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Now the status update. I've accomplished one of my goals for this month--to dig up a lot of older book reviews that had been postponed for various reasons, such as having been written while the books were too new to be offered as Fair Trade Books, and get them updated and live on this web site. Now I still owe readers three more Real Posts, which are being spaced out so they don't all pop up at once. Meanwhile, the focus of blog time is shifting to making a monthly newsletter for real-world subscribers, since online readers aren't paying for all those lovely links and comments.
I'm still trying to work with Paper.li after some fashion; a free online "daily" Link Log is still possible (as "daily" as my online time is, anyway) and Paper.li does a good job of sorting out major news and blog posts on specific topics, but funding will still be necessary to get "the Paper" into your e-mail or Twitter feeds.
Heather is still missing. If she hadn't gone missing for weeks at a time before, if I weren't aware of snug barns and sheds and a cave (steep narrow opening, extremely dangerous) where she could in fact be lurking indoors during this Big Freeze, if Samantha were not a Listening Cat who knows what "Heather" and "Samantha" mean and has reacted to my calling Heather in different ways on different days, I'd have given up hope of her coming home again. However...Heather is a determined hunter who's been known, after being lured or scared away from the home she's kept rodent-free, to spend several days cleaning out rodent colonies in neighbors' barns or sheds. Some of those barns are about as snug and warm as the unheated part of the house to which Heather has access at home. She knows who she is, where she's from, where she's going, and what she's doing. She is not, repeat not, an ordinary cat who needs to be rescued. She has extra brain circuits to go with her extra toes.
(Those extra toes are her real distinguishing feature. There are a lot of tortoiseshell cats in the world, even a lot of tortoiseshell cats with "Siamese" body shapes, but Heather's big double "thumbs," the way they cause her to walk with her front paws turned out like a ballet dancer, and the band of black fur that forms a "mitt" across one paw with a few orange-furred toes sticking out past the "mitt," are pretty conspicuous. I took some cell phone photos of her paws once; they didn't come out well enough to be worth posting. Let's just say that if it's a Tortie with a long buff-tipped tail, long and lean body shape, dark yellow eyes that can look brown, green, or amber, and those special paws, it just about has to be Heather.)
For what it's worth...On the morning of Christmas Eve, when the dogs were bounding around the front yard and had "treed" Samantha, after I shooed the dogs away and called Samantha out of the tree, I called Heather. Samantha pointed and sniffed, nonverbally saying "She went that way but she's not come back." On other days after that, I called Heather. Samantha ignored those calls; she and Heather were not so close (yet) that both came when either one was called; they'd made it very clear that each cat knows her own name. But last Wednesday, when I'd been in town during the warm sunny weather, when I came home and called Heather, once again Samantha pointed and sniffed as if to say "She went that way"--indicating a different direction--as if to say that Heather had come home, found me not at home, and gone back to where she'd been. Since then, once again, when I've called Heather Samantha has ignored me.
For most cats that wouldn't happen. Even Heather's not been missing for this long, in the past, although it's been bitterly cold and any sensible animal would have stayed in a snug barn rather than visiting friends on all but one of the days since Christmas Eve. But she has done that kind of thing, with shorter time spans between visits home--nonverbally telling me that she's all right and hopes I am the same, and if so she wants to go back to cleaning out a colony of nuisance animals. She has communicated what kept her away--by showing me what she's been hunting.
I know there are lots of less pleasant possibilities, but Samantha's behavior, and Heather's past behavior, is keeping me in hope that Heather may yet come home.
I should mention that, also on the morning of Christmas Eve, some neighbors lost a Chihuahua. I don't think the beagle-mix hounds in the yard were big or hungry enough to have eaten a Chihuahua, either. Scared one away from home, into danger? Absobloomin'lutely yes, they could have done that. I've never met a Chihuahua who I thought had as much chance of surviving the kind of weather we've been having as Heather had, nor can I visualize a Chihuahua being able to get out of the cave if it got in--then again I've never explored the cave and don't know whether a Chihuahua could have found a lower opening. These are the miniature dogs who are famous for shivering cutely and begging to be snuggled at room temperature, and if the missing Chihuahua is still alive it's been outside when temperatures were in the single digits Fahrenheit for days, and nights...
Whoever took that pack of untrained, small, young, clueless dogs out on the morning before the epic freeze, and lost them, has a lot to be ashamed of. I had hoped the person had at least rounded up the dogs before going back to work or school, since I hadn't seen them again over the holidays. Then on Sunday I saw just one of the dogs, one of the longer-legged ones, running across the front lawn of a church in the neighborhood. So, did the idiot succeed in getting the smaller, slower-moving dogs inside before those two mornings in a row when my thermometer was showing zero degrees Fahrenheit--with a wind chill? Unless they live near here and the idiot turns them out regularly, or they've been trapped by "humane rescuer" types, I fear the worst for those dogs. And they were cute little beagle sort of hounds, too; the kind anybody would have found easy to love when they weren't, y'know, hounding other animals.
Dogs like to run around and hunt in cold weather. So do cats--I remember stepping outside one snowy morning to ask the feral cats who were then in residence if they were sure they didn't want to come indoors, and they bounded across the snow to show me where they'd been basking in the sunshine right on the snowy ground. (In cold weather Heather's usual preference is to curl up close to me beside the computer in the heated office room; Heather, like Samantha, was born indoors...but she still definitely prefers to go out rather than use a litter box, and yes, she goes out to hunt in freezing weather. Briefly.) However, no animal needs to be left out for hours after the kind of frigid wind that blew in on Christmas Eve has driven the animal's human companions indoors. I don't care how cold, how wimpy, how unprepared, how non-local, how young and how clueless you are: if you have any business owning dogs, you don't go indoors without'em. Hounds don't have all that much fur, and even shaggy animals need some protection when the outside air is colder than your deep freeze!
Meanwhile Samantha has been making herself adorable. I have to admit that she's not one of the cats I've really loved. She's very clever, but those defensive reflexes have not been conducive to bonding. She's heard a lot of things like "Maybe if you lived twice as long as Heather has, you'd have half as much common sense." Nevertheless, the way she listens for instructions and goes right into the cage where she's allowed to be in the warm room--only when it's bitterly cold outside!--has convinced me that she's worth retraining, however long the process may be...I suspect I'm stuck with her for life. I don't think I'd ever trust her around children. I trust her, myself, to keep her threat displays down to light nips and scratches--the kind that cause "humane rescuers" to kill stray and feral animals. She does know how to purr and cuddle, and I've encouraged her to do that...but very carefully.
And I've been curled up with a warm computer...something told me it was time to bring the desktop computer back into active service as an auxiliary room heater in the office room, and it was, and I've been enjoying my reunion with it, with the parts of my brain and my husband's brain that are stored in it. I like newer computers that will connect with the Internet, but there's nothing like a computer that won't connect with the Internet, that's mine entire and alone. And it did a great deal to reduce the extremity of the Big Freeze, although I'm still looking forward, with dread, to epic heating bills as the little space heater has roared valiantly on, day and night, for at least five days with hardly a pause during Christmas week. Will this be the year my heating bill goes above $100 a month?
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