Atomic Nerds

Just ’cause Stingray pointed out the obvious solution to me spinning around in my office chair debating if there was anything I could possibly find to say more than a Twitter’s worth of words about today.

A great deal of time and energy has been spent on the domestication and social behavior of dogs, because they are an obvious candidate; they’re our oldest domesticated species by far, they’ve played the most different roles in our species’ history and forms of civilization, they’ve returned to feral states in a few times and places along the path and provided that additional data point, and being dogs, they are generally cooperative with our efforts.

Another thing that makes dogs particularly felicitous to study as the ur-example of domestication is that they have a life history and ecological niche that is relatively close to ours; humans and canines are both group-living, cooperatively foraging, cooperatively breeding generalist predators. It was not a huge leap for a canine to allow us to share care and raising of their young, as packs of canids generally all pitch in to a litter of puppies. We understand each other relatively easily; even if we are wide branches apart in our physiology and history, we have a shared world and outlook.

Cats are different. Canids have a long and robust history of group living and sociality, but felids are most often solitary with a few scattered species here and there that have some degree of group living, or at least mutual toleration. Lions are the only felid that has fully embraced group living and cooperative breeding and hunting, and even then it’s the former rather than the latter that truly benefits them. Two to three lions would do best bringing down the biggest game that would give the whole group the biggest share of food, and indeed that is the size of the groups the bachelor males tend to form when between prides- more lions gives less food per lion for the same general amount of effort. Big prides don’t bring lions more food, they bring them babies that live- Having a few lionesses looking after the cubs at all times brings them a much lower infant mortality rate than other felids can manage, even accounting for the attrition of unlucky cubs to new incoming males*.

Until the last twenty years or so, the generally accepted dogma was that lions were the only truly social felid out there, and any and all other social behavior witnessed was due to adaptation to unnatural conditions. It is now known that wild male cheetahs will do some cooperative group living and behavior under the right circumstances, and that colonies of domestic cats, whether feral, living within shelters, or living within households definitely feature some wide-scale organized social behavior as well. As an artifact, when reading older literature about cat behavior, you’ll often see their social behaviors framed in terms of redirected fragments of other behaviors; cats rub against you because they’re scent-marking you as their property (not true, rubbing is an affectionate feline social gesture, and one most commonly directed from someone lower in the pecking order to someone higher), cats relate to you as though you were their mother (because it was thought that the only relevant social behaviors cats had were from mother to young or mate to mate), and so on.

As it happens, groups of domestic cats act much like lions; when they form on their own without human influence, they tend to be centered around groups of related females, the territory itself tends to be held and inherited among those females, and males come and go, sometimes forming partnerships with brothers or even unrelated buddy males. (The latter types of coalitions between unrelated intact males are more fragile for domestic cats than they are for lions, but they do happen- male lions simply need each other more.) Domestic colonies tend to be much more stable than lion prides, with fewer dramatic ousters of resident males and more males being able to coexist in relative peace.

Cat societies are less rigid than canine societies; while dogs tend to have a fairly structured heirarchy based on sex, relatedness, and seniority, with strict conditions on who is allowed to breed, cats tend to have one or two boss cats, a large middle stratum of member cats, and the odd pariah cat, who often will not stick around long if he or she is able to leave. Even within that structure, the rule of possession tends to prevail; a boss cat may have privileged access to prized sleeping spots and have other cats move out of his or her way as they go, but won’t be able to take food or a mating opportunity from a subordinate cat without a fight.

Behaviors and gestures once classified as crude uses of fragments of territorial and maternal behavior are probably more like the basic feline toolkit of relating to one another; they probably DO have their roots in those behaviors because their roots are indeed in solitary animals, but they seem to have much more flexibility and specificity as social behaviors than we once thought. Cats have a wide range of temperaments; while a dog is a social animal down to its bones, a given individual cat may range from completely solitary (and effectively untamable, even with recent domesticated ancestors) to gregarious and highly preferring the company of other cats as friends, far beyond the potential to mate. It IS known that kittens have a window from about three weeks of age to twelve weeks in which the species they are readily prepared to accept as friends and companions- and which as food- but it’s not completely hard and fast. A feral cat may still be tamed as an adult, but it really is more like taming a wild animal than adopting a pet domesticate.

It’s possible that, even without much direct effort on our parts, that humans are responsible for turning cat-as-we-know-it from a solitary species into a sociable one. Even before it occurred to the cat or the human that friendship would be a good idea, there would have been pressure on cats to coexist in denser numbers around the rich food supplies that colonies of rodents in human grain fields and storage would represent. Even most species of wild cats will live more densely when food supplies are rich, mostly in the form of maturing young spending more time with their mothers and females tolerating the company of their local ranging males for longer and more sociably. Once humans started bringing cats into hearth and home rather than appreciating their good work in the field, the pressure for cats to be capable of- and even thrive off- companiable coexistence would have been quite intense.

Still, evolving from a basic-but-present level of sociability to a more complex and intense form over thousands of years instead of millions shows in places. Dogs seem to have more, and more sophisticated mechanisms for resolving intra-group conflicts and relieving pressures; cats mainly rely on avoiding one another until either everyone calms down or someone can leave altogether. Displacement aggression is much more common in cats than dogs, as are spiraling anxiety-rooted behavior problems. Cats that must live in a group but aren’t friends tend to establish small sub-territories and live around one another rather than with each other, and when they are forced into each other’s territories, problems sometimes explode into existence.

Personally, I find it likeliest that cats know exactly what we are- a non-cat species that can be befriended and can act like a mother, sibling, or baby** as the situation and the roles shift. Thankfully mate stays off the table; we smell all wrong for that.

*Lions are interesting in that they are one of the few species with male infanticide where mothers, and coalitions of related females, will regularly unite to defend as many young as they can from the males. If the cub is old enough to have a fair shot at survival, a mother may leave with her subadult cub. In most other cases (as in primate) the mother and child are more or less screwed, and in a pack of canids the most likely individual to kill a mother’s cubs is her own mother or other older, dominant female relatives. There is now some evidence that related female domestic cats may mutually defend kittens from marauding nonparental males as well.

**The likeliest explanation I have seen for why cats bring us dead or wounded prey as gifts is that they are trying to help us start out hunting. There isn’t, so far as I’m aware, another context to this gifting behavior seen among wild cats.

Noah Brand of No Seriously, What About Teh Menz has a kitty. His kitty has a tumor in her sinuses that, if left there, will kill her. Unlike the vast majority of such tumors in that location, it is operable and treatable, with money, which Noah Brand does not have.

I have never met the man, and have no connection to him other than approving of NSWATM enough to link to it and read it regularly. I did, however, have a kitty with a tumor in his sinuses that no earthly power could have treated, that I miss very much.

There’s actually not a lot left needed. Many small donations have added up. Just a few more of similar size would do it. The donation system is nice and painless- if I ever find myself in need of it (let’s hope not), I would use it myself.

ETA: Goal reached, with padding. Go Team Internet!

It was osteosarcoma under the infection after all. He was in a lot of pain and there was absolutely nothing we could do to fix it, and the fight was ebbing out of him, so we have just returned from euthanizing my oldest friend.

Rest in peace, my little warrior. Better yet, find Valhalla. You belong there.

*Comments re-opened. We appreciate the sympathy, but we needed a bit of time. - Stingray

Vet is very pleased with the progress Zydeco has made on the antibiotic injections and wants to slow them down some. He looks brighter, is more active, and is leaking a lot less pus and gore. He’s far from over it yet but he’s recovering.

Kang is packing at least three big pups in her belly, with room for a fourth to be hiding in there as well. Delivery any day now, as opposed to another week or so as I had thought.

Severe osteomyelitis. Essentially he has an infected face, with about three big pockets of infection.

Which… is not good news, but is better news than the alternative from the first x-ray we got, which was osteosarcoma. This sucks for him and will require a lot of shuttling back and forth from the vet for strong antibiotic injections, and may at some point involved draining one of the pockets, but it is treatable and not a terminal diagnosis as the bone cancer would have been.

Never been happier to hear “severe bone infection” in my life.

Sorry for the light content again. Zydeco got dropped off at the vet’s early this AM for a dental and what turned out to be very multiple tooth extraction. He had a canine go rotten, and because he’s a stoic little bastard who never betrays any sign of pain or discomfort until he’s ready to collapse, the first indication we had of this was the crap from the infection at the root backing up into his sinuses until he was sneezing it out. Yeah.

The vet’s office managed to forget to call us when he was ready to go home, so between his age, the existing infection, his very much underweight status, and the general anesthesia I spent most of the day engaged in mid-level fretting that was not particularly conducive to creativity.

I needn’t have worried. He lost a lot of teeth (the rot was pretty deep, and pretty extensive), and he seems to have a chronic high blood pressure problem he will be medicated for hence, but he bounced back like a very angry rubber ball and was trying to kill the vet through the bars of his cage. When he got home he raced to where he’s fed and leapt up, then was equally pissed off I had not already served dinner, which he ate with gusto despite what must be pretty significant pain. Aside from the hypertension, bloodwork showed his internals in remarkably good shape.

He’s 13 now, so seeing these signs that my mad little berserker is starting to show the effects of age is making me a little sad. I got him when I was just freshly an adult himself, so seeing him starting to wear out in places is bittersweet.

Less maudlin content tomorrow.

Enough serious business. The Republicans will get round to hideously disappointing us in due time, I’ve been spending more time than is healthy for me wielding sabres in other people’s comment sections and for whatever reason my body clock came up on “NO SLEEP FOR YOU” at an indecently early hour this morning. I want some caffeine, video games, and just generally to do something other than stare at a monitor willing the internet to drop real content in my lap.

- Fall comes (a month and a half late and honestly stepping on winter’s toes at this point), leaves turn color and fall, horror movie season gives way to family movie season, and the cat ceases to be satisfied with his normal nap spots and starts seeking contact and warmth like a candiru fish. Lately he has been expressing his objection to my insistence on failing to be a lap on the couch by crawling into my lap when I’m maximally busy (let me tell you, it really enhances a precision moment in a game to have a cat jump into your lap with claws out to hang on if you resist), or like now, taking over my mousepad in protest. As I need to open links in other tabs to finish this, this will mark the fifth or sixth time today I’ve ejected him from my desk. It’s not as though there isn’t a much better sunbeam over on the other side that’s actually warm; at this point, he’s just doing it to piss me off.

- Once upon a time, TV Squad hired Wil Wheaton to do episode reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation using his experience from behind the scenes playing the series’ most hated character. They were awesome and can be found here, but sadly the whole thing fell through before all the first-season reviews were even posted. It seems he’s published the first half of the first season as a book with the sections edited and expanded for content and to fix “dammit got to get this out of the way and posted AOL is paying me for this” factors. To my disappointment the last mention of the project on Wheaton’s blog seems to be dated 2009 so future volumes may be a no-go, however…

- Apparently Europeans are baffled about why we’ve fallen out of love with Obama, apparently because he’s just so cool and also not Bush. Same reason anyone who has ever dated the cool handsome kid in high school and then dumped him; cute is only enough from afar and so is “not my ex”. Y’all want him, he’s yours.

- So I suppose I should comment on what seems to be ongoing fascination with Ozzy Osbourne’s genome. Renowned sober-sided publication of record the New York Post refers to him as a “genetic mutant” because he has a number of gene variations that haven’t been bagged and tagged by geneticists before.

A little perspective; ten years ago there were exactly two fully sequenced human genomes out there. Now there are about 2,700 of them estimated to be complete by the end of the year, but compared to the size of the human population overall this is peanuts, especially given the overall rates of heterogeneity (multiple possible genes/alleles in the same location that do roughly the same thing) in the genome. Compounding the problem is that sequencing a genome is not remotely the same thing as annotating it- this is roughly the difference between copying the Rosetta stone and translating it. So yes, at this point if you sequence someone’s full genome and find a few things you don’t quite recognize among the things that the annotators have already gotten to and put into meaningful context, this is something of a dog bites man event.

Then again, given the number of spurious specifics cited by the genome sequencing company (Morbo says GENOME ANALYSIS DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY), this is most likely a pure case of GIGO. Most standout in the nonsense is the claim that Osbourne is the descendant of a Neanderthal- researchers don’t have anything approaching a list of reliable individual markers yet.

Kang and Kodos, rather than there being a clear alpha and a clear beta, have the sort of complex relationship with one another that’s fairly common to dogs (and humans, for that matter) of opposite sex. They tend to be much more concerned with intrasex pecking orders. Consequently, she defers to him some of the time (like guarding, in which she still looks almost totally up to him), bullies him mercilessly at other times, and at still other times he’s reminding her who’s really bigger by dragging her around by the neck for awhile while she yowls and complains.

Particularly, she is pushy about possessions. She will claim treats, toys, chews, beds, and favored nap spots from him just because she can. Kodos simply doesn’t care as much, so 95% of the time he lets her have them.

We brought a new dog bed home today, as we had two beds for three frequently used nap spots. Kang sniffed it extensively and decided she didn’t like it; when Kodos decided it was just fine, she threw a crybaby fit until she could take it back from him. (She only cared about the bed for about another minute.)

Many hours later, she walked into the room to find, imperiously spread out on the new bed she’d pissed and moaned so hard about Kodos taking before, the cat.

She took one long look, politely took the toy she’d left there, and went and lay down across the room to chew on it.

First, a little bit of background biological trivia. There will not be a quiz later, but I promise it is relevant to the story.

Cats, unlike dogs, need to learn how to properly kill prey from another cat, which will almost certainly be their mother. While you can see puppies descended from generations of show-ring ancestors practicing their killing bite-and-shake on a soft toy just as a matter of natural play, cats need to learn this behavior specifically- the stalk, chase, and pounce are built-in instinct, but the mechanics of the actual kill are not. Cats are one of the few predators that makes any special effort to kill large prey before it settles down to a meal rather than merely hoping to impede or immobilize it; most of us are familiar with near-surgical bite to the back of the neck to sever the spinal cord, but fewer have watched and understood footage of a lion or leopard firmly clamped on a large ungulate’s throat; the cat is not trying to “go for the jugular”, which is actually quite difficult to do properly, but to cut off its trachea and suffocate it. Useful tactics for a short-winded but powerful ambush predator but less so for a high-stamina chase-and-slasher, these techniques are apparently sufficiently advanced that they require enough education of young that the more rudimentary final-kill skills have faded from the library of instinctual behavior. Suffice to say, a domestic cat born to non-hunting indoor parents will not know how to kill prey. Our Siamese, Zydeco, is one such cat- fantastic enthusiasm and stalk-and-pounce instincts, but no practical knowledge.

So it came to be last night that at some point well past a decent hour, Zydeco started up with his I-have-a-problem howl. Stingray and I were full of immediate dread- Zydeco’s range of potential problems is limited, and most often his problem turns out to be that he feels sick and is about to create a spectacular new carpet pattern. However, this time, he sounded oddly… muffled. We were still trying to figure out what in the seven hells was going on when it became apparent what his problem was: he had bolted into our bedroom carrying a mouse, which he didn’t know what to do with. Being a sociable and fairly clever cat, he’d brought his problem to us. Being very excited and very inexperienced, he promptly dropped and lost control of the mouse, which was now firmly OUR problem. A confused session of upending and shaking everything in the bedroom eventually failed to turn up a mouse, and we were thus forced to give up and go back to bed for some very uneasy rest. (The dogs, who were of the opinion that it was WAY past their bedtimes and certainly too late for this nonsense, refused to stir themselves for any of it.)

Fast forward to early this afternoon, and Stingray noticed that Zydeco seemed oddly interested in the fireplace. He loves the fireplace with all his heart and soul, but he’s not usually excited about it unless he sees someone loading wood in. Stingray correctly drew the conclusion that the mouse had found refuge somewhere inside the fireplace, and summoned me to get an appropriate capture device. After handing him a cardboard box (far too large) and a jug normally used for iced tea (opening far too narrow), Stingray settled on having me empty the ash bucket so he could use that. Eventually he applied his Leatherman to the task of disassembling the appropriate part of the fireplace insert, and the mouse made an immediate break for it. Zydeco, who had been ready for just this moment for the last ten minutes and possibly his entire life, immediately caught it and attempted to race off with it. Stingray, figuring he was clearly just going to drop it unharmed again, lunged for the cat and mouse and succeeded in dumping the rest of the ashes over the cat’s head while the mouse escaped behind the entertainment center. Zydeco’s mews of excitement turned into furious yowls of outrage. We, and the newly interested Kang, regrouped in front of the TV, bringing the pack up to four actively involved members with three species represented.

Eventually, we succeeded in harrying the mouse out from behind the TV and shelving, where it made a bold strike for the dining room with Kang in hot pursuit and the rest of us in slightly cooler pursuit. She probably would have caught it then and there if the entryway in between hadn’t been tile- she nearly spun out making the turn, and had to get her hind legs back under control. As it was, she succeeded in pinning it by the bookshelves in the dining room… and, because it was small enough to completely disappear beneath her big snowshoe paw, she became confused about where it had gone and managed to let it go in the process of figuring that out. The mouse found itself a new refuge under another set of shelves in the office, which fortunately for us has enough space underneath it to look under- and, with the help of tools, reach under. Kang and Zydeco covered each end while Stingray covered the middle. Some sorting-out followed while we determined where the mouse was and Zydeco established that no, Kang was NOT to muscle in on his position. (She apologized with lowered ears and a noselick, which he seemed to accept.) I prevented Kang from solving the problem by upending the bookshelf while we pondered how to proceed.

After a period that consisted mostly of cursing and furred members of the family circling like sharks, and also involved the amputation of the mouse’s tail at one point when Stingray was a fraction of a second too slow with the bucket, it was concluded that the dedicated household predators had failed and human tool use was necessary. After a fruitless search for Stingray’s air pistol, which we apparently have the box for but not the device itself, a certain amount of overkill was applied in the form of his air rifle. (It was less overkill than using the crossbow would have been, mind you.) While Kang and Zydeco enthusiastically covered for Stingray’s absence while he fetched the pellets, they were less enthusiastic about his return to the proceedings - alpha pack mate or not. Eventually he was able to get the muzzle threaded between wildly dancing paws of various sizes and line up a shot. Confirming a hit, he raked the mostly-dead mouse out from under the shelf with a fireplace poker, and stood triumphant, rifle and poker in hand while I put a plastic bucket over it to keep the animals off.

“HAH! BROKE INTO THE WRONG GOD DAMN REC ROOM DIDN’T YA?!*”

“Is it dead?”

“It was breathing.”

“What do we do with it?”

“Plastic bag?”

“It sounds like it’s gotten up again. We’ll need to figure out more than that.”

“What if we AAAAHHH NOOOOO ZYDECO NOT THE BUCKET GAH DAMMIT”

Zydeco, not to be denied his prize by mere humans at this late stage in the game, had used his paw to flip the bucket back over, grab the mouse, and bolt. Naturally, he dropped it again, where it attempted a very aborted scurry until Kang swooped in to intercept the dropped pass. At that point the question of the mouse’s final dispatch became moot; Kang definitely is not confused about how to kill prey. Since she surrendered it reasonably willingly, she was given several of the most prized sorts of dog cookies all at once while the plastic-bag plan was put into action. Zydeco was given a bit of cheese to mollify him while cleanup wrapped up.

If you’re wondering where Kodos was in all this, he was waiting by the back door for someone to notice him and let him out so he could go lie down in the cool breeze- he was almost completely distinterested in the whole affair, once he figured out what we were doing. While Akitas are supposed to be a hunting-and-guarding breed, our two have apparently split the tasks between them.

Matt and Steve have achieved cooperative three-species hunting parties in the form of raptors and dogs. While we may now technically claim the same honor, I somehow doubt that dog-and-Siamese hunting is going to catch on.

*Stingray has been waiting for ages to get a chance to use this line. Geek points for you if you recognize the source.

When last we checked on the exploits of Zydeco, he had just finished a brief stint impersonating Ceiling Cat. Zydeco apparently liked this taste of supreme power, and tried to one-up himself by becoming not just Ceiling Cat, but the obviously higher level Roof Cat.

A few years back, while we were still living in a duplex, summers were an interesting exercise. Given the layout of the building, there was only one place that was viable to house all the computers. Having a significant amount of processing power in one small bedroom is already a good recipe for a very hot room, and in the winter it offset the god-awful insulation a bit to help keep things more comfortable. In the summer though, the afternoon sun, combined with the computers, made the room nearly unbearable. To combat this, we picked up a window-mounted AC unit.

Unfortunately, the window in the room was a sideways-opening window, rather than the vertical opening required for proper mounting of the AC. Since the heat was bad enough to occasionally reboot the computers, something had to be done, so we pressed on and mounted it anyway. We covered the gap above the unit with a truly ghetto-tastic combination of cardboard, plywood, and duct tape. I wasn’t happy with it, but it did the job and made the room livable.

Around this same time, we picked up a spare sofa. Formerly my grandmother’s, and a rather sturdy (if slightly ugly) offering from Ethan Allen, we were loath to turn it away, even though we didn’t really have space for it. After some creative efforts, we managed to get it up the stairs and into the computer room, directly under the AC, reasoning it would be a good place to sit and read during the peak of the heat.

Zydeco had other plans.

One evening, the three of us merrily sequestered in the computer room (this being before we got Kodos), LabRat and I were playing Unreal or some other “Hah! Gotcha!” game with each other. A pause in the game rolled around, and for some strange reason there was a sound artifact during a loading screen. Sort of an angry “YAAAA!” noise. Thinking little of it, we continued blasting each other to kingdom come. A few minutes later during another pause, we heard the sound again. This time it was slightly farther away, yet more angry and more insistent. Since LabRat was closer to the window, she became curious and looked around.

Then she noticed that the makeshift window-blocker had come askew. Near where Zydeco had been napping on the sofa. Who was no longer on the sofa.

At this point, things got interesting. Pulling the blocking material the rest of the way down, we confirmed that Zydeco had indeed decided for a little suburban exploration, and was stalking around on the roof of our back porch. Because Zydeco considers himself the most supreme destructive force known to exist, simply leaving him there to come in through the back door after his wanderings was out of the question. Any run-in with a coyote or bear would result in Zydeco making a very credible effort to destroy his agressor, but likely ultimately losing the battle. Plans were made to retreive him.

Did I mention that it wasn’t a work night, and the deathmatches had been progressing along the lines of “Oooh, they’ll be picking up the pieces of you from that one for a while! Take a drink!”? Fortunately, I was winning.

Anyway, a sane person would’ve simply gone around the back and used a ladder to remedy the problem. The drawback there is that our ladder was on loan to someone a good ways away. We scratched our heads and worked up Plan B.

After a brief discussion, while one of us kept a head out the window to watch our idiot explorer, we came up with three options. One, I could climb the firewood pile, stacked next to a storage shed, and from there scale the shed roof and clamber to the porch roof. Two, we could try to climb out to the porch roof the same way Zydeco did, over the AC. Three, we could go out the bedroom window, which overlooked the same porch and did not have an AC unit hanging in the way. Amazingly, we took the third tack. Throughout the process, Zydeco, being Siamese, felt obliged to comment.
“Well, we could - ”
“YAAAAAAA!”
” - climb up the firewood -”
“ROOOOOOOOORRWWW!”

It was a difficult conversation.

A few minutes later, after wrestling with a screen retention system obviously designed by Rube Goldberg himself, I managed to gain a clear access to the roof. Zydeco, trying to either kill me and make it look like an accident, or be helpful - the jury’s still out on which - had come over to the bedroom window, where he deposited himself directly where I was trying to land. I managed to avoid squishing him only through some feat of gymnastics which I don’t think was strictly physically possible. My legs informed me that tomorrow There Would Be Words about my efforts. The cat, who assumed I was on to his scheme to kill me, scarpered.

At first, he ran down the far side of the porch, past our adjoining neighbor’s bedroom. Luckily for me, she had apparently not gone to bed yet. At least, no police showed up to ask why someone was running around on the porch roof. Just as I was drawing near, Zydeco must’ve assumed my intent was not to return him safely to his indoor lifestyle, but instead to exact my own revenge for his previous attempt on my life, and doubled back, going between my legs. My grab found me slightly off balance, though fortunately only my posterior was wounded, rather than risking potential damage to the concrete below from my head had I fallen.

Having decided I was a credible threat to life and limb, Zydeco turned up his efforts to escape, and leaped the small gap to the shed roof, which was made of corrugated sheet metal, and set at a fairly decent slope. It was also covered with dead twigs from a sickly elm tree hanging over it, the sort of twig that’s just big enough around to act like a long, slender ball bearing if you step on it. I prepared to cross the gap between porch and shed.

Finally, a spare neuron in my head looked in and realized it was living in the skull of an idiot. Alerting its fellow neurons to their imminent peril, it organized a plan of action which involved me stopping and saying to myself something along the lines of “Y’know, I rather like having my neck in the current configuration, rather than twisted and mangled.”

With Zydeco staring haughtily at me from the shed roof, I withdrew from the gap, sat down, and told LabRat to go downstairs and catch him if he tried to descend via the aforementioned wood pile. While she descended the stairs, I began quietly and calmly outlining exactly what I thought of this stunt, as well as Zydeco’s questionable ancestry, and even offered a few suggestions as to his viability as a winter hat. Apparently, this stream of quiet profanity was soothing, as at this point he flicked his tail once, got up, sauntered over, and promptly sat in my lap.

LabRat wasn’t terribly thrilled about making the trip down the stairs only to have to march back up to help get the cat and me back in, but was happy enough that the cat was safe.

The sofa went back the next day.