Echo’s bogus journey, version 2.0

Echo, if you were not aware, is a strictly-indoor cat.  She protests this, and from time to time she escapes.  On such occasions, she tends to demonstrate her unsuitability for life in the outside world.  Today, alas, was another one of those days.

Last night she escaped the house,  and since it was quite late I decided against trying to chase her down.  This morning, when I called her to come in, I heard her meowing but she did not come to the door.  Following the meows, I eventually looked up and saw her in the neighbor’s tree, probably about 15-20 feet above the roof of their house!

At first, we thought nothing of it.  If she got up, surely she could get down.  But after a few hours, it became evident that she was stuck, and with the Texas sun rising, we realized that a rescue was going to be necessary.

I began by trying a number of simple methods.  I took a bowl of food and water to the base of the tree, and tried to call to her to come down and have some.  No dice.

I climbed part-way into the tree itself, to see if proximity would entice her to come down.  Again, no luck.  It was at this point that I began to realize how steep of a branch she had climbed — if you look at the wider-angle shot above, and follow the branch, you’ll see that it really juts down at probably something like a 70 degree angle.  Once I got high enough, I began to appreciate her dilemma.

The neighbors weren’t home, but since I didn’t know how long they would be away, I decided to go ahead and try climbing up on their roof with our 12′ ladder.  The roof is quite flat for a ways, and the ladder could be placed firmly against the branch where Echo was perched.  I climbed the ladder and got within about eight feet of her, but despite my best efforts waving food and water around, I still couldn’t get her to come to me.   (Going closer to her was also out of the question, since the branch became more narrow and the distance quite great.)

To really get to her, I would need a ladder about twice as long.  I asked our neighbors across the street, but they couldn’t think of anyone with one.  At this point, I figured I was in above my head.  Fortunately, the neighbor’s son (probably a senior in high school, or thereabouts) got home, so I was able to secure permission to call someone to get her down.  I tried calling animal control, but they said “we don’t do cats” and I’d have to call a private rescue company.  I managed to find two phone numbers for such, but, being Saturday, the calls went unanswered.

Back to square one.  But this time, I had an ally.  This seemed to be about the most interesting thing in the neighbor-kid’s day, so we went up onto the roof together.  We didn’t have any great ideas about getting her down, but since Echo was panting a lot and seemed thirsty, we thought we might at least be able to get her some water by throwing a rope over the branch as a make-shift pulley.

As I was getting the rope from my garage, I had an ingenious idea of the variety that no responsible person would allow me to attempt.

I returned to the roof with (a) the rope, and (b) the cat tree.  Our approach can best be described visually, so I have put together this excellent diagram explaining how it was done.  Basically, ladder + cat tree = really damn tall.  The diagram doesn’t quite explain that our arms were above our heads because the ladder was taller than me.

With the top of the cat tree right next to her, Echo made a heroic, death-defying stunt jump onto the top of the cat tree.  We then carefully lowered it to the roof, and I picker her up off the top.

Wow!

Seven months

You will, no doubt, be shocked to learn that despite having me for a parent, Cali is still alive and in good health, and, later this week, will be seven months old.

It has been an interesting month.

At her six-month appointment, the doctor told us that she was becoming a little heavy for her height, so we cut her off from her night-time feeding to bring her down to a steady schedule of four meals a day.  That went better than we expected, and in retrospect has been a really good change.  She’s now sleeping from about 7 or 8 o’clock at night until 5 in the morning.  We keep trying to get her to sleep in later, and we can usually eek out an extra hour, but beyond that, alas, there’s just no reasoning with her.

In the last week or so, she’s started to crawl after things (video), which has been really exciting.  For at least a few weeks she’d been able to transition from prone to all-fours, but then she’d just hang out or switch to sitting.  With her high interest in standing, we were beginning to think she was just going to bypass crawling altogether.  As of yet, she’s not really tearing around the house, but I expect it’s only a matter of time until Echo really has danger at her heels.

Her first tooth also poked through the gum about a week ago.  Since then, four more have already followed.  She’s really been pretty mellow about the whole thing, and seems to cope by sleeping more and just sitting around and chewing on stuff.  She’s also developing a vice grip.  She took a small, laminated piece of paper out of my hand at the library the other day, and I had to really yank on it to get it back.  With so many new teeth, she is suddenly much more dangerous.  I, for one, feel that we have not been given adequate time to learn how to avoid getting our fingers bitten.

OMG, a post!

Seeing as that we haven’t posted anything here since November, this is quite an accomplishment.  We’ve been pretty much getting our asses completely kicked—Laura with the tax season, me with the dissertation, both of us with the baby, and so on.  At any rate, I’m going to try to put pictures up more frequently.  Instead of trying to give you monthly updates or something here, I’ll just put a link to:

All Photo Albums

So you can visit there at your leisure.  (RSS readers can subscribe to the pictures directly, too; I’m not sure if it will show you just new albums or also new pictures in an album.)  At any rate, this blog definitely needs some more recent pictures…

Cali is almost 6 months old now.  She had some fussy times back in January and February, but since then she’s pretty much been an angel.  She reliably sleeps for around ten hours a night, waking up once around 3-4am for a snack, so we’re actually able to get some good sleep.  She’s eating baby food and can stay sitting up on her own, but she doesn’t pull herself up yet.  She smiles a lot, and my mission in life has become to keep her constantly giggling.  She’s not crawling yet, but is doing lots of baby push-ups and can flip over well enough that you can’t really expect to find her where you’ve left her.  She has some pretty bad stranger anxiety when other people hold her, but she seems pretty fine with just being around people.

She’s big.  Really big.  They told us she was in the 99th percentile at her two month appointment, and at the four month appointment she was “off the charts” and the size of an average ten-month old.  Her 9-month size pajamas are too small, now.  She’s pretty tall, but is getting some pretty adorable baby rolls, which we’re told will go away in short order after she’s mobile.  She had a cold for a little while, a few months ago, but otherwise she’s been in great shape.

We got hit with a big hail storm in March that broke our skylights and banged up our roof.  Apparently we need to have it re-shingled.  So that was exciting.

Baby Calista

Calista Jordan Davis, born November 19, 2008, 5:20 PM, 9 lbs 5 oz, 20.5 inches.

Baby and mom are doing great.  More pictures here.

Update. Christmas pictures.  January pictures.

More pictures! February.

Wooot!!!

Congrats, President Obama!

T Minus 10 Days?

We went to another Ultrasound today and got some new photos.  They aren’t very clear (apparently this is usual as the baby gets larger).  But a couple of the better ones begin here.

They say she has hair, and is 7.5lbs +/- 1lb.  I’m pretty sure I could have told them that.  They are also moving up the expected due date by a week, to the 13th.  Rut roh.

Things coming together

I’ve put up just a few new photos, and I’ll probably be updating this album next week with some more.

In the past few weeks we’ve had a baby shower (thanks for all the loot !!), read some baby books (everything scary is normal; everything normal is scary), and attended a birthing class which was rather unremarkable.

We’ve also made the list of things we want to get done.  We have always avoided this in the past.  My mother is a notorious list-maker, currently on volume 17, page 192 of the list she started 27 years ago.  But I can’t deny that it has prompted us to do many useful things.  For instance, now, rather than ferociously lurching at you, the dishwasher stays in place when you pull a full rack of dishes forward.  I had also forgotten how nice it is to have a mirror to look at while shaving.

Meanwhile, work is progressing and I like it.  I had cut back to 30 hours a week quite awhile ago, in order to focus on the dissertation.  And I’ve started to do a little bit of writing on it, I guess that’s going well.

We’ve been watching lots of football games and the Longhorns are doing great this year.  I’ve also been following the elections more closely than is probably healthy.  Maybe that’s okay.  It’s the first time I’ve voted for the winner

Mighty hunter

The craziest thing happened today: the weather in Austin was actually really nice.  Air conditioner off!  Windows open!  Let’s go for a walk!  I doubt the high here was much past 80, ending several tyrannical months in the 95-100 range.

And so, this evening, we were out in the front yard, enjoying the cool and letting Echo eat grass (hands down her favorite thing in the entire world to do), when we noticed two young deer, similarly occupied, across the road in the neighbors’ yard.

I, of course, immediately set upon redirecting Echo’s attention from the Very Tasty Grass to the deer.  She wasted no time in adopting a hunter’s pose, lowering her body and sneaking alongside the curb for cover, and then aggressively moving towards them.  The deer seemed somewhat alarmed and paid her good attention.  It was quite like watching lions approach gazelles on those nature shows, but for the eleven-pound lion.

That’s about the point I realized that even small deer are quite large compared to a cat.  And, noting in particular that their kick might do quite a lot of damage to such a small creature, decided that perhaps this was not such a good idea after all.  Fortunately, our mighty hunter was working on getting a good angle, and so she was not difficult to retrieve.  For their part, the deer seemed almost relieved to see the situation being dealt with.

I was unable to reset Echo into vegetarian mode, as upon being set down she immediately tore off after the deer again.  And so, our time outside had to come to an early end.

I only wish I’d had my camera.

Bathroom remodel pictures

The bathroom remodel is coming along very nicely, and has provided perhaps the most frightening house photo of all time.

You can see this, and the rest, in the new Album 13.

Building an Echo run

Over the last couple of weekends I put together an “Echo run” high up in the office.

More pictures of this, and a few other things, are up on Album 12.