Cat Tales, 4

All that the pernickety old woman expected me to live on until morning …

First thing this morning the pernickety old woman called me ‘Maggy’. Huh? Well I know she meant me, no one else present. I ignored her. I am Hand-of-God.

What the pernickety old woman and I are engaging in now, I’ll call the struggle for dominance, because that’s what I am about. You thought that was a dog thing? Ever seen a cat and dog stand off?

I overheard her say to a friend that she’s getting me accustomed to being awake in the daytime, and if that wasn’t enough, she’s getting me used to spending the majority of my waking hours indoors?

Well! We’ll see about that! I lay down on the mat in front of the backdoor—where sunlight beat through the glass and warmed me wonderfully. How could I not sleep for hours?

I did. I woke in the late afternoon. We could’ve had another stand-off about me going outside except that the woman distracted me with that red feather on stick.

She twirled the stick and I jumped and leapt and rolled at the twirling feather. We had a great time but that can’t happen again. I can’t let her win me over like this.

Then she showed me where she will feed me, in the kitchen. A white ceramic bowl filled with my favourite kibbles. Water right there beside them. I felt mollified and ate far too much.

I had another sleep and when I woke, I vomited up my kibbles. What a waste! Despite that I’m feeling wobbly in the middle, the old woman scooped me up, and ran me to the laundry.

She set me on the litter tray and waited expectantly. “Go on,” she said. “Sick up the rest.”

How embarrassing. I walked back to the drinking bowl in the kitchen. I drank. Waited by the food bowl for her to refresh the kibble supply.

Grumbling at herself, she cleaned up the vomit. “No more kibbles today,” she said.

What??!!! I’m telling you I created havoc that night!

Cat Tales, 3

Me, the Hand-of-God, trying to get out of the house

The pernickety old woman has many unnatural ideas about me, as I said. They cause a lot of strife and strangering between us, as you might expect.

Strangering is when someone pretends they are a stranger and they stalk away with their tail high and their self-respect intact.

Our first great struggle was about me intending to do my Hand-of-God work in the night. Let me tell you, I have stood hours at the back door, miaowing sternly, or piteously, begging, or forceful. “Open the cage door,” I would cry. “Let me explore the night!”

The first few times she told me about the nocturnal critters native to her backyard. She’d sworn that they’d go unmolested.

“I’m the Hand-of-God. I wanna get to know them,” I cried. She turned her back on me, got on with getting dinner.

The following dozen stand-offs at the backdoor, she told me about the little deaths delivered to her by a neighbouring tom. The morning he brought her a snakelet in three pieces, she decided that none of her pets would ever join in the nightly carnage.

“Pets?” I snarled. I’ll show her who the pet is in this house! I stalked into the bedroom and hid under the bed. Causing, I might add, a lengthy battle at her bedtime, with the easily deflected indoor broom.

“Go! Have the run of the house,” she said.

My last 20 or 30 attempts to gain the night, she served up several more excuses, the weakest one about the busy road out front where two of my predecessors met their demise. “I’m a super cat,” I cried. “The Hand-of-God!”

She apparently thinks she can wean me from my instincts. “If my instincts can be dampened down with enculturation,” she said. “So can yours!”

I showed her my teeth in disgust. Predictably, she laughed. “Like it or lump it,” she said.

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While this event is already past, I want to learn about the outcomes. Just reading the first few paragraphs, I’m sure I can learn ways to rephrase my messaging which seems to be falling on deaf ears at the moment.

Prior to my cancer scare I was a deep green greenie. I volunteered as a Landcare committee member, biodiversity co-ordinator, group leader and the local ‘fungi lady’.

Did talks in science week at schools, talk-and-walks about fungi in the local arboretum. Joined Knitting Nannas, an activist group. I fitted my house out with PV and a watertank.

When I woke after the end of the treatment, about July 2021, I was ecstatic that I had survived. And a few weeks later, very confronted by the seeming lack of concern about the climate emergency. My usual sources had dampened right down.

I had nothing left of any of the above, apart from an abiding fear for plants and wildlife and above all, how my very young grandchildren, and everybody-else’s descendents are mean to survive.

I had to relocate to the next state for the treatment, which all happened during covid. I’m in a rental with no control over the utilities. I have very little energy. No local contacts. But am still largely online.

My flavour of activism is being rejigged …

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Cat Tales 2

When I first came to live with the pernickety old woman I was about a year old, having spent my kittenhood secretly entertaining a pair of young lay-abouts in rented accommodation that had a strict no-pets rule blanketing it.

The young lay-abouts … I call them that for their lack of tables chairs or even a couch. They owned a mattress on the floor to lounge about on, satin cushions, a velvet couch cover, and a refrigerator. I had my toy bucket with a ball that spat kibbles.

Not so here. There’s furniture galore, many places where my toys go to hide when they’re too tired for more play. But anyway, I prefer getting the pernickety old woman to waft the red-feather-on-a-springy-stick. When she tires I’ll slip away as if for a cat-nap.

Then, when she’s busy at whatever humans get up to when they’re not attending their feline companions, I stalk through the house looking for an open window, an open door, a propped up sky-light.

Aargh! Even a chimney will do! How can I get into the backyard for my Hand-of-God work?

The pernickety old woman has a lot of bad-fangled ideas about what a self-respecting cat should do all day.

Cat Tales, 1

Hi, I’m the Hand-of-God. So called because I was born with a hand-outline, two hairs wide, on my back. But which was only my second name. At the cattery they called me Zorro.

The hand is hard to see now because I grew, and grew, and expanded and the hand expanded too, and became a blob.

Which is how the ignorant old woman now looking after me, calls it.

Hand-of-God? she says. You wish! Go on! I dare you go do something that God told you needs doing.

She obviously doesn’t know God is another name for Life, or Nature, if you’re pernickety like she is.

That night I hunted and ate all the cockroaches in the house. If that isn’t nature, what is?

What else can a Hand-of-God do locked up in an old house?

“I Don’t Speak Binary.”

Despite a ten minute trawl over my virtual fishing grounds, my mobile phone has not seen fit to supply me with an image I could use to help explain Lodestar’s timeline.

And that is, it’s not doing any imagery at all this morning, not even photos. I don’t know why. I probably only use about 50% of the phone’s capabilities often, I suspect, because “I don’t speak binary”.

Don’t you love that line? Pure frustration spoken by the Mandalorian in the last instalment of Season Three at his R5 droid’s explanations that it couldn’t instantly open gate 5 that second.

I felt instant rapport with the Mandalorian at that moment. How many times today already have you been required to speak binary, and didn’t, because you don’t?

The upshot of all that? I will craft an image myself. Sketch, paint maybe, scan-shot if I use digital paint, cam-shot if I use pigments, import into media library. A simple 4-step operation.

About The Lodestar Timeline

The Star Wars chronology has been my go-to viewing for the past few weeks. The Mandalorian has just said auf wiedersein to his small charge and will be at a loose end.

The Mandalorian series got me thinking about novels, such as The Crystal Planet by Vonda McIntyre, set in the Starwars universe.

[All Star Wars related media produced pre 2014 are now referred to as Legends, while for post 2014 material and the original series, Disney+ claims the ‘Canon’ label.]

While they all have only a tenuous position on the original timeline, TV series and books have expanded the Star Wars universe.

The original timeline of the Lodestar universe has always involved timetravel. Not sideways to expand the size of the universe yet, to give more options where to set stories, as in the Star Wars universe.

The Lodestar universe began in the future … I even set a date for its beginning when I was still new at the business of writing a universe. But it turns out that in a story that involves a time travelling, forward falling, octohedrenal spaceship such as the Lodestar, there is no beginning or end.

Because that’s what happened …