Apricot Shows How It's Done

And I don't have a picture.

Sorry.

My sister came to visit. It's taken Apricot a while to be okay with her, but this time he came out even before the next day after her arrival, which was really cool. And now once he comes out, he stays out, and interacts with me like normal and usually gives her a fairly wide berth (just in case, mind you).

Except when she's doing her stretching exercises. My sister does way more stretching exercises than I do. She practically ties herself in knots. And unties herself and redoes another knot. I told her that the phrase is "does anybody want to be a stretchy kitty?" because that is what I ask when I do my (far simpler) stretching routine before I go to bed.

Colby is my normal stretchy kitty but they usually all show up. Her saying it let them know what she was planning to do and let them know not to be alarmed when the human started doing weird things.

Sophia, my sister, must use the living room for her stretches because, well, she stretches out all over the place. I do mine in the bedroom. So there was that difference, to start with.

And Apricot likes to hang out in the living room.

He came down from whatever perch he was on and wandered around her, getting closer and closer, watching her. He seemed very baffled.

After a while of her convoluted stretching antics, he made sure she was watching him and then did the classic cat stretch, front paws out, shoulders down, shoulders rolling back up as the back part stretches out, and then the back feet drawn under the body again.

He looked back over his shoulder at her. "Did you get that?" his body language asked her quite plainly.

Sophia started giggling. "Apricot's trying to show me the proper way to stretch!" she said.

The next day she did her routine again. Apricot saw her, gave his little kitty sigh (it looks like a shoulder shrug) and went over and demonstrated again  how to do it properly. Sophia was commiserated with him about how dense she was in not getting it right and explained that he was just going to have to keep showing her until she got it.

So every time she stretched, Apricot would go over and stretch, once, too, demonstrating.

Pants, Pockets, and Frustration

Okay, so I hate to shop for clothes. There are several reasons. I react to the finishing chemicals on most new clothing, so I can only try on clothes for a short period of time before I end up starting to develop a rash and I have to quit.

I hate dealing with salespeople because I know their pay depends on what they can sell me, and I feel guilty if I can't find anything I like.

I hate the whole exhausting process of getting undressed, dressed in the new clothing, trying to figure out in a few minutes if this is going to work for a whole day at a time, and then getting undressed and dressed again.

And I really hate shopping for clothes that aren't the same size from one color to another or one style to another or one manufacturer to another. (That is why women take so long to shop for clothes, in case you wondered. You can't go buy a "this inch" waist and "this inch" inseam and walk out with it--you have to try the stupid size "this" on to see if this is the size you need in this style or if you need to move up or down a size.)

So, I lost weight, and my pants, the ones I wear to work every day, don't fit anymore. I had inexpertly taken in the waist in order for them to not fall off, but this ended up in pads of heavy material resting on my hips and making them hurt all day. Plus, as I had lost more weight after the initial sewing, I still needed a safety pin to take the waist in the rest of the way.

Point being, I needed new pants. Really. I put up with this situation for over a year before finally coming to a conclusion that I also needed help to get new pants. Sophia knows clothes (or more than I do) so when she came to visit I asked her help to go buy new pants.

We went shopping together, which is always better since I don't have to do all the fetching of the next size up/down myself, and I don't have to do all of the dealing with the salespeople, and so on and so forth.

I think it took us four hours all told, and it was exhausting. I discovered a dreadful fact--manufacturers seem to think that if you are a smaller person, weight-wise, you don't need the same size pockets as the same pants in a bigger size.

Um, nobody issues us miniature house keys, car keys, or tiny credit cards to match our size, people. Everybody's pocket stuff is the same size, whether you're wearing size 2 or size 12. Also, manufacturers apparently think most women don't use their pockets for anything, but that's stupid--don't put the pockets in the pants in the first place if you're not going to make them useable.

Sophia was the one that found out that not only do different manufacturers and different styles mean different sizes, it can also be different colors. She found (was handed by a salesperson) a pair of black dress pants that looked stunning on her (even I could tell, and I'm not good with clothes, if you hadn't gotten that idea by now) and since she actually did need new dress pants, she decided to try on a different color in the same style and size to see if those would work too. It was a lovely color, but they just looked wrong. Something in the hang or the fit or something. She tried the next size up but that was wrong in a different way. But the black pants, and another color of that same style/size of pant, looked just fine. Is it any wonder we hate shopping for clothes? (She hates it as much as I do, but two people meant it wasn't quite as dreadful for either of us.)

Finally I found a pair that my phone fit in the pocket, as well as the pants fitting on me. I bought two sets, we went home, and the next day I wore a pair to work.

And discovered that the phone barely fitting in the pocket wasn't enough to work for a whole day of wearing them. It fell out a few times (luckily no damage) but the pocket kept the phone so tightly suspended against the pant material that it couldn't register my leg movement, which meant the pedometer function only sporadically worked.

I found this out at home, and kind of had a minor meltdown about it. If I don't know how much food to eat back to counter my activity level, I'm going to keep losing weight or compensate too hard the other way and gain it. The app I'm using to calorie-count and exercise-count is the only way I feel I can maintain my weight. Which is kind of important to me. Very important.

Okay, fine. I've been reading about women from the Victorian age and such-like, and they always seem to be letting out dresses and re-sewing dresses and altering clothes and if they can do it, pants can be altered, and if you can alter one part of pants, you can alter the pockets to make them bigger.

A woman in my neighborhood had posted on our neighborhood facebook type group that she did alterations so I called her and took them over on Friday, which we had off due to my company trying to give us Easter Friday off and missing by a week. (To be fair, it's just weird having Easter in March.)

Her place smelled intensely of smoke but she insisted that she herself didn't smoke and didn't let her nephew smoke in the house now that it wasn't winter and I felt bad having bothered her for nothing so I let the pants there with instructions to keep them in a secure plastic bag unless actually working on them. I got home, turned around at my driveway, and went back.

It took an incredible amount of courage to knock on her door again and explain that I changed my mind and wanted them back but she didn't seem upset. I'm glad I did. In the five-ten minutes it took me to drive home and drive back, the pants were already beginning to smell of cigarette smoke.

So I was out, going to get these pants altered if it killed me, so I randomly, without researching it first, chose the nearest alteration place from a google map search and let Siri take me there. Turns out I've driven past it probably my whole life. I remember the sign and the location like other people would remember the face of a childhood friend. I'd never gone in there. Just driven past it a lot. I reasoned if it had been there for that long, they probably knew what they were doing.

It was one of those sewing alteration places run by people who barely spoke English (I'm guessing Polish or another East Europe country from the accents) but they had all kinds of clothes hanging up to be altered or picked up, including some gorgeous prom dresses. I believe altering a pocket was almost an insulting request, for how simple it would be (not that they, the wife and husband, behaved that way!) I had brought the old big pants with me, to show what size pocket worked, and I'm glad I did, since my knowledge of the language they spoke was zero and their knowledge of English was less than optimum and complicated by my inability to hear the words properly due to their accents and my hearing processing delay disorder.

But we got it worked out, and they said they'd have the pants by next Tuesday. I picked them up that next Tuesday, and now my phone fits in my pocket. My left pocket, to be precise. Alteration is expensive work, and I didn't see any point in altering the pocket that I don't keep the phone in. (Now you know which side of me to pick-pocket if you're trying to steal my phone!)

Phew. I hope these pants last for a long time, because I don't want to have to go shopping for pants anytime soon.

Sophia's Spring Visit

Sophia came for her spring visit the last week of March. We were very interested to see how Apricot would react, since last time he actually accepted her presence and came out and was social the last night she was here.

It took him a night to get used to her being there again, but after that he was fine. Sophia might debate that, as he did spend a lot of time under the sofa.

But that's part of anxiety. Even after you are okay with something, sometimes it's just too overwhelming to have that something be there. So he would retreat to his quiet place when he got overwhelmed. But he wasn't scared. It's not like he'd suddenly run for the hills. Just a calm, walking down the hall and into the tv room where he'd be under the sofa if anybody was looking for him.

The weird part of her visit was poor Thimble. He found himself quite scared of her. And he was distressed because he didn't understand why he was scared. He kept trying and trying, but she'd move after having been still for a while (like at the dinner table) and he'd leap up and run, having both a puzzled and a frightened expression at the same time.

I'm not sure what was going on there either. After she'd been here two days he finally calmed down enough to be okay as long as she wasn't getting too close. But it seems my brave boy has finally broken through his bravado to realize that bravery isn't not being afraid of something--bravery is being afraid and facing it anyway. And he's never had any practice in true bravery.

Colby, meanwhile, was his usual phlegmatic self. He hung out around whoever was being the most interesting or the calmest, depending on if he wanted to nap or not. While I rode my exercise bike, for instance, she was playing with her ipad in her room, lying on the bed resting. So he went in there and curled up against her legs and took a nap.

She said that first he tried being on her chest but to her relief that didn't last long. A cat of Colby's weight combined with someone who has asthma isn't a good idea.

So now Colby's my brave boy when it comes to new humans, and even he's gone skittish. I think Apricot is rubbing off on them entirely the wrong way!

Sophia's Magical Visit

It didn't start out very magical.

My sister came to visit. On the Sunday she drove to my house from hers, I was in the guest bedroom on the bed on my back, reading my Kindle. It was getting close to 8 pm, which is kitty bedtime, and kitty playtime, and they were getting a little rambunctious.

Colby leaped up on the bed at chest height to me, leaped over me diagonally to the other side of my head, and kept going. His back foot tapped the Kindle in my hands, making my grip less than secure. Everything would have been fine except the reason Colby kept going came after him at full speed.

Thimble followed the same pattern of jump, only when his back foot hit the Kindle, he knocked it out of my hands completely and smacked it into my upper lip.

This, by the way, hurts quite a bit.

I was severely not pleased with him. They know they aren't supposed to be playing on top of me like that. I was irrationally not pleased as well, since I was mostly blaming Thimble and not Colby, even though both of them were fairly well responsible. And I was upset because I was simply upset--the week had not gone well and I was stressed. As usual. You'd think I'd handle it better or get used to it or something.

Well, I knew what I was feeling was irrational, so I managed to not yell, or do anything overtly scary, but Thimble did get "talked at" (as in, "you know you're not supposed to do that and this hurts a lot" with whines and whimpers in there too. Granted, those were deliberate to let him know I was hurt--that's how cats let each other know they went to far. They whimper about it. And meow, but I can only do human versions of meows and they don't sound right.)

Unfortunately, before I could get settled down and settle Thimble down, my sister arrived. She then stayed in the same room where the "incident" happened. And shut the door.

You are not supposed to shut doors!

Now Thimble met her as usual, being my greeter cat. It wasn't until the next day that he started acting weird. It wasn't until the second day that I figured out why. He was acting skittish around her. Wanting to be elsewhere if she was there. Really acting more like Apricot than himself.

Well, we think he was kind of viewing her as his "punishment" and was expecting the other shoe to drop, so to speak. 

While Thimble was starting to act stranger, Apricot was under the sofa any time Sophia was in the house and not behind closed doors. (He's there in the photo; see his tail? The rest of him is pretty well hidden behind Thimble's bulk.) She remarked that Apricot had done better when the kittens weren't there, as he'd stayed out in the Ops Deck of the living room cat tree and watched her, at least.

I said that it made sense, though, when you thought about it. Apricot and Thimble split up the "monitoring safety" duties between them, so as long as Thimble was around, Apricot could hide under the sofa all he wanted to, in full confidence that Thimble was on top of things.

But this time Thimble wasn't on top of things. He was very much not on top of things. And Apricot started coming out and showing up, in the distance, more and more often as Thimble got more and more skittish.

Until the evening of the day before Sophia was scheduled to go home. We (she and I) were doing stretches in the living room, and Apricot wanders out into the living room, calm as you please, and stays.

Not in the Ops Deck. Not up on any of the cat trees. Down on the floor. With us.

Sophia was doing a stretch on her back and Apricot meanders over to her and sniffs her. Both of us humans were just almost paralyzed, trying not to do anything to scare him or make this brave moment something he would regret.

From that point on, he started acting his normal self around her. We stayed in the living room some more after stretching, just talking, and Apricot came over to me several times for head bumps. Just like usual. And this is the first time anybody besides myself has seen the "real" Apricot, the way he is when he isn't scared stiff.

Magic.

Apricot's new confidence even made Thimble feel reassured, so by the time Sophia left the next day, everybody was acting normal again. Not that Colby ever stopped being his normal self. Colby, bless his heart, is a little oblivious. As long as someone is taking care of things (those things including him), he doesn't really pay attention. 

I had taken the day off on Tuesday, but Wednesday, when she left, I'd gone to work as usual. She left a few hours after that (which is why I went back to work that day). She said that Apricot had walked with her / followed her down the hall to the pink room door, whereupon he peeled off into my bedroom. She asked if this was "good riddance" or "good bye" or a combination of the two.

I don't think it was either. When Apricot walks with me down the hallway, normally I go into my bedroom. At that point, he jumps up on the bed and wants petted. Sometimes, if he's feeling a little more anxious than usual that day, he will stay in the center of the bed and I'm supposed to lean over on the bed and pet him, making my body "hide" behind my head so I'm not so big when I pet him. It reassures him.

I'm betting that if Sophia had gone into the bedroom as Apricot expected, he would have gone into the middle of the bed and wanted her to pet him for the first time. If he was experimenting with how far he could take this new acceptance, that would seem to be a logical, safe way to do a first-time pet. 

Now we are both curious, Sophia and I, to see if he will accept her from the beginning the next time she visits, or if he'll have to get used to her again.