ELSEWHERE

Went over several name options and have decided on Caelus; "Cael" for short, sort of "kel" in pronunciation

For the first half of the day I was alternating an hour with him in free roam (in my room) and an hour with him locked in the bathroom (so Oz could have some time without him around). By evening, Oz was mostly sleeping anyway so I let him hang out uninterrupted while ash spent the evening with us in my room. He is very polite and mostly backs off when Oz hisses at him, but he is a kitten and really wants to stalk and chase her. Things got a little stressful a bit ago, so he's back in the bathroom for his dinner, will probably come out again one more time before bed. I can tell he's starting to get a little tired both of this system and of not being able to explore the rest of the house, so hopefully it won't take too long before things change.

We are hitting points of correction and having to teach him 'no', 'get down', and 'don't do it', which he is of course not thrilled about. He otherwise continues to be ridiculously affectionate -- we think he may have been weaned before he was ready for it, which also means he might be a little younger than reported (the previous owner was guessing), but he's certainly big enough to be twelve weeks. He doesn't have the anxiety I'd expect from a cat that was separated from its mom or littermates too young, but you never really know how that'll affect them. He's definitely very well socialised, and [touch wood] I expect him to get along with all the other animals in the house

Oh, we also gave him a flea bath (more as a preventative measure than anything), which he took better than most cats would but still predictably not great. He is a drowned rat when wet.

I really hope things work out. I'm very nervous about Oz. But I'll keep things moving as slowly and smoothly as I can

It took about two years for Oz and Loki to sort of get along -- they're still not friendly, but they have spent time near each other without causing any issues. That's in a situation where they largely spend their time in completely different parts of the house, without anyone making an active effort to acclimate them to each other. So, like, it's possible, probably.

Oz got pretty severely bullied by dad's cat when I was living with him, and that broke her trust in other cats, so when there's one around she does a lot of hissing and growling and then running away to hide. The other cats don't take particularly well to her social skills, so they're prone to antagonising her to varying extents, which reinforces the issue.

She has gotten along with other cats, before dad's -- I'm hopeful that she can get there again. That some slow and careful exposure therapy will break through her nervousness and she and Cael can get along

There's been a little bit of tolerating being in the same space, today. A few times of both of them sitting on the bed

Oz has been wanting to spend time out of my room, which is fine except that if I leave the door open so she can come back, the kitten is able to fit through the gate so would also be able to get out, so I've ziptied a piece of chicken wire to it -- it will either keep the kitten in or make such a ruckus that it will alert me to any attempts to get out (I hope). It does also make it difficult to actually open the gate, but it'll work until we're ready for the kitten to explore

This also means there's been some interaction between Cael and the other animals -- there was a very cautious meeting between Cael and Ivy (Ivy seems Concerned), and just now Cael and Sekhmet, and Mochi saw each other. I'm going to keep an eye on things there for any escalation -- I'm fine with them just being aware of each other, but I don't want any nose-to-nose yet

And just now Cael and Loki had a pretty thorough meeting -- I could tell it was going well so I didn't want to interrupt it

Aaand while I was bringing Oz back in, we had some Cael hissing at Ivy, so not all smooth

 
There's some of this, there's some of hissing and growling, there's mostly staying on complete opposite sides of the room. Oz has come down from the tree several times and been able to do some of her old, kitten-less routine, which is very heartening. The kitten on the other hand has been kind of exhausting today and I've had to put him in time-out several times to get him to stop misbehaving

Getting Cael used to wearing a harness -- it's going shockingly smoothly so far, but I haven't put a leash on it yet and I suspect that when I do he will have opinions about it. In the meantime he wears it like he doesn't even know it's there. I want to get a better one for him, but this will work in the meantime

I've been adding stuff to the hedgebound subdomain -- it's going to be an art project where I just sort of add on to it as I think of things, with arg-ish inspired puzzle elements where you have to dig around to find anything at all. There are two (2) things to find, so far, neither of which go anywhere but one of them will once I get the where more figured out.

I need to eat lunch, and after I've done that I'm going to sharpen a knife and hopefully not stab any cats in the process.

Things continue -- Oz and the kitten are hovering at about the same level; Oz will tolerate a certain closeness, mostly, but is generally unhappy about the whole business. She's wanting to spend a lot of time outside my room, which I'm a little hesitant to grant because I don't want her to just give up on having a claim to the space in here (and also the rest of the house has other animals in it, and I don't want her to be getting into fights out there as well), but also I want her to be able to move at her own pace because forcing her to be around the kitten is going to make things worse. She's very insecure in here even when Cael is relegated to some bathroom time, except in the morning before he's been let out, when he's been in there for eight-ish hours. Cael also is clearly getting tired of the cold shoulder and is trying to push her envelope, which is frustrating for, I'm sure, all parties involved, including me. I'm stepping in where I can, and trying to preemptively redirect him, when I'm able.

Since Oz has been spending more time out of my room, my door has had to be open, which means Cael continues to get interactions in with the other animals. Ivy in particular had an unpleasant encounter through the gate, with hissing and whapping -- we're going to need to figure out how to introduce them better. We're also fast-tracking doing a scent introduction for the other cats and have traded bedding, so Cael will smell Loki, Sekhmet, Mochi, and Echo in his room, and they'll smell him where-ever ash puts the pillowcase I gave him. Hopefully that will help them get off on the right foot, we'll do some more supervised gate visits soon.

This weekend, ash and I are going to kitten-proof my room, since I have a better idea the kinds of things he's going to try to get in to when unsupervised, now, and so I can leave him alone in here sometimes without worrying about him ruining everything. I also finally ordered some petfood storage bins -- I've been meaning to for forever because ziplock style bags these days have such shitty adhesive on them that the ziplock bit just rips off instead of opening, and also I think Oz's food might tend to start to go stale before she gets through an entire bag and a sealed container might help with that. But also Cael is the sort of cat to try to chew through bags, so that especially needs a stop put to it, ASAP. Then we'll need ways to keep the boy from jumping up onto surfaces he doesn't belong on, and potentially brainstorm ways to keep him from chewing on wires (god help me).

He is ridiculously food motivated, I'm increasing his food amounts in the hopes he's just been not getting enough to stop being hungry and will calm himself. If it's not that I hope it's a growing pains thing and as he gets a bit older he'll chill.

I've broken out the spray bottle for training purposes and it's working alright -- better than physically removing him from what I don't want him to be doing, because his main takeaway there has been that he should hurry up and do what he wants while I'm going through the process of getting up and going over to stop him.

He's continuing to get locked in the bathroom sometimes, and that's working out so well that I may just continue using it to give Oz some space indefinitely, except that I'd honestly like to have my bathroom back. But he just goes to sleep when I put him in there, sometimes plays with his toys a little. He goes in there to eat and while Oz eats, then goes in there while Oz gets her pill and I take my walk, today he went in while I did a recording and hung out in the office for a while, went in there while I hung out with ash and put dishes away/read to him, then he went in there for about an hour at around 8 because he was sleepy anyway and to give Oz a chance to hang out. He'll go in there again to have dinner, come out again for a bit, and go back in for bed.

Oh Oz just came over to curl up next to me, she hasn't really been doing that since kitten so that makes me feel a little better.

Anyway, I am 36 years old and it's just nice to be able to be like 'no, I am too tired to deal with a kitten's nonsense right now' and just put him somewhere else for a bit. As a bonus it's good for his social development to have alone time, I think. And good for him to have regular experience of me leaving and then coming back.

In other news today ash was doing some crafts on my bed, and the kitten jumped onto it while ash was attempting to glue things together. So the kitten got glue on himself and had to be cleaned off and bits cut out of his fur -- it wasn't a huge amount, but got it on his paw, a bit on his side, and some of his whiskers got glued together. He's now missing those (or, they're shorter, rather) and has little bits cut out of his fur.

In other other news, I've been replaying Inscryption, and annoying the game by refusing to progress it (I want to see if there's a limit to how many names can go on the winner's wall). I'm also following all this Unity news, how that falls out is going to be very interesting. Capitalism continues to ruin everything and public companies are a bane on consumers

Increased food seems to be working -- yesterday, an hour to dinnertime, he was going nuts; it's now fifteen minutes to dinner and he's sleeping on the end of the bed

Cael is intent on undoing All progress made with Oz this morning

 
bite, tear, rend, etc