The Streamlined Cannonball

New toy

I have a been a good consumer this past week. I finally ordered a new bed frame (to replace the current frame, which is resting on boxes after having at last broken in a fatal way) and I ordered a new laptop (an iBook), the longstanding missing part of my freelance-productivity equation. I hope the economy takes notice. I tried to buy shoes and a big pile of books, too, but I was stymied by supply issues. Let the record show, however, that I made a good-faith effort.

I find it hard to work at home in the company of the world's cutest juvenile. Kittens are energetic, and they damage productivity in two ways. Well, in many ways, but two in particular have been plaguing me. 1) They are just so cute, you can't possibly concentrate. 2) When they require attention, they ambush you, jump on you, and bite you all over the place, especially your ankles.

I am a writer, and my hands are my livelihood. That means that I should take a break every hour or so anyway, so from a typing-at-the-keyboard standpoint, having a kitten that "reminds me to take a wrist break" is not a terrible thing. I wave the kitty fishing pole around until he starts trying to bat at it from a lying position rather than chasing it, and we're good. (This takes a shorter time than you might think, because I have developed an aggressive anaerobic training program for my cat. Of course, it probably takes a smidge longer every time, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, I will have an amazing, powerful supercat that will run me completely ragged.)

There are times that I don't need a wrist break, and the kitten still insists on reminding me to take one. When I am reading, for example, or when I'm editing. If I want to concentrate on those tasks, I have to leave the apartment. I pack up readings and pens and notepapers, and I head out to one of a few places on my rotation. I sit quietly, try to remember to say "thank you" when a server brings me something or takes something away, and I generally do a good job of concentrating on my work.

It's not just the kitten. I've always been more likely to be distracted by the familiar surroundings of my apartment than by the outside world. I do well resisting novelty, but more than that, being away from home limits the ways I can procrastinate. Take this morning, for example. I wanted to deliver some work by 1 PM. I did the dishes, neatened the bathroom, did some vacuuming, tired the kitten out a little, cleaned the top of the stove, picked up the mail, and made some phone calls. Let me repeat, I cleaned the top of the stove. I'd have done more, but I was supposed to work over the weekend, too, so there wasn't much left. Had I had a laptop, I could have gone to a cafe, where the only thing I'd have had to do would be stare at my screen and write. Maybe drink some tea.

I ordered the laptop on Thursday, it shipped on Friday, and it arrived late this morning. I've already looked it over and tested the modem, and I can start using it for work right away, although my file-sharing system will be rudimentary for the time being. My kitten has been enjoying the cardboard box it arrived in, which has a perfect kitten-sized hole in it (to allow the item labeling on the packaging to show). An engineer from Apple came to my apartment within hours of the delivery, inquired after my "out-of-box experience," and showed me how to make some changes to my desktop.**

The iBook won't get its maiden voyage until tomorrow -- today's deliverable will be completed on the current work machine. I have yet to figure out exactly what software I want enough to buy again, to set up the networking, and to figure out where my email will reside. I won't be traveling for a couple of months, so the timing should work out as well in the medium term as it has in the short term. I have a few days to spare before Labor Day Weekend. I think the Three-Day Novel Contest will be an excellent shakedown cruise for this putative maximizer of productivity.

--

** This service may not be available in all markets, or indeed in any market other than this one.

August 26, 2002

August

I was living on the edge. Writing group starts at 7 PM, and I figured that if the plane pulled up to the gate right on time, and the shuttle was pulling up to the blue-and-white curb as I walked out of the terminal, and I actually remembered what floor I parked my car on, I would have just enough time to straighten up my apartment and tire the kitten out a little so we'd be able to concentrate. "I thought I was cutting it close leaving work at 6 PM," said a group member who works on the Peninsula. I left Seattle at 3:35.

It was another miniature gathering, two people plus a third who came at the end, for the workshop portion. The exercise was to write about a time when you felt like you were becoming a person of your own (20 minutes to write).

At some point, we learn to lie to our parents. I don't mean the simple lies, redirections of blame or brazen claims, hand still in the cooky jar, that we never went anywhere near the kitchen. I mean lies about who we are. There is a point, a Rubicon that, once passed, ends the era in which our parents know us better than anyone. Sometimes it's the start of our parents' being the last to know.

For me that point was boys (as opposed to crime or drugs). I constructed alibis with other girls, cross-covering for each other's illicit night-time meetings. Curfews were strict, and rules were meant to be followed. Good grades and chores cheerfully done meant less supervision and fewer questions. The price was gladly paid.

Boys proved problematic but by then the experiences were so enmeshed in lies that I could not ask for advice from my wisest, most trusted friend, my mother. The mere fact of feeling that way about her suffused me with guilt over my deceptions. Eventually, when the pressure was too much, I started to crumble. Confused and hurt and wondering whether girls, instead, were the answer, I contrived to start some kind of conversation about my pain with my mother. I didn't get a chance to be oblique before she blurted, apparently at random, "I don't know what I'd do if one of my children turned out to be gay. I'd feel like I'd failed as a parent."

So much for that.

I moved out shortly after high school, long before I started college. I learned the value of my wisest and most trusted friend. We got closer in the idiosyncratic ways that mean the most to us. Hiding became not merely undesirable but irrelevant. I turned to her in times of crisis, great and small, and bared the kinds of innermost secrets she probably never wanted to hear.

On July 4th of this year, I called her for help. I had a severe puncture wound, kitten inflicted, on my finger, and it was hot and swollen. I was concerned, and she was, too. She's a physician, and she really just wanted to know whether I had a preference of antibiotic for her to prescribe. Details out of the way, pharmacy phone number taken, she asked how I got such a bad cat bite. "I was handling kittens," I said, handwaving, changing the subject.

My face was hot with shame, not at needing help but at having courted disaster. It was more than a week before I told her I had gotten a kitten. Yes, the same one that bit right through my fingernail. Not so much a lie, by now, as a confirmation of something she already knew.

I had planned to write about a different lie. The kitten is the big lie, but I meant to write about telling my mother how I came to fall in love with him. A few days before I went home last week, I was talking to my mother on the phone, and I remarked casually that I am completely enchanted with this kitten. She reflected that she thought my love for him had evolved appropriately, from my being not completely sold on him at first to developing a deep affection for him as his personality emerged and we spent more time together.

She obviously doesn't read my journal. He had me at "Meow."

I know why she got the impression she did. My sense of self-preservation is alive and well, but then there have never been so much as rumors of its death to be exaggerated. I deeply appreciated my mother helping me save an urgent-care center visit on a holiday weekend and getting me on antibiotics right away, and I wasn't about to undermine my position by staying on the phone to gush about how entranced I was about the wild animal that had attacked me. (I could feel the pursed lips and the crossed arms through the phone line when I told her I kept him.)

Lucky for me, he's turned out to be a model cat, well behaved and affectionate and healthy. I've been gone overnight before, but my trip to Seattle was five full days, and the apartment is much as I left it, with just a couple of things out of place. Three and a half years of a destructive cat who was happy to hold me hostage with her bladder has made me sloppily grateful for this contented pet. I gave him several treats as he showed me the new things he started to do while I was gone. After one very beautiful jump, I rewarded him for ... for jumping onto a counter.

When I came in the door yesterday, the kitten bounded down the hallway toward me, still pigeon-toed, his shoulders bulkier than I remember. He was noticeably larger, heavier, still leggy, but muscling up. He jumped into my arms, like wumpus in the horse paddock that day, purring, clinging, pushing his head against my chin. Now I know I can safely leave for a week at a time. But why would I want to?

August 21, 2002

Love the one you're with

My father has a barn with a rodent problem, 35 miles from the city. He is always on the lookout for a good ratter.

"Be sure to tell your father that one of the cats caught a large rat the other day," my mother said last week.
"Which one?"
"I don't know. So he has to take both."

My mother is allergic to cats now, too. She always assumed she wasn't allergic to animals. So did I, although it was quite dramatic when my cat allergy was identified. I had debilitating symptoms, severe enough to prevent me from working. That was the flare-up that demanded attention; my asthma had been bad enough that I sought medical care for quite some time beforehand.

My mother assiduously managed my asthma from at least my adolescence, but I don't remember taking it seriously. I rode bikes or went running or whatever I was into at the time. I could never be depended on to carry an inhaler. A trial on extended-release oral theophylline was an even greater failure than a rescue inhaler: both made me feel worse than the symptoms themselves. The theophylline made me feel downright sick.

Just after the Persian Gulf War, I had a serious respiratory illness, possibly the 'flu, although the urge to refer to it simply as Gulf War syndrome has never worn off. I was off work for a long time. I remember being sick for two weeks. When I went back to work, I felt like I'd lost a lung.

I saw an allergist who didn't work me up for allergies at all. He treated me for something called intrinsic (or nonallergic) asthma, not unreasonable since I reported sensitivity to cigarette smoke and a recent respiratory illness. (One alternative diagnosis is "allergic asthma," which is probably what I have had throughout my life.) His treatment involved starting me with a tapered course of steroid pills to help clear the junk that had accumulated in my lungs. He put me on daily steroid for asthma, too, but I couldn't comply. It involved an enormous inhaler that offered all the charm of sucking air out of a bicycle tire. Inhalers are like that, but this one required four puffs four times a day. I elected to live with my symptoms.

The symptoms were severe compared to what I was used to, but they didn't elicit overwhelming sympathy. My mother's then-clinic treated patients with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder with a number of effects, including massive reduction in lung function. I stopped by her clinic to have a tech administer a quick lung-function test and emerged dejected, with measurements that reflected a 33-percent drop from previous results. My mother suggested I at least wait until I left the clinic to complain, surrounded as I was by people whose lung function tested out, best case, at about 33 percent of mine.

Even in my damaged state, I still had lung function roughly equal to normal for a person of my size and age. My symptoms were bad enough to make me complain but not bad enough to make me comply. It would be another five years before my allergy crisis motivated me to keep allergy relievers in the apartment, and a decade before I'd use asthma medication on a regular basis.

--

Doctors have always been more interested in my asthma than I have. I've been prescribed inhaled steroid and rescue inhalers regularly by every primary care physician. I've been offered peak-flow meters so I can monitor my lung function at home. I find it a little silly, in some ways more so since I started taking it more seriously myself and monitoring my condition.

I signed up for a study last year, and I have a visit every month or two. On some visits, I answer questions. On others, I have extensive, sometimes unpleasant monitoring tests. On all visits, I have spirometry, a careful measurement of the same functions I had tested in my mother's clinic more than a decade ago. I use two compounds twice a day, and I don't know whether either is medication or placebo. For one brief phase of the study, I was on open-label medications to bring me up to presumably my best lung function and compare my status then to my status in other phases of the study. I'm back on the study drugs, and I can't tell whether what I'm taking is different.

I am a Good Patient. My compliance is not perfect, because real life intervenes, but I answer their questions thoughtfully and accurately, to the best of my ability. I follow directions and refrain from using allergy medications and caffeine before my visits, even though caffeine in particular is so routine for me that this can result in comical levels of effort. I have had an exquisite cup of hot chocolate raised to my lips and then realized I couldn't drink it, have made a whole breakfast and had to sacrifice the fresh-brewed pot of tea for water. This sounds trivial but trivial indulgences are the hardest to deny.

I am laughably serious about the outcome measures, and I follow the directions literally and with such focus on each step that I often need to be prompted throughout, even with procedures that I have by now done dozens of times. "Ah, a doctor's daughter," said the principal investigator, watching my spirometry readings over my shoulder one morning. The curves for each of the three tries their protocol requires were nearly identical, the numbers within less than 1% of each other.

My athletic performance has improved this year, and maybe it's due to the attention effect. I manage to forget my spirometry results from visit to visit. I let them collect their data and don't second-guess my progress. I enjoy the approval they almost reflexively give me as I report no emergency room visits, no night-time wakings due to asthma symptoms, no uses of the open-label medication issued to me in case of a sudden escalation of my symptoms. It's so fast to do my questionnaire, they say, and my curves are so repeatable. ("Nice curves!" that same physician allowed himself to say, and I laughed, the good daughter.)

--

I was catless almost long enough for my apartment to become clear of cat allergen. I noticed some improvement right away. My previous cat had the thickest, silkiest fur of any cat I've ever touched, and it coated everything. Even if it had not itself been coated with allergen, the sheer volume of it would surely have irritated the strongest respiratory tract. Every hair was a delivery system for a biological weapon both stable and sticky. Though diminishing, my continuing reactions were enough to remind me how significant, if not strictly serious, my allergy is.

I sneezed and teared for several days a couple of days after bringing the kitten home. It hasn't dissuaded me, of course. It's motivated me to keep exposing him to water; clean-water baths made a difference whenever I made sure my cat had them regularly, and I won't waste this opportunity to train a new and pliant feline mind to expect them. I use my air cleaner every day now, although I turned it off before I brought him home so as not to scare him right away with a hissing object in the very middle of his new home.

It was being at my mother's house that made me take my allergies more seriously, and my mother's new diagnosis seems to underscore the petty perils of life here. The only asthma attack I have ever had that was severe enough to send me in search of a rescue inhaler was in this house just over a year ago, in the room I continue to sleep in when I stay here. My attack did not actually wake me, but when I did wake up, I found I could not breathe normally without coughing and that I could not speak.

There's cats here, and I'm a cat person. Who couldn't see that coming? But these cats avoid me, and while I've never fully accepted that, in this house I am not (as I am in my apartment) sharing my pillow with a cat. These are potent cats, poisonous and unusually so, compared to their cousins. They spend almost all their time outside, but in the house they rain down a torrent of symptoms even in the complacent.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that I never learn. When I see one of these toxic cats snoozing, I drift over, unthinking, to pet her. I pick her up and let her allergen-laden fur come away on my shirt. I know what's coming, and still I reach out, as if their unwitting theft of my breath is a cry for help, an act inviting my forgiveness and affection. If they sit still long enough to be touched, they begin to purr. I feel rewarded even as I start to wheeze.

August 19, 2002

August 15, 2002

August 14, 2002

August 12, 2002

August 11, 2002

Increasing in wisdom and stature

Thursday took us to the vet for a well-kitten visit: follow-up distemper shot, advice about trimming his claws, and information about this newly intense nursing behavior. He's teething, I was told. She showed me his pink gums and where a fang is being pushed out.

Since he was weaned before I took him, it's less likely to be nursing behavior per se, even if it seems like nursing and has a comfort component for him. It does for me, too. I was gone for nine hours on Wednesday, afraid that when I got home, my kitten would be bouncing off the walls, ready to claw me into a sieve just from nervous energy. He wasn't. He burst into tumultuous and ragged purrs when I walked in the door and latched onto my hand and wouldn't be dissuaded.

Women sometimes feel sexual pleasure when they nurse their infants. It should come as no surprise, but it's hard to talk about it. Our society can barely tolerate the notion, and certain disapproval engenders shamed silence. I understand this mix of pleasure and shame on a more visceral level now. It flatters me that my kitten treats me like source of comfort, purrs and kneads and suckles as if I really am his mother now. And that pleasure shames me, in part because I feel like this is a situation I have forced on him. Who knows what's in his mind and how it got there? I soak up the attentions of this energetic growing animal that has no other options, flattering myself that it's me me me that he loves.

We came back from the vet to an apartment getting more oppressive by the hour in the un-San Francisco heat, into the 90s and no, it wasn't OK because it was a dry heat. Hot weather makes it easy to feel sorry for a tiny creature that is covered with hair. The kitten moved from spot to spot in the apartment, stretching out to maximize his surface area. As the day dragged on, company trumped comfort, and he came back and snoozed near me, even braved my lap a few times rather than shelter alone in a cool closet.

In the late afternoon, I ran a bath for myself. I came out of the bathroom to finish one or two things. I heard a sploosh and a few other watery sounds, and then an utterly waterlogged kitten came trotting out of the bathroom. I swept him up in a towel and blotted him while he finished grooming. It's now a weekly ritual for us. He shouldn't be soaked that often, but as long he doesn't have a long bath every time, his fur and skin should be fine. A friend says now he knows that if he jumps in the tub, he gets snuggled in a towel, but I think he's just playing a game of chicken with himself, and his imperfect coordination achieves an unfortunate synergy with the smoothness of the edge of the bathtub.

That bit of excitement aside, it was a quiet afternoon for us. I had a severe allergy attack, which caused my eye to swell shut and prompted me to load up on antihistamines. It turned out to be a good day to get him a drowsy-making shot; he mostly lolled in the afternoon, toward in the interior of the building, where the apartment is coolest, and I was able to sleep off the antihistamines in peace.

I've continued to have more peace. Friday was another hot day, and this time the kitten was warring internally between a desire to bat his toys all over the apartment and a need to stretch out completely flat on the cool enamel of the bathtub. He managed to bounce around ocassionally during the day, banking off me on his laps around the apartment.

Years of adult cats without claws did spoil me, but the trimmed claws are a marvel. I can't think why I didn't ask for a demonstration when I took him to the vet the first time. As he bats and banks, I find the touch of his paws unbelievably soft and realize that he has been retracting them, perhaps from the moment he was able. They've just been so long and sharp so suddenly that he tagged me regularly.

He seems to look more adult with every day, and even though I know it's just the heat, the last couple of days of quiet lounging have filled me with happy anticipation about his adulthood. He is becoming more weighty, too, more substantial in my hand as I scoop him up from the floor. He weighs easily twice what he did when I got him, and he is growing out of the abrupt kitten-shifts between crazed and sacked out and into the more languid and attitude-ridden poses of the adult.

Size matters. He's big enough to jump to the bathroom sink in one leap now; the kitchen counters aren't far behind. He's more coordinated on the edge of the tub, but there's more to coordinate, and slips are a little more common in this middle stage -- that is, I feel certain that they will become less common soon. His weight alone makes some of his routine more difficult. He rockets up the surfboard, but if he tries to steady himself with his claws on the way down, he's liable to stick and somersault over them. So he's taken to sliding down, springing onto the bed from about halfway. He really is a surfer now, choosing the perfect moment to end his ride and pop back over the shoulder of the wave.

He is a shoulder surfer, too, clambering up to get a better view, get access to the spider plant, or just get a ride to another part of the apartment. It's more fun if I'm standing, but I don't have to be. When I wake up in the morning now, he's snoozing on the pillow beside me, perched on my shoulder, his forehead pressed against my temple.

August 10, 2002

August 9, 2002

At the vet

Spider-plant update

They say a spider plant is hard to kill. I'm not so sure. My kitten almost dispatched mine in just a few seconds yesterday.

He's not quite big enough to get onto the kitchen counters on his own, but he wants to, so badly. He has turned into an on-top-of-things cat, who won't be held if he can get onto a shoulder, who gazes down at me at my desk from on top of the bookcase. He can't get to the top of the food chain in this household, but he's not about to stand for another organism living in a higher spot, even if all it eats is sunlight. Perhaps especially then. Cats are jealous of their sunspots.

The kitchen counters are a mystery, an Emerald City that he gazes toward with longing. Especially the cabinet top near the stove, where the spider plant resides. He already has heart, courage, and a brain. He's examining every route, testing his brute jumping strength from the floor, testing his balance as he seeks a stable platform above the floor and closer to the counter.

He's had some success with trips on the monkey elevator. He lulls me into glassy-eyed adoration and travels around on my shoulder for a bit. When I go into the kitchen to pour another cup of tea, he looks frankly at the plant and makes his move. I let him examine the plant, but within seconds he starts biting, and I scoop him up. Yesterday, knowing that he didn't have much time, he started digging immediately, exposing about three-fourths of the plant's roots before I could whisk him away.

The kitten's less lethal interests deprive him of the focus that might have had him finishing off that plant by now, although he's clearly looking forward to it. I've identified a place on the wall where a plant hanger has resided in the past, and I'll use the little time I have left wisely. I should be able to find a nice hanger tomorrow.

August 8, 2002

Kitten Tummy

How can I work under these conditions?

The seamy underside of romance

Today he drank from my bathwater. I thought it was the pinnacle of romance until I discovered his water bowl was empty. He did seem suspiciously eager at the edge of the tub; he braced himself with his front paws actually below the water line.

His balance is improving daily, but his increasing size is a disadvantage on the edge of the tub, and he fell in again. I caught him and wrapped him in a towel, and he remains perfectly calm about the aftermath of these incidents. It's becoming a ritual with us. Perhaps he even enjoys it.

I began the day with not quite enough sleep. Kitten alarm, which involves numerous direct hits to the monkey head, has no snooze button. I rolled out of bed and into bike clothes and did a quick 30 miles before I could think clearly about what I was doing. I went out along Skyline, which has lovely views but succeeded primarily in making me wish I had a motorcycle. I didn't go very far, both to cut short my longing and to get on with my day.

Kitten's energy was high when I got home, and we had an extended game of kitty fishing pole. Today saw another developmental milestone: first stuttering while chasing a bird-like object. This chattering sound has always struck me as a feline attempt at a bird call, but I've read that it doesn't have any purpose or at most is a dry run for the killing neck-bite. If that's true, it seems like a singularly arrogant sound to make while stalking prey.

By midday the lack of sleep had caught up with me. Apparently, the mere whisper of my desire for a nap was enough to send him into a fresh bout of kitty crazies. Regretfully I closed a door between us, albeit not until I had determined that it would be impossible to sleep through repeated (and vigorous) attacks on my toes.

On waking, the first thing I did was open the door. The kitten purred upon seeing me and was quite calm and willing to forego toe-biting. He was also feeling somewhat needy and commenced nursing behavior almost immediately. This mostly involves licking and kneading. I've tried to discourage earlobe-sucking for practical reasons. He drools all over the place, and his teeth are getting big, which invariably leads to a painful allergic reaction on my part.

Kitten is trying to find a good substitute for my earlobe somewhere in the vicinity of my neck, and today he settled on my collarbone. Wumpus used to do some nursing behaviors (limited to kneading and nosling) at my collarbone, so I let my guard down. I ended up with a drooly neckline and a hickey. A hickey is never an attractive thing, whether on an adult or a teenager. I'll be wearing higher necklines for the next day or so, because this is something I definitely don't care to explain again.

We are developing our own peculiar relationship. Wumpus's long, early illness gave us some odd rituals, but these seem odder somehow. I do give in and refer to myself as his "mommy," but the bathing and nursing behavior makes him more of a child surrogate than I feel comfortable with. The nursing in particular, since the bathing is another practical matter to do with my allergies.

I remember thinking this afternoon, "Maybe I should get him a little bottle or some kind of kitty pacifier so it's not my skin at least," and then shaking my head. I can't get my kitten a pacifier, and the last thing I need is to train him that sucking results in food. Just the logistics involved in going on vacation make me shudder. The whole point of cats is their relative independence -- leashing oneself to a bottle-feeding schedule is not on. Bottle-feeding. I can't believe I considered it. Oh, I can believe it; he seems so happy, and he purrs so loudly.

The purr, what an amazing sound. I wonder if the world would be a more peaceful place if humans purred? Would we have made it out of Africa? Or would humans still be concentrated there, perhaps alternately sharing fruit and greeting each other, bonobo fashion, and just curling up in piles, purring. No art, no science, no technology. Religion would be unnecessary. In a society intoxicated by purring on demand, there would be no weighty questions. Who cares how we got here or whether there is life after death, just rest your nose near my ear and purr, close enough that I can feel the faint vibrations on my skin.

August 4, 2002

August 3, 2002

What he is to be he is now becoming

The kitten and I continue on the adventure of exposing him to new things and setting his boundaries. I want him to be an affectionate cat that is open to new experiences, so I handle him often and try to bring new people into his environment. So far he hasn't embarrassed me in front of my guests.

Last week I hosted a small coffee meeting and brought two attendees over afterward to meet him. We stood near each other, and he walked from shoulder to shoulder examining these new people, both of whom have cats at home. Late this week he met two more people, briefly, again happily climbing onto new shoulders.

I hosted writing group in my apartment on Tuesday, and he was extremely charming. He had an advantage: we weren't exactly a tough crowd. We did manage to get work done, although he took almost every opportunity to use his feline wiles on us, usually with great success.

Today he visited the next-door neighbor and the cat that lives there, a 2-year-old female about three times his weight who hissed at him almost continuously. He was appropriately submissive the first few minutes, but then his desire to explore her entire territory took over, and his head popped up and his fur flattened again.

Come to think of it, six of the seven new humans my cat has met in the past ten days have been women in their 30s. He must be developing some strange ideas about what monkeys are like. Or maybe he just assumes that we're bonobos**, sending our most vibrant dignitaries to meet the regal new arrival.

Wait until he meets my friend's great dane. That should be a Kodak moment.

Of course, I am a never-married woman in my mid-30s with a new kitten and a digital camera; almost every minute of the day is a Kodak moment. Or Nikon, as the case may be. I have taken almost 800 pictures of this kitten in less than two weeks, some of them quite good. The cat has gone from squinting at every flash to gazing steadily as I snap, and I imagine that he has become kind enough to refrain from going supernova with cuteness the minute I put the battery in the charger.

The kitten has also gone from having to do chin-ups on the side the tub to being able to peek right over the edge, his back feet planted firmly on the ground. (I'm a sentimentalist, I gave him another chance to fall in, and he did, then popping out, grooming, and returning for a rematch. Every cat is peculiar in its own way.) He is long and lissome now, a sleek torso on spidery legs, his head growing into his ears. He still plays with his tail, but more hours of his days are spent basking or otherwise reclining, elegantly, ideally right in the middle of my work. The kitty fishing pole brings the inner child out again, but even this practice for his most primal -- or essential -- role seems more an opportunity to demonstrate his growing grace, speed, and leaping prowess.

Eleven p.m., prime kitty-crazies time. Crab-walking, banking off every surface, and laps around the apartment and up and down the surfboard are the stuff of my next half hour. I'm ready for sleep myself. If I want any, I'll have to get out the cat dancer and tucker the little monster out.

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** Don't read too much into this.

August 2, 2002

August 2, 2002

August 2, 2002

August 2, 2002

August 1, 2002