You know it's bad when
Sep. 10th, 2009 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI guess you know you're not a very likable or desirable person to be around when your own cats don't even want to live with you anymore. I mean, I know, thanks to plenty of people telling me that, and being clear what they think my faults are, but wow, when your cats go looking for another home of their own accord, it must be bad.
I've had this sneaking suspicion Olive found another home for a few weeks now -- she has been gone for increasingly long times, to the point where she doesn't even come home at night and is gone the entire day. She doesn't come home for food or treats, and I have to lure her in if I see her and that doesn't even work much of the time. She hates Blues SO MUCH. And by extension, has started hating me, too. She growls and huffs and puffs when I touch her or pet her or try to be friendly. She'll only play with me for a short time. She often won't sleep on me anymore. She tries to knock out the window screens to get out, and hisses, snarls, and growls when Blues is in the other room, if she merely hears him walking around.
And I've been looking for her for two days and all last night, and this afternoon a woman knocked on my door and said that some of the neighbors thought I might be her owner, and she described Olive to me. I said, yeah, that's her, and told her that I'd been afraid she had found another home where someone was feeding her and offering her Blues-free affection. She said, yes, that's me! She commented on how friendly and sweet Ollie is, and I mentioned she's also very bold and fearless, and she said that Ollie had just come right into her house. But she has a skittish, very fear-aggressive cat so didn't want to just bring her in. Olive slept on her porch, and was there curled up at the door in the mornings, and there at night, so she was feeding her.
She took my card and said she'd call when she next saw Olive, and in the meantime, while she was off running errands, I went over to her house and there was Ollie, who had obviously ignored me when I'd come by about an hour earlier on my walk, calling for her. This time the brat came out and let me bring her home, although she stopped purring and started snarling and growling when we got in the yard. Now she's alternately sleeping and glaring at me with her golden eyes, hissing and puffing (I started calling her Miss Hufflepuff a while ago) and growling at Blues, just being generally disagreeable and yet still cute as the dickens.
I don't know what to do about her. She's obviously incredibly unhappy here, with Blues, with me, with the bully cats who invade her backyard sanctuary. So she's gone to find another home. And I think even if the neighbor stops feeding her, she'll just go find someone else to do it. She is very focused and bold. And grouchy.
I've become addicted to the Dog Whisperer lately, and I'm even trying to do some of Cesar's tricks -- changing my energy to calm assertive, breaking her attention when she gets into one of her growling frenzies. But Blues is still her tormenter and ignores my energy, ignores most of my attempts to get him to behave. It's impossible to modify behavior, though, when they freaking run away. Today when I went looking for Ollie, Blues bolted out of the house. He's been remarkably good about not straying since the big My Little Runaway episode of last year, but today he seemed to vanish, and didn't come back, didn't eat his breakfast, anything. I finally got him back in about an hour or so after Ollie came home, and it's been snarls and growls and running around and fighting since, when they're not glaring at me or begging to go outside.
I mean, how bad a person do you have to be that your cat, who you love with all your heart and spoil rotten and saved from death row, wants to go live on someone else's porch? Depressing, I tell you. This does not help how lowdown and unloved I feel lately.
I'm working on taking this copyediting test for a fiction publisher. I'm really stuck on it and I need to finish and get it back asap, but it's really badly written but they want mechanical stuff from CEs, not really developmental or substantive stuff. I'm spending too much time analyzing every single sentence because I don't know if it's not enough, too much, the wrong thing, what. It needs much more than a copyedit, so it's such a struggle to figure out what's right. I really would like to do work for them even though it pays next to nothing (really, it's almost like volunteering!), just because of what they publish, but the pressure of what's right on this test makes it very hard to do. I hate tests, and I really don't believe in them, but it's the nature of this crappy field. I love the work of editing, but as a business it kinda sucks.
I've had this sneaking suspicion Olive found another home for a few weeks now -- she has been gone for increasingly long times, to the point where she doesn't even come home at night and is gone the entire day. She doesn't come home for food or treats, and I have to lure her in if I see her and that doesn't even work much of the time. She hates Blues SO MUCH. And by extension, has started hating me, too. She growls and huffs and puffs when I touch her or pet her or try to be friendly. She'll only play with me for a short time. She often won't sleep on me anymore. She tries to knock out the window screens to get out, and hisses, snarls, and growls when Blues is in the other room, if she merely hears him walking around.
And I've been looking for her for two days and all last night, and this afternoon a woman knocked on my door and said that some of the neighbors thought I might be her owner, and she described Olive to me. I said, yeah, that's her, and told her that I'd been afraid she had found another home where someone was feeding her and offering her Blues-free affection. She said, yes, that's me! She commented on how friendly and sweet Ollie is, and I mentioned she's also very bold and fearless, and she said that Ollie had just come right into her house. But she has a skittish, very fear-aggressive cat so didn't want to just bring her in. Olive slept on her porch, and was there curled up at the door in the mornings, and there at night, so she was feeding her.
She took my card and said she'd call when she next saw Olive, and in the meantime, while she was off running errands, I went over to her house and there was Ollie, who had obviously ignored me when I'd come by about an hour earlier on my walk, calling for her. This time the brat came out and let me bring her home, although she stopped purring and started snarling and growling when we got in the yard. Now she's alternately sleeping and glaring at me with her golden eyes, hissing and puffing (I started calling her Miss Hufflepuff a while ago) and growling at Blues, just being generally disagreeable and yet still cute as the dickens.
I don't know what to do about her. She's obviously incredibly unhappy here, with Blues, with me, with the bully cats who invade her backyard sanctuary. So she's gone to find another home. And I think even if the neighbor stops feeding her, she'll just go find someone else to do it. She is very focused and bold. And grouchy.
I've become addicted to the Dog Whisperer lately, and I'm even trying to do some of Cesar's tricks -- changing my energy to calm assertive, breaking her attention when she gets into one of her growling frenzies. But Blues is still her tormenter and ignores my energy, ignores most of my attempts to get him to behave. It's impossible to modify behavior, though, when they freaking run away. Today when I went looking for Ollie, Blues bolted out of the house. He's been remarkably good about not straying since the big My Little Runaway episode of last year, but today he seemed to vanish, and didn't come back, didn't eat his breakfast, anything. I finally got him back in about an hour or so after Ollie came home, and it's been snarls and growls and running around and fighting since, when they're not glaring at me or begging to go outside.
I mean, how bad a person do you have to be that your cat, who you love with all your heart and spoil rotten and saved from death row, wants to go live on someone else's porch? Depressing, I tell you. This does not help how lowdown and unloved I feel lately.
I'm working on taking this copyediting test for a fiction publisher. I'm really stuck on it and I need to finish and get it back asap, but it's really badly written but they want mechanical stuff from CEs, not really developmental or substantive stuff. I'm spending too much time analyzing every single sentence because I don't know if it's not enough, too much, the wrong thing, what. It needs much more than a copyedit, so it's such a struggle to figure out what's right. I really would like to do work for them even though it pays next to nothing (really, it's almost like volunteering!), just because of what they publish, but the pressure of what's right on this test makes it very hard to do. I hate tests, and I really don't believe in them, but it's the nature of this crappy field. I love the work of editing, but as a business it kinda sucks.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-11 07:20 am (UTC)Cats don't love humans -or at least most don't- they see us as their servants whom they are honoring with their presence and they often believe it is a natural state of affairs to be adored and spoiled rotten. Basically, cats do not care about you though their level of tolerance of us varies based on incomprehensible parameters.
You want to be sure to avoid thinking of a cat as if they were a dog: dogs often love their owners unconditionally, blindly, and definitely see them as their owner. Or at least their very own food person which they greet enthusiastically every day.
Not cats. Expecting from a cat the level of love you would get from a dog or a reciprocation of the level of fondness you have for it is a mistake in my opinion...
When I was younger, my family had a cat and a dog and though our dog was stupid, it loved all of us -especially my father- and I think it died of grief when several years later we had to pass him off to a relative after we moved to another city totally unsuited to having a large dog.
Our cat on the other hand disappeared after several years though it was always petted and indulged and fed delicious tidbits and we never found it again... Well, it was a Siamese cat: they are so very pretty and they are indeed supremely elegant cats but I gather they are also known for being especially temperamental and coldly haughty.
Not that I am a specialist, there has to be people who can give you some practical advice, but just based on my own experience of someone who always gets along very well with cats and dogs, you really do not want to assign too much meaning to such things.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 07:54 am (UTC)And anyway, Olive is a cat who thinks she's a dog (most people who've seen her are amazed at how like a dog she is), she's just very unhappy here since the addition to the family, and that extends to me.
It's always a bit hard to have a conversation with someone you don't know who you're talking to -- I'm not used to anonymous unsigned posts, so I'm not sure if I'm reading your intended communication style correctly or not.