Drinking and Cats

Here's a not particularly good picture I was absurdly happy to take this morning. I've been trying to make friends with that black cat for over a year. She's very standoffish and I think she's a stray though my mother, who lives nearby, said she saw the cat in someone's yard like she owned the place. But she acts like that in my yard too. I see her catching mice and lizards and I think she lives off them.

I saw her drinking from the fountain in the upper right corner one day. That fountain is choked with algae and I know how cats like fresh water so I bought that little bowl for her some time ago. I'd see her drink out of it every now and then but over the past couple weeks the workmen who've been putting new floor in the kitchen had been going through the backyard and had set up their table saw to cut planks outside. They'd tossed the bowl into a big flower pot.

To-day, almost a week after the construction ended, I finally saw her in the backyard again and I realised the bowl was empty. I slowly, cautiously went outside to refill it but she ran around the corner anyway. I came slowly around the corner and saw her staring at me wide eyed about ten feet away. I employed the "slow blink" technique I learned from this video about cat body language posted by my friend Spooky on her Facebook.

The cat seemed subtly baffled but didn't run. So I slowly turned around, took the bowl into the house, filled it with water, and brought it back out, making sure the sound of the bowl touching concrete was audible. Then I went back inside and finished making my breakfast. I didn't expect her to come back--she usually avoids the house for a day or so after she's seen a human. But as I was finishing making my breakfast, I looked out and saw her drinking from the bowl. I got my camera and took the picture above. Maybe I'll try and get her some food now.

The neighbour's cat, Snow, doesn't attack her but seems to feel a kind of adorable social anxiety around her. I saw her once just staring up at him when he was sitting on the fence. His response was to continually look around and cry as though he expected someone else to do something about her.

This morning I also watched Saturday's new episode of Monogatari, a series which so far hasn't been especially interesting, particularly when compared with its predecessor Bakemonogatari. But this arc concluded with a surprisingly Kiernan-esque moment.

Araragi and the child vampire Shinobu have been in an alternate timeline where most of the world's population had been turned into weak, shadowy, zombie-like vampires and Araragi had been dead several years. Shinobu in this timeline was in her adult body, not living literally in Araragi's shadow, and as a consequence she's tried destroying the world before failing in a suicide attempt by burning herself. Araragi and child Shinobu show up planning to fight her but she loses all her will when she learns there was an alternate timeline where she and Araragi ended up together. The nice moment comes when she says the knowledge of everything that had happened and everything she'd done was hard enough to bear without the alternate timeline being shoved in her face.

Twitter Sonnet #545

Nostril bands decipher thumbs as postcards.
The blue serpent recalled the impostor.
Eggs were stolen with snug pipes in scabbards.
Loose follicles foiled the scalp roster.
U turned tallies hook the croquet mallets.
Wolf skins folded four times incubate cells.
Elbows snap in centres of novelettes.
Returned rockets ring the usual bells.
Loaf of Olympus half recalls Hera.
Electric hair massaged a rubber scalp.
Martian glow sticks avoid square old Terra.
The only ones sent in the club are kelp.
Adult and child fold to one scarecrow.
Split straw timelines meet in a brittle bow.