Rat, No Rat
The traps weren't sprung this morning. Bertie didn't go on alert all day.
We set one out in the pantry section of the garage, a place we've caught one before, and reset out the basement one.
Watching Ursa with toys we can tell he'd kill birds, bugs, amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals. He's far too tiny right now so we're keeping him away.
Rat vs. Sofa
We still have a rat in the house somewhere.
We have disassembled our terrible sofa. It didn't help us get rid of the rat, but we found droppings under it after Bertie alerted on it tonight.
Tomorrow I talk to the junk haulers. CK is ordering a sofa with legs making it is easier to clean beneath. We're pulling the pieces out of the house and covering.
Our hated of the sofa and the rat overwhelmed us and we took the horrid thing apart. We reached a point where we just wanted it gone! We decided against dragging the three large pieces out of the house in the dark!
CK set up traps. We've got them on each floor.
Tonight feels like this year's just continuing to be dramatic as fuck.
Autumn Rats
Several years ago, as Autumn got truly wet and cold, a young rat broke into the house. Puck caught and killed it. He was proud forevermore.
There's a rat in the house.
Bertie alerted to it downstairs. We tried to keep it down there, and our animals away from it, by closing the door. We deployed a trap in a box, adding an additional layer of impediment to one of the dogs trying to grab it..
Instead of going for the box it has come upstairs. I saw after doing dishes, running across the living room.
I've put the trap upstairs. I'm in the yoga room with the kitten.
This year. Of course this year we get the repeat of a rat.
Kitten news: sitting close to Obie on a chair!
Kitten Induced Terror
This morning the kitten flipped himself through the stairwell rails and dropped several feet onto the hardwood stairs. He then ran into the basement and hid while growling.
I thought I would throw up when I realized what happened.
Brow and I both ran down the stairs. Bertie fell down part of the steps he was rushing. He fell again coming up because he was worried.
I felt this terrible shame that is failed to keep the kitten safe. Certain CK would get angry that I wasn't careful.
Ursa seems fine. CK wasn't mad, she reminded me that he's inadvertently knocked himself off the bed twice.
She got why I felt so bad.
Power went out again too. This led to pizza for dinner.
Still feeling sad and demoralized. My students shared today that most of them are feeling the same.
Today the kitten slept with Dora, which was pretty great.
Days of Exhaustion
Today we have both been tired and our low energy has been making use both blue. It doesn't help that the headlines after full of T* supporters holding a parade and rally rejecting the election, most of them without masks.
COVID is so bad right now and people are intending to have Thanksgiving dinners with 10 or more people attending! Hospitals are once again low on supplies and beds.
I'm feeling so irritable about it all that I want to scream again. I realize that my self-directed anger has been very high today too.
This is why I was up at midnight playing Animal Crossing while the kitten sleeps on me.
The tiny kitten is helping. The way Dora had taken to mothering him is sleeping very sweet. I also lay down with Obie for a while today, who was very happy about that.
Perfect Kitten
He's demanding, it's surprising house loud a creature that's 2 pounds, 9 ounces, makes! He wants out of the bathroom and into the yoga room with one of us. CK's den is fine too, he spent much of the afternoon in there with her.
Mostly he wants to be held. Bursts of kitten exuberance, old shoelaces are the best, but mostly snuggles. Right now he's trying to eat my hoodie tie.
He loves you get up on our shoulders!
We've introduced him to the dogs. Dora became Momma Dog, she had a litter years ago, and groomed him. He was unafraid of her and was playing!
Bertie will take more work. He's so over excited that he jumps up still.
CK posted online that he's perfect. I'm really glad since I feel like I keep being there one with unplanned creatures that fall in love with me and I them!
He's such a good antidote to the incoming winter blues alongside another COVID shutdown.
Kitten Day
Today I finally got to bring home the tiny kitten our friend fostered and I fell for. When CK meet him he wasn't quite the same, but today he put his paw on her forehead as she leaned over to look at him and now she's as smitten as I was.
He's loudly crying right now because I spent a little time with him while brushing my teeth. It's good first night all alone and my heart breaks a little, but we're being strong and are going to try and get him to have a bedtime routine.
Given the surging COVID totals and mayhem being caused by the GOP, T* still hasn't conceded, a day with a new kitten is really welcome.
Midweek Holidays and Other Interruptions
Today's Veterans' Day. I thought about my Father and the tangle of bluster and myth he told about his time in the Navy and his "Service Connected Disability".
I've read paperwork that came to me when he died. He'd actually been drinking on duty, but it still came out for him. The VA's attempt to treat his back created more problems. He was also emotionally and mentally unstable his whole life, making frequent in-patient stays in the psychiatric ward at the VA here in Portland.
Mostly I tried to keep our day as even as possible. Midweek holidays throw CK off, but we managed to keep both our moods pretty even today by checking in. I was disappointed with dinner, mine was kind of experimental and it turned out edible enough.
We made some mutual progress on basement cleanup. CK continued on with her project to build us a NAS. It's already built and now she's going through old hard drives and is moving the data onto the NAS she built out of mostly spare parts! I started tackling the towers of unsorted stuff around my desk.
My therapist once suggested that my having random areas of unsorted stuff needing attention at some point in the future might not be the failing I feel it is. It might just be how my brain works. I'm not wild about this, I'd like to be a highly organized person who knows where everything is at all times.
Kitten tomorrow! I was sad to discover that while CK and I were talking about hard drives I missed the call to come pick him up today.
The Waiting
We still don't know. It's looking more and more like it will be Biden/Harris, but it isn't done.
There are T* supporters with guns at election offices demanding that they be allowed to count ballots (Arizona) or that counting be stopped (Michigan). Like the supporters running the Biden/Harris bus off the road in Texas last week, these are the newest incarnation of the Nazi Brownshirts who intimidated people to push their political agenda.
I have felt exhausted today. As usual, teaching at 10am online helped anchor me into the day. I enjoyed chatting with a favorite student afterward, one of those people who's become a friend as well, and that helped me feel a little less hopeless.
I ended up napping after lunch for a little while with Obie. He's been wanting to lay on the bed so I've been turning on the electric blanket to warm up his bones. He reached out his paws and chirped at me, which is pretty impossible to resist. Having got to bed close to 2am, a nap with Obie and Bertie was a good choice.
I felt really unmotivated by food, aside from wanting to turn several ripe apples and pears into a crisp. CK suggested that we have takeout, we picked pizza which I really enjoyed, despite feeling unmotivated. I kept searching for recipes and ended up just making it up; I needed more salt! I also just realized I forgot the cinnamon!
What's weighing on me is how we're just barely holding back fascism. Some small part of me hoped for an outright repudiation, instead T* supporters doubled-down, recruiting more hateful people. Voter suppression has also been so successful, redistricting and gutting the Voting Rights Act continues to disenfranchise people.
There are millions of Americans who are so opposed to everyone sharing a piece of the pie, where everyone gets a smaller piece but everyone gets pie, that they would prefer to just burn down all the pie shops rather than allow the "others" to have some pie.
I see rounds of social media posts about educating "T* voting friend, now's the time!", and I'm furious. This is not about education, we cannot educate people who are willfully ignorant, truth denying, and cruelty seeking!
Also, quit putting work on those of use who are already exhausted and afraid of losing rights we've only been celebrating a few years!
How do we engage with people who don't care if they get hurt so long as they get to see the "other" hurting? How do we just shut it down? How do we say to them, "We don't really care about how you feel about it, this is what is happening."
November
Here we are, firmly in autumn and working on eight months of COVID life. I see people taking about a "second lockdown" and here we've never left the first one. It feels naive to have ever hoped that we'd share Thanksgiving with our chosen family.
Tonight we checked in on tasks we want done before Tuesday evening. CK ordered more first aid supplies; we still can't easily find isopropyl alcohol, even the 70% type. I ordered groceries to pick up Tuesday afternoon.
We're making plans for kitten arrival, ordering litter boxes to replace the ones downstairs. It will be easier for Obie ultimately and we'll train the kitten to use them upstairs. This will let us close the downstairs and use the space for sorting, cleaning, etc.
Using one of my new journals from an earlier Maido subscription box to continue making comics. The square shape is perfect!