be even more house-bound than usual due to a broken finger claw), I prepared a dinner of rigatoni pasta (we didn't have any spaghetti) cooked with broccoli as well as a pan of tempeh, onions, and two kinds of mushrooms.
Charlotte and Neville had spent much of the day on the beanbag in the laboratory, and evidently this had unnerved Diane the Cat (who is still feuding with Charlotte). By this evening, I realized I hadn't seen Diane in hours. So I went outside and called for her, expecting her to suddenly appear with insistent meowing around the north end of the house like she had yesterday. But she didn't materialize, so I went back into the house to see if maybe she was in some little-known hidey hole in the laboratory. But she failed to appear when I called for her there as well. This had me thinking: where might Diane spend hours outside at this time of year? Maybe she'd gone down to the greenhouse. It's unheated, and it had been cloudy all day so it the sun hadn't warmed it up. But it's dry and there are soft things to lie on, and it's accessible via its own pet door. So I went down there, opened the door, and sure enough, there was Diane! I carried her back to the house and put her on the catfood table so she could eat something. Then I carried her up to the laboratory. Later she ran through the teevee room (which is where she is often chased by Charlotte, who keeps an eye out for her, and only her, while lying on the teevee room couch) to go downstairs and visit the cat food table again. After she'd had a lump of wet food and drunk a bunch of water, I carried her back up to the laboratory. It looks like I'll have to be more proactive in engineering a detente between our black dog and our black cat, because I don't want Diane feeling like she has to live in the greenhouse. Interestingly, Diane often acts like a cool customer when Charlotte is around, lying on the floor and grooming herself, pointedly not even looking at Charlotte. And Charlotte leaves her alone when she does this. It's only when Diane is trying to move from one place to another in the house that Charlotte gives chase (seemingly as a way to punish Diane for an incident two months ago).
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