Monthly Archives: April 2019

April 12, 2019 · 3:41 pm

The taxman cometh! And so did the pollen!

Durham has heavy pollen this time every year. This year it got really heavy.Running down the gutters after a rain.

Washing off the driveway.

Even turning our dogs’ leashes yellow.

It got so bad that even though I’m on Claritin (to avoid rashes from all the grass pollen carried on the pups’ coats), allergies laid me low mid-week. This was a regular problem a couple of times a year back in Florida but I’ve never had it here before. No sneezing, just this insane draggy feeling that nothing in the world would be better than lying down and watching television all day (trust me, that’s not normally a thing I say). So that cost me a day and a half.

And then about two days went to taxes. I had almost everything figured out, but the state income tax form wouldn’t let me enter data on the computer so I had to print it up, then write it out. Then print it out again to fix my mistakes. I suspect it will come back to me: the NC Department of Revenue scanning system is much stricter in how it’ll take data than the IRS, so most years I’ve had to re-enter my return because of some technicality. But it’s done, so that’s good. We’re paying in this year, but that’s primarily because I made more money than I expected and didn’t have to pay estimated taxes, so we got socked with a bigger bill than usual. Ouch. And our printer is slow, which drew the process of printing the forms out longer than it should have. Next year I shall take steps to avoid that.

In the remaining time, I did some research reading for the Undead Sexist Cliches book and got some useful feedback from beta readers (one yet to come). I got a lot of work done on a redraft of Impossible Things Before Breakfast, though I still lack a good finish. And that was pretty much it. But taxes needed doing before Monday, like it or not.

Wisp has been an erratic presence on the deck. She’s still not showing up regularly for her meals the way she used to, and there’s another cat we caught eating at least one of the meals we put out. As Wisp has fought to drive off strange cats before, I’m guessing she’s getting food at someone else’s house and so can afford to turn up her nose at ours. Even though someone else might be better situated to take her in, I do feel a twinge of jealousy at the thought.

Trixie has had a hacking cough the past couple of weeks. It’s mostly faded, but we kept her home from Suite Paws day care this week just in case. Much as I enjoy a dog-free day, she’s pretty easy to handle when she’s by herself. But if the hack doesn’t go away, we’ll call the vet next week (I’m wondering if it’s pollen-based).

I’ve also realized that one reason I have trouble focusing after lunch is that Plushie likes to settle into my lap, then stretch out, rather than curling into a ball. This usually puts me in a position that, while not exactly uncomfortable, it strains my body enough that I have a hard time focusing (Trixie’s position on either side of me sometimes makes it worse). I like Plushie curling up in my lap, but I’ll have to position my legs so he can’t expand out.

#SFWApro. Photos are mine, please credit if you use them.

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Filed under Personal, Short Stories, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Undead Sexist Cliches: The Book, Writing

April 12, 2019 · 5:10 am

Breadsticks!

So last weekend I made breadsticks. I’d never tried before, but TYG said she’d like some and her wish is, of course, my command. I found one recipe in my cookbooks, but on the day of baking I saw it was a bulk recipe and I wasn’t sure I could scale it down. I turned instead to Secrets of a Jewish Baker and found a more manageable size, though I did use some of the advice from the other book. The result:

They tasted great (I mixed some Parmesan and garlic powder into the dough) but looked a little pastier in real life than they do in the photo. A friend of mine recommended a vegan bread wash which should fix that next time.

#SFWApro. Images are mine, please credit if you use.

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April 11, 2019 · 5:10 am

No, clothes do not make the rapist

I’ve had Jessica Wolfendale’s law journal article on Provocative Dress and Sexual Responsibility on my desktop for a while. I’m glad I finally got around to it. The article covers a topic I’ve written about before (the myth a rape victim was asking for it) and does it well. Two points in particular jumped out at me:

1)Under the standards used in some states, a husband or boyfriend murdering his wife for divorcing him or taking out a restraining order could be classed as manslaughter rather than murder, on the grounds the killer was driven by overwhelming emotion. As Wolfendale says, this allows the man to rewrite the law: a restraining order doesn’t really restrain him. A woman’s right to divorce doesn’t entitle her to leave if he loses it.

2)The standard that a woman should expect rape if she’s “dressed to convey sexual availability” supposedly makes women responsible for what happens. In reality it takes away their agency: whatever they think they were doing (looking professional-but-attractive for work, wearing makeup because it’s expected, wearing shorts because it’s hot), their intentions are less important than what men think they were doing. By Rod Dreher’s logic, if a man thinks a woman looks like a hooker, it’s natural for him to rape her. Most women I know with tattoos don’t think they’re flaunting their sexuality; Dreher thinks they’re slutting it up. So presumably they’re asking for it, the jezebels. Much as Saudi women who cover up everything but their eyes can be punished for having sexy eyes.

And of course, women often look sexy because it’s a job requirement. And because they’re constantly being judged on their clothing in ways men aren’t.

In other news:

An older article from Time on sexism and school dress codes.

Jessica Valenti looks at comments on one article about anti-rape slutwalks.

Back in Steubenville, OH, two teenage boys raped an unconscious girl (they’d all been drinking) and shared videos with classmates. Think Progress looks at how the media took the boys’ side, for example discussing how hard it will be for them if they have to register as sexual offenders the rest of their lives.

A fascist endorses the idea that women should have to pay incels sexual reparations. And here’s an incel who thinks slave women had it easy because all they had to do was have sex.

Passage is a long-shot but I do like this Dem-backed bill fighting sexual harassment.

Another prominent harasser (whom somehow I’d missed hearing about).

“Older men are sex symbols” has been a fantasy for a long time (a fantasy in that while some older men are sexy, a lot of us are just old). It’s also a popular fantasy for incels who imagine themselves getting hotter with age while women wither up and become spinsters. We Hunted the Mammoth tackles the bullshit.

Trump cabinet member Alex Acosta broke Florida law as a prosecutor by giving accused serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart plea bargain. In a recent Congressional hearing, Democrats pummeled him for his decision. The standard Repub defense in these situations seems to be that it’s all politics, but that’s no excuse for Acosta (despite which, one Republican in the hearings hailed him for integrity).

Echidne of the Snakes parses out the complexities of what causes the gender pay gap.

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April 10, 2019 · 5:04 am

The Bird King and the power of setting

I like G. Willow Wilson’s comic books, and I really liked her first non-graphic novel, Alif the Unseen. I was confident I’d like her second novel, THE BIRD KING, but while it had its moments, I was overall disappointed. And I think the setting is a big part of that.

I don’t think articles about writing, particularly specfic, discuss setting quite as much as we discuss world-building, the ways we create and establish the setting. One’s a matter of craft and skill, the other’s a matter of judgment and taste. Perhaps that’s why it’s not discussed as much: it’s one thing to thumb down “as you know, Steve, our occult research project is devoted to mastering the laws of magic” as objectively bad writing (telling people what they already know) but the merits of setting are more subjective.

As noted at the Alif link, I liked that book partly because it had a setting I rarely see, inside a modern Middle Eastern nation (and focused on the country and its people rather than how they relate to the US). The mash-up of computer hacking with Islamic mysticism and folklore made the setting even weirder. And as someone who’s read several IT/fantasy mash-ups, I think it’s much harder to mix the two than it looks.

Wilson’s opening setting is great: 1491 Granada, a Muslim stronghold about to fall to Ferdinand and Isabella, creating a united Spain. Not that the ancient Muslim world is that unusual a setting but Wilson’s a Muslim and makes it feel fresher than most portrayals. The core characters are good, too: Fatima, a slave concubine serving the sultan and Hassan, a gay mapmaker whose maps can alter the world they portray. Like Lucy in The Twelfth Enchantment, Fatima is a formidable, capable protagonist without being at all anachronistic. She resents being a slave (Wilson discusses this in an interview) but at first it’s the best she can do. After she and Hassan go on the run, she’s determined not to be anyone’s property again.

They have to run because the sultan’s negotiating surrender terms. Luz, a point woman for the Inquisition, makes it clear that Fatima and other Muslims will have to convert or die; Hassan, as both a “sodomite” and a sorcerer of some sort, won’t be that lucky. They have to run.

And that’s where the book turned me off. Hassan and Fatima’s desperate flight isn’t as fresh as the scenes in Granada. They could just as easily have been Protestants fleeing Catholics, Catholics fleeing Muslims, or refugees fleeing a conqueror; the landscape wouldn’t change much. And despite the presence of a jinn, it’s a very low-level magical setting, close to a straight historical story. And I’m not fond of those (see what I mean about taste). The long slow journey across Spain to the Island of Birds drained the interest out of me. (It didn’t help that religious fanatics creep me out to the point reading about them makes me genuinely uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the result of living in the Bible belt much of my life. Maybe not). I also wish Wilson had played around more with the power of maps (I have an interest in maps), like the opening scene in which a general gloats that Granada is already part of Spain on the maps.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that setting is important because it shapes our expectations about the story. An attack by a knife-wielding Martian, a knife wielding Gold Rush claim jumper or a knife-wielding killer in a Los Angeles alley can all offer the same level of danger, but they engage us (or don’t) in different ways.  We can use setting to put a fish out of water, or to contrast with the story we tell; Peyton Place became a best-seller in the 1950s partly because it’s sex-and-scandal plot contrasted with the New England small town setting (I’ve discussed other angles of setting here and here). Even an old, familiar setting can be fresh with the right take. But Bird King‘s setting just wasn’t right for me.

#SFWApro. Cover by studiohelen.co.uk, all rights remain with current holder.

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April 9, 2019 · 5:10 am

Destiny turns on a dime — or a batarang

Recently finishing BATMAN: The Golden Age Omnibus Vol. 4 reminded me one of the things I love about the Golden Age Batman is the stories the series tells focusing on ordinary people.

Of course lots of comics, then and now, include ordinary people in the cast, as friends of the hero or as victims of the bad guy. What makes this era distinctive is that the innocents caught up in the story almost seem to have their own character arcs going on, into which Batman and Robin stumble.

The previous omnibus, for example, gave us Destiny’s Auction. A crook, an aspiring actress and an over the hill thespian all lose possession of their steamer trunks. A year later they buy them back at a seized property auction, but ooops, they get the wrong ones. Now they’re all entangled, and the crook is very willing to use force to recover his trunk. At the end of the story though, the two actors have both jump-started their careers. Even though Batman intervened to save them, it feels like their personal stories are their own, not just supporting Bat-characters.

Similarly, in Detective Comics #93, we have One Night of Crime. Crooks fleeing the Batman take a tour bus hostage. Various passengers get to work out their own crises in addition to the main plot.

Batman #33 has The Search for Santa Claus, in which three despairing men, take up roles as Santa for the Christmas season. By the end of the story, which involves crooked heirs trying to kill one of the Santa, they’ve all got a new lease on life.

Detective #94 gave us No One Must Know, in which the Dynamic Duo help out an escaped con whose happiness and whose son’s marriage could be ruined by a blackmail scheme.

Detective #112’s A Case Without a Crime has the employees of a small, tightly knit shop thrown into doubt when they discover one of them has sto-len $99 from the register. Can Batman restore their faith in each other, particularly when it becomes obvious none of them committed the crime? And why steal such an odd figure, anyway?

I still saw stories along these lines in the Silver Age but not as well done. And now they’ve faded away, for the most part.

The omnibus has lots of other good stuff. We have more stories of the Joker and the Penguin (Catwoman only gets one minor story), more war stories before moving into the post-war period, a few new villains such as the Blaze and plenty of ordinary criminals. Alfred gets his own series, four pagers in which he tries to be a detective and succeeds in spite of himself. And just as the previous volume focused on different specialty cops, this one gives us a look at the mail service and Gotham City’s graveyard shift.

And there’s a particular favorite of mine, from World’s Finest Comics #105, The Batman Goes Broke. After one of Bruce’s companies goes belly up from embezzlement, Bruce wipes out his fortune to reimburse the investors. Trouble is, without money the Dynamic Duo can’t pay for all the equipment they need. And working a day job to put a roof over their head will leave Bruce without the time to fight crime and train. It’s all over (spoiler: it all works out). It’s a good story and it amuses me that a couple of decades later, people considered Stan Lee a revolutionary for dealing with superhero money issues (Stan definitely did break a lot of fresh ground, no argument, but it still amuses me).

#SFWApro. Covers by Jerry Robinson, J. Winslow Mortimer and Jack Burnley (t-b). All rights to images remain with current holder.

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April 8, 2019 · 5:01 am

My state and other links

A North Carolina school insisted female students wear skirts to “preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men.” How does that work? “Visual cues” signifying this is not a boy and should be treated accordingly. Plus blather about teen pregnancies and casual sex, which as we all know never happen when women wore skirts.

Oh, and in North Carolina, once sex starts a woman can’t change her mind. It’s a 2017 story, but online research indicates it’s still the law here.

Now for something positive from NC: the Guilford County sheriff fired a jail chaplain who thought his mission included converting inmates.

Less positive: the Supreme Court told Texas must either allow inmates to have a spiritual adviser with them in the execution chamber, regardless of faith, or ban all spiritual advisers. Texas went with option 2.

Rod Dreher bemoans kids who’d sooner play online than get physical in the sports arena. Of course he never played himself.

If women have “daddy issues” why do we mock them instead of their fathers?

Donald Trump has decided Homeland Security shouldn’t focus as much on domestic terrorism. Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Christopher Hasson, the prez has your back!

The problem with capitalism is often that capitalists suck.

Conservative Austin pastors unsurprisingly fight an ordinance that protects against firing for gender identity and sexual orientation.

How America sold out to Russian (and other) kleptocrats.

A pastor told his female parishioners God would bless them for submitting to his sexual demands. (hat tip to slacktivist).

The appeal of Satan-fearing paranoia? “Even if there isn’t a good guy, there sure as hell is a villain.” Or as Fred Clark puts it ” It was a lie that reassured them they were the good and virtuous and heroic people, distinct from and better than hundreds of thousands of their neighbors who were — in fact and, more importantly, by comparison — unspeakably vile and depraved.”

A-OC reminds us that tech companies and Big Pharma rely on government support for innovation and don’t pay much back.

In El Salvador, having a health crisis in pregnancy can get you 30 years in prison.

“But, being “not quite as bad” when it comes to gender discrimination isn’t enough for Democrats, not ever, but especially not now.” Which is to say Michigan Democrats are not doing enough.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (yep, that guy) is totally in favor of trans rights (the same way he’s concerned about the environment), but if we give them rights, couldn’t Trump declare himself the first female president?

White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney thinks it’s terrible that we don’t support anti-gay discrimination in other countries. The administration is also comfortable with overseas efforts to push women into having more babies. Unsurprising given our own alt.right movement is fueled by male supremacy. And Republicans have been courting the far right overseas for a long time.

Beware! Trump claims the noise from wind turbines gives people cancer. No More Mr. Nice Blog provides some perspective (it’s a fringe theory that the noise will keep people awake, which weakens their health).

National Review‘s Graham Hillard says it seems reasonable to respect trans people’s requests about which pronouns and names to use, but we shouldn’t! “A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Let us not pretend otherwise.” Remember, it’s the people who hate LBGTQ people who are the real martyrs.

A woman in West Virginia claimed she saved her daughter from an Egyptian-immigrant kidnapper by flashing a gun. She lied about everything.

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April 7, 2019 · 5:18 am

Super powers and comics: this week’s reading

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL by Jim Starlin and others collects the original Bronze Age Thanos saga, which elevated Mar-Vell from a C-lister to a major character as he battles Thanos’ elaborate schemes, attains cosmic awareness and saves the universe. It’s the first storyline to realize the full potential of the Cosmic Cube (as opposed to its role in Captain America a few years earlier) and the story is excellent, though I still prefer Starlin’s Warlock run.

After his father’s death from cancer, Starlin returned to Captain Marvel for The Death of Captain Marvel, a graphic novel in which Mar-Vell discovers a past adventure (included in the book) exposed him to a deadly nerve gas that has slowly been killing him with cancer. His many friends put their heart and soul into finding a cure, but in the end they and “Marv” have to accept that fact that sometimes people just die, unheroically and hopelessly. It’s intensely moving, the last work from Starlin that I liked.

I have a fondness for oddball superhero stories when they work, and THE TALENTED RIBKINS by Ladee Hubbard works. Jonny Ribkins comes from a family of metahumans (one of several — they’re not unique) and possesses the ability to map out places he’s never seen. In his youth, he and his friends used their powers to protect civil rights activists; later Johnny and his brother (possessing Spidey’s wall-climbing powers) used their abilities to steal. Now Johnny’s old, desperate to pay off a debt to a powerful businessman and stuck taking his teenage niece along on his road trip. The results are quirky and low-key, but I liked them, though the ending dissolved into film cliches (don’t try to fit in when you’re born to stand out!).

GIRL GENIUS: City of Lightning by Phil and Kaja Foglio continues Agatha Heterodyne’s quest to free her city from its temporal prison. First she has to deal with an intelligent, belligerent and powerful locomotive, then she and her crew arrive in Paris, a city riven by scheming and ambitious sparks but already taken with the legend of the new Heterodyne (she’s being marketed for everything from hats to bath oil). Funny as always, though the sheer scope of the cast frequently makes it harder for me to follow what’s going on.

COMIC BOOK IMPLOSION: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978 by Keith Dallas and John Wells actually starts with the mid-1970s as DC struggled to regain its dominance over Marvel Comics and outsider Jenette Kahn came on board as publisher to shake things up. Her most ambitious project was the “DC Explosion” — rather than simply hike the current 35 cent price to 40 cents, raise it to 50 cents with an expanded page count. Retailers would make more profit, making the books more attractive, and readers would get something for shelling out extra.

Oops. No sooner did the project launch than Warner, the corporate owner since the late 1960s, slapped it down: comics went back to normal size and DC had to cut its line by 40 percent, the DC Implosion (though Marvel cut massive numbers of books that year too, it didn’t get the publicity). This isn’t really an oral history (which implies someone sat down and talked to the players in the present) as much as culling old interviews and articles for contemporary accounts and perspectives at both DC and Marvel, mixed with a few more recent interviews (this is not a bad thing — contemporary material isn’t automatically more accurate but it isn’t blurred by time).  It follows the fallout from the Implosion (a lot of suddenly fired people went to work for Marvel)  through the launch of the Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans, which proved to the world that DC wasn’t permanently stuck in second place.

As someone seriously pumped about the Explosion and disappointed when it collapsed (particularly as it took down books I liked such as Shade the Changing Man), the high point of Comic Book Implosion is the detailed account of what happened to all that extra material: was it completed? Was it ever published (unsurprisingly a lot of stuff has shown up in more recent hardback and TPB collection)? Almost everything was published in 30 or 40 copies of Canceled Comics Cavalcade, if nowhere else (these were printed to protect copyright in the material and handed out to some of the creators). While I was fascinated to know these existed, I suspect if I saw them I’d agree with writer Mark Waid, who got to flip through one while working at DC and discovered it wasn’t full of lost classics.

#SFWApro. Covers by Jim Starlin and Steve Ditko (Shade), all rights to images remain with current holders.

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April 6, 2019 · 5:12 am

From Japan to France to New York: movies and a play

THE MIKADO was the second time Durham Savoyards have done Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous show since I moved up here (there’s a limited number of shows so this is inevitable) and the lesser of the two (TYG agreed). The cast were in fine form, particularly the Southern-accented actor playing the arrogant, venal Pooh-Bah as a Boss Hogg type, and the play is great. However to get away from doing the story (involving an executioner, the heir to the Japanese throne and the old battle-axe he’s supposed to marry) as yellow-face they tried an unconventional approach: Koko is staging a fashion show, the models rebel and dress in the clothes of their choice, then decide to put on a show of their own, which happens to be The Mikado. That might have worked if they’d explained it in the program; as they didn’t (I believe it was in the publicity, but as I know I’m going I never read that stuff) I couldn’t figure out a lot of what was going on like the actors frequently (and obviously faking) struggling for lines. Still worth going to, but I’m more excited about Patience (one of my favorites) coming next year. “It’s a great insult to offer a Pooh-Bah money — but I swallow the insult.”

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (1969) has a lonely French bachelor reluctantly spend the evening with a friend and the man’s girlfriend Maud (Francoise Fabian, above). Maud is sexually liberated and obviously interested in luring the protagonist into bed; he’s a devout Catholic so instead they wind up having Deep Thoughts about love, sex and religion until daylight. Eric Rohmer’s direction makes this talk-fest surprisingly easy to watch: the actors body language, the sets and the camera work make it more visually interesting than, say, My Dinner With Andre. The intellectual discussion, however, wasn’t interesting at all (it reminds me of the journal Cahiers du Cinema‘s complaint that French films are all pretentious talk and no action) and I gave up midway through. As I was equally unimpressed the last time I tried Rohmer, I suspect he’s not my cup of tea.“Pursuing women no more estranges a man from god than pursuing mathematics.”

NERO WOLFE (1979) stars Thayer David as Rex Stout’s legendary detective (like a lot of older mystery characters, I’m not sure if he’s a legend to younger generations or just forgotten), who’d rather eat gourmet food or grow his prize orchids than actually put his brain to work on a case. In this TV movie (based on Stout’s The Doorbell Rang), a wealthy realtor (Anne Baxter) tells Wolfe and leg man Archie (Tom Mason) that the FBI have been harassing her since she gave away hundreds of copies of a book criticizing the agency (which lord knows, did lots that deserved criticism). Wolfe is reluctant to take on an adversary that powerful, but he could use the fat fee he’s offered … It’s a good yarn (and nice to see TV actually skeptical of the feds, instead of the tongue-bathing of recent shows such as Quantico) and David (best known for Dark Shadows) is really good as the cantankerous Wolfe. Unfortunately he died so this 1977 pilot sat on the shelf for two years, then we got a competent but not as satisfying William Conrad as Wolfe in the eventual series. Brooke Adams plays a woman in the case. “To watch Nero Wolfe pour a beer is a demonstration of precision; to see him drink it is an exercise in patience.”

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April 5, 2019 · 4:30 pm

New frontiers in time management!

Yep, once again I have tinkered with my time management approach and found something that works. At least for the moment. But after the constant distractions of February and March, it feels great to be productive again. If I were Dali, all my clocks would be firm, hard, erect … er, I’ll be in my bunk, okay?

For one thing I don’t have any Leaf articles at the moment, which frees up time to do other stuff.

For another I decided to break up my 35-hour week into 20 hours of actual fiction writing and 15 of other stuff: submitting queries, doing major replotting work, paperwork, working on nonfiction (along with Leaf, whenever it starts up again, I’m working on a proposal for a new film reference book. And I’m always hopeful other stuff will come along), research reading, blogging. This was the first week I tried it and it worked well. I had another Alexander technique session mid-week and it was much easier to not lose any fiction writing time this way.

It’s not perfect. It’s very easy to wind up spending the whole non-writing afternoon blogging or doing research reading instead of drafting queries. However so far it does seem to work, and it reduces the amount of deep thinking I do at the end of the day, when I’m at my low point. And if I have to use more time for fiction writing because I have an imminent deadline or something (someday …), I can adapt.

As to actual accomplishments:

I finally found an ending for Only the Lonely Can Slay that I like. It still needs a lot of work, but I have a story arc I can build on, instead of tossing it out every time and starting over.

I have a story arc for Impossible Things Before Breakfast (formerly known as Neverwas) too, but the last quarter is ultra-vague. I know the ending (Susan and Hal save the world and find each other) but I don’t see how to justify it yet. I’ve also lost a lot of the weirdness of the earlier drafts in building up Susan/Hal; I think that’s the core of the story, but I want some of the weird stuff back.

I redrafted Bleeding Blue, following the rather dark story line of my first draft (the ending’s upbeat, though). I really hadn’t intended to write dark, but that’s where my mind is going. The story arc, though, is a mess, more a string of incidents than a plot. So more work!

I did about 4,500 words on yet another novel, Good Morning Starshine (spec-fic/rom-com). I wanted to replot it too but didn’t get very far.

I drew up a query letter for Space Invaders, a book on alien-invasion movies and TV I was working on a couple of years ago (the academic publisher I was dealing with decided on massive cutbacks, so no go). I’m still deciding where to submit it but my query letter is, if I do say so, awesome.

It’s a good start to April. I shall endeavor to live up to it the rest of the month.

#SFWApro. All rights to Dali’s The Persistence of Memory remain with current holder.

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April 5, 2019 · 5:10 am

Wisp wants to flirt

So as I mentioned a week ago, after TYG and I returned from our Mensa trip to South Carolina, Wisp went back to skulking. Instead of showing up and mewing when she figured dinner was due, she showed up afterwards and ate stealthily as possible. This week, she seemed to get over it, showing up semi-regularly to mew for her supper.

Last night, she also showed up when TYG was walking the dogs at night and sidled up very close. She’s done this before, even rolling on the ground in a “play with me” manner, but never quite so persistently. She clearly wants to be friends.

Trouble is, we’re not sure how well that would go. Neither she nor the dogs seems hostile, but if Trixie gets a sudden itch to show who’s boss — well, Wisp does have those big sharp claws on her feet. So TYG called me out of the house to drive Wisp off. She scurried away as soon as she saw me (I thought we were getting along better. Maybe not) but lurked as close as possible.

I’m tempted to let them get close, but the risk of injury is definitely there, as far as I can tell. And TYG’s even more cautious than me, and I’m not about to go against her on this (“Hi honey! I let Plush Dog snuggle with Wisp and now we have a $700 vet bill and stitches in his side!” would not go over well.

A minor problem comparatively is that the dogs get too distracted to do their business. Particularly Trixie, who could not get her mind off Wisp long enough to poop. This may be why she wound up pooping in the bedroom last night.

I’m absolutely not going to do anything that hurts Wisp or drives her away from her house (TYG doesn’t want that either) but I’m not sure how to handle it.

#SFWApro. Image is mine.

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