Bats in the bedroom again… August 8, 2013

Brown bat in bedroom June 26, 2006, 2am close-up. He was about to fly out the window when I flashed in his face. Whoa!

Two nights in a row, Aug. 4th and 5th. First time in several years. Cheesecake and I used to have our bailout protocol all figured out for when there was one circling the bedroom. (Screens are tighter now, usually.)

The first night it was very late, maybe 3:30 or 4 am. I was waked up by the *kittens* bouncing all over me and the bed, chasing it. By the bedside flashlight it looked like a small bat.

Small bat in bedroom, June 26, 2006, 2 am approx

So I grabbed the Spot *kitten*, who was closest, locked her up, then caught the others one at a time, and once they were all locked up, closed the bedroom door to wait for it to settle out.

Once all was quiet, I went back in with the flashlight. Didn't see it. (They usually settle clinging to a screen.) So I opened a window wide and left. By that time it was almost showing some light in the sky. Went to sleep for the rest of the night in a chair.

I had hoped that it had gotten out, but kept the kittens and Buddy locked inside all day, and not in the bedroom. Because in the past I have thought that a bat had gotten away, but as soon as I let the cats out, they found it. (Once  a very small one had crawled under the cat-house on the porch. They were trying to fish it out. Once there was a bat clinging to the shingle siding outside the bedroom. Several times one was still in the bedroom. Once in the torchiere lamp. It couldn't get out. After I had gone back to bed, I heard it skritching. Had to tip it out the window as soon as it was slightly light.)

So the next night, the bat appeared early, maybe 9:30 or 10:00pm. I was still reading, the light was still on, but luckily cats still locked up. It looked like a larger bat this time.

Medium-size black bat in bedroom, June 26, 2006, approx 2am Notice the same calendar is in this picture.

Leave, close door, wait for it to settle, go in and open window, and TURN OUT THE LIGHT. (Very important, otherwise there will be lots of bats in the bedroom, following bugs! See previous post about bats.)
http://wrwcolors.blogspot.com/2006/10/bats-in-bedroom.html

This time, it was so much earlier, I just read in the chair for an hour or two, then went back to bed. Good chance it had escaped, and seems to have done so.

Think I've found where it/they got in — screen pulled loose from frame, and I had left the window open too far so they could easily get in.

I'm sure that this time it wasn't this guy - you can see (there's that calendar again) how much larger he was, and brown not black.

These pictures, from June 26, 2006, when I stood out on the porch roof and took pictures, the time I cleverly opened the window from the outside, thus leaving the light on, show, I think, three different species of bat.

I like my bats a lot. Haven't seen a mosquito for a month. But I prefer them outside, not in the bedroom.

Haven't heard them for a couple of years now. My extra-high-frequency hearing might be gone.  (Never heard them in the bedroom; apparently it's the social calls, not echo-location, which are in human hearing range, sort-of.) 

** The kittens are all grown up, though small, cats. But they still act like kittens. And they're my kittens, especially Rexie. (He thinks so too...)

Pollen Season

Large pollen cones on Ponderosa pine May 3, 2011

Pollen season seems to be over for the year. There were a bunch of small pollen cones in the driveway, only half an inch long, unlike the complex pattern on the roof last year of fallen 2 inch pollen cones, and these even larger ones from 2 years ago. Like everything else here, they vary a lot from year to year.

Light rain again today, after several warm days after the last rains.


Several years ago, on an early warm night, I had opened the doors onto the partially screened porch downstairs, and a few screenless windows, to let a bat out, (which after swooping through hall and computer room, had headed down the stairs).

And when I went back downstairs with a flashlight, after hearing a bang, I heard a skittering and a scrabbling out on that porch. And the loose screen across the doorway was down. Critters had been in the house!

In the morning, footprints in the thick layer of pine pollen on the porch.  Five toes, so not cats (or dogs). Raccoons. A couple of sizes. Not really clear back foot prints.

But something funny. Among the footprints were some large poofy-puffy, roundish-ovalish marks. Tail prints!

I already knew that muddy prints on the car were different than the ones in soft dirt shown in the animal-tracks books. Tracks in the layer of loose pollen dust are different still.

A house made of books Feb 23, 2011

I drew this back when I was just learning to draw on the computer.

I thought of the idea when I was taking color theory, and we were asked to produce a self-portrait for our final project.

I'll probably redraw it to reproduce on a t-shirt.

But the way it is now, it says almost more about me than I want to say.

Val & Cleofatra & 2006

Here's Valentine in happier days looking at Cleofatra. (The background was an ancient concrete wall in the basement.) We lost Cleo (aka "Yo Fatso") early in the year. She was almost 16.

She and her sibs were born on my bed. Waking up in the morning to squeaking down by my feet! Beautiful kittens. Their mother was Kate, who had been abandoned half-grown at a local park. We were there the last weekend of the season. She spent the evening going around to the campfires and sitting on laps. I was going to take her home and try to get her adopted. But by the time I got to the truck, holding her, she had a name.

I kept 2 of the kittens, Ariel and Miranda. Miranda used to sit outside the window and toss her head in an imperious way, asking to come in. She looked like an Egyptian cat. So she became Cleopatra Miranda. When the kittens got old enough, I locked them inside until I could get each of them fixed. She instantly became fat, and I thought "Too late". But it was just inactivity. By the time I figured out she wasn't pregnant, she was going into heat every other week. By the time she could finally go out, she was permanently fat and timid from being kept in so long. (Cleofatra was a Garfield joke.)

When she started losing weight, I didn't think of it as something wrong — she seemed healthier, and happy. But then she got very skinny. The vet didn't figure out what was really wrong, she just went down very suddenly at the end.

Then last summer Cheesecake lost a lot of weight — I could feel all his vertebrae, although with all that long fur he didn't look too different. I started giving him canned cat food, and he picked up again. Just a week or so ago I noticed he seemed all recovered. No backbone knobs. Thick pretty fur. Happy and healthy. Sleeping on the bed and kneading the covers and purring at my face, like when he and Miranda and Ariel and Fussy were kittens, having a purring fest.

When Valentine, who was young, started losing weight, I thought for too long that it could be fixed with better food. Now, just a week after losing her, Cheesecake is suddenly very sick.*

2:20 AM Jan 1, 2007 The coyotes are howling in the orchard. Happy New Year.


*I think Cheesecake had an early dose of that poisonous cat-food ingredient from China, before the news was out. Luckily he survived, but he was never as healthy again.

Goodby, Valentine

This was Valentine. She started life as a feral kitten, among the ones I used to feed behind where I worked. She was trapped by the landowner and taken to the pound to be killed, where I retrieved her, along with her mother and brother. The kittens were maybe 3 months old, fairly small. I had them all spayed and neutered. They were in a cage out in the shed, recovering from the operation. Something opened the cage by drawing the bolts, and killed the mother cat. Probably a raccoon. She fought long enough that the kittens had time to escape.

They were used to coming to the sound of my car to be fed, so the kittens found me at the house. After they got used to eating near the house, I caught them by opening the house door with a string on it, then closing them in. Not, in retrospect, a technique I would recommend, since the result was wild kittens loose in the house.

They weren't my first feral cats, and they were pretty young, so the technique I had worked out, of getting them in the bathroom, and going in to feed them, and letting them come out at their own speed, worked well on them. They became part of my balcony cats. The gray tabby brother got named Buddy, because he wanted to be everyone's friend. The little orange female didn't have a name until a few months later. I had opened the window early one morning, and let her into the bedroom with me. She was sitting on my lap, purring and being petted, when a voice on the radio said, "Happy Valentine's Day, in case no one has said it to you yet." And I said "Valentine! That's your name, and you already told me happy Valentine's day."

She was a happy, healthy, little kitty who loved being petted and rubbing her face on my hand. I don't remember exactly how old she was; somewhere between 5 and 8 years old, I think. She liked to sit in the sun on the porch, and play in the grass. And curl up with some of the other cats, in a purring pile.

She started losing weight a month or so ago. I lost an older cat early in the year from unknown causes that started like that. And Cheesecake, late last summer, had lost quite a bit of weight, until I started giving him canned cat food. Val and her buddies were getting a little canned food treat with dinner, to encourage them to come in from the yard when I came home, before dark. I gave her some more, and hoped that would fix it. If anything that made her worse. By last week she had gotten really skinny.

Remember for next time! Intervene before things get so far!

Not that it would have saved Valentine. The vet today said she had a carcinoma almost certainly. All we did was give her fluids, to try to get her to feel a little better, and I was just going to keep her as comfortable as I could. She was already in the warm nest under the stove that I get by taking the bottom drawer out. She was out on the balcony in the warm sun for a few minutes earlier today, a little shaky, but moving fine still. I thought I'd have her a little longer to cherish and say goodby to, and let the others say goodby to, since she wasn't contagious. But she never recovered from being taken to the vet this afternoon.

Goodby, Valentine. I love you.
 

Serendipity 1

After I made this design, the virtual batik I showed earlier, I designed a dress using it on a sage background, in the brochure for the publication design course. And now, Cafepress has surprised us with some new colors of t-shirts, and one is this green! I may have to have this…

Of course, as I go back and add designs to new colored tees, I'm finding other pictures that are great on the new colors too. Such a treat to have colors, not just white. I got so desperate for color that I'm overdyeing many of mine. I can get my favorite colors that way, but it's time consuming.



Here are some more tempting combinations that I found today. For some reason I really like the bright blue and yellow of my Dresses like Spring picture on this green. And the lilac Himalayan Poppy is perfect on this green; the leaves go with it and the flowers are contrasting colors.



The brown tee is the new women's long sleeve tee, and the poppy works well on it. And the stained glass style Sunset Marsh design looks like it will be good on the navy color.

Bats in the bedroom

It seemed like an appropriate day to show this. As you can see this is the same room as the picture from Saturday. And you can probably guess that it's Photoshopped too, as was the textured image from that post.

But it's pretty real, all the same. The sunset light pattern in this image was cast by the old float glass in the window, and photographed just to the right of the sink you can see. Sunset doesn't seem like an impossible time for bats.

And all the bats were photographed on the same night last summer, standing out on the porch roof, while they were flying around the bedroom next to this.

It was 2:00 in the morning. I was in the computer room. Suddenly there was a bat swooping from the hall into the bedroom. It had come upstairs from the porch, where a screen was off. Rather than dodge through a hall full of a swooping bat, I thought I'd go out onto the porch roof to open a window to let it out. Unfortunately this brilliant idea meant that the light in the bedroom was still on when I opened the window. So by the time I got back out there with the camera, there were several bats in the bedroom, swooping into the hall and back…

How many can you see? Except for the close-up, all the pictures were taken at the same distance, near the far wall of the larger room, as you can tell by the shadows. And how many species do you think? Three at least…

It's the season when the cat starts sleeping on the bed again

 All summer we're separated. He sleeps in the bathtub, or on the floor. I throw the covers off, and there's a fan in the window pointed at the bed. Then, the nights get cooler, and he's back. It's as if he never left. Purring, kneading… at this season I have plenty of covers to make that ok. Sleeping right next to me. … Aack! He didn't use to lick all over my face to wake me up! Where did that come from? Who has he been hanging out with this summer?

This is Cheesecake. He came from the animal shelter as a kitten. I didn't need any more cats. He was named after the kind of temptation one ought to resist — and doesn't. He might even be a Birman. Long-haired, lilac point, white feet. He was younger when I took this picture, but he's still gorgeous.

And no, I don't choose my bedding colors only to flatter him. They just happen to be some of my favorite colors nowadays…

The three-legged cat falls off the roof

Lovey on the railing

 I just spent three hours catching the three-legged cat! That's Lovey, whose shoulder was injured by being carried off by a bluejay when he was a feral kitten. The lady who heard the kitten screaming ran out threw rocks and the blue jay dropped the kitten. I got him after he was trapped. He was a pettable-only-while-eating cat for a while, but with me, indoors, he is totally friendly, pick-upable, comes when called to eat, rolls on the floor to have his stomach rubbed, hops up on my lap and purrs. When he is upset, he reverts to wild. And, apparently being loose in the wild outdoors is enough to turn him wild again.

He fell of the roof! Well, I had just put him out on the porch, and he and Buddy got in a fight and rolled right off. I heard the commotion and looked out and saw the other cat looking over the edge. When I went out side they both ran away from me - well, Lovey hopped. That's how he gets around. Buddy showed up at the door later, and came in for dinner with a little coaxing. (He was feral too, but learned early to come through a door when called.) Lovey found the porch mid-evening, but when I tried to call him in, he left, and spent the night outside. It was the first really rainy night and morning of the year, too. And he didn't show before I went to school this morning, or when I came home mid-afternoon. There are coyotes living just down the hill, so I was worried.

I called again about 5:30, and I guess he was thinking it was dinner time, because he showed up. And after calling awhile, and approaching very cautiously, he came towards me - closer, closer - I moved my hand and he ran. After that I was just trying to herd him to keep him from vanishing again down the hill. There was no getting close to him. Finally, at almost dark I gave up. Left the basement door propped open, and went in to feed the other cats.

He heard me doing that, and cried from outside. "Aren't you going to feed me too?" I took a dish of noisy dried food out, and he hopped right over to eat near the porch, but wouldn't let me closer than 4 or 5 feet. So one time he spooked, I moved the dish up onto the porch, and after a while he came up there to eat. He still wouldn't let me near him. It was very dark by then.

I felt my way down the stairs and collected a lot of large empty plant pots and barricaded the porch stairs. That worked, sort of 'cause he can only hop. Then I turned on the porch light, and took a can of cat food out on the porch, and popped the top. He came right over to it to eat, but still no touching. So I took my book out, and sat there. He would eat next to my hand, but not be touched.

So I put the can of cat food just inside the open door, and when I sat down again, I was a little too close, and he got scared. Luckily he didn't jump off the porch. He went over to investigate the food, went in the door, started to explore - and I leaped up and shut the door on him. The hall doors were all closed so he couldn't just vanish in the house. He was scared and tried to run, so that was a good idea. So I went and got Cheesecake (the other cat), and opened the doors to where I wanted him to go. But after he and Cheesecake said hello, I guess he decided he was indoors now, and he let me walk right over and pet him and pick him up.

So I took him into the room where he is used to eating, and put him down, and the food - and he rolled over on his back to have me rub his stomach… Tame inside, wild outside.

The picture is a painting-style image of Lovey on the porch railing in a characteristic pose.