The Great Book Sort, Part 6: Disability Representation
Today was exciting. My kindle app has been having issues for a long time; holding blank spots for nonexistent books (that I couldn’t delete); refusing to download certain books that do exist; etc.
I was patient. Until today, when I finished the first book in a rather good series, and couldn’t download the second. Bah!
So I poked through various bits of the app, trying to find a way to fix it. Finally, I did the closest possible thing to, “Have you tried switching it off and on again?”—I logged off. Of course I didn’t have the faintest idea what my password was, or how difficult it would be to reset it. Luckily, it wasn’t difficult at all.
One tiny problem. None of my folders existed any more. Four years of sorting, and all my 700+ books were in one jumbled pile once again. On the up side, I could download the book I wanted to read right now. So I did.
And a few minutes later, all my folders magically reappeared—minus the phantom books that I’ve been trying to delete for a year. I win!
So let’s talk books! There are only 112 left to sort: I’m almost down to double digits.
Chronicles of Egg by Geoff Rodkey
These rollicking adventure tales have lots of piratical injuries—missing limbs, eyes, etc—and one of the key characters has a missing hand as well as neurological issues that make him twitch. As someone with neurological twitches of my own, this is the first time I’ve seen twitching in fiction. Hurrah for variety!
Speaking of things done well, Egg is in love, and not very good at it—but the author is clearly self-aware about the character’s immaturity. Your characters don’t have to understand consent or respect perfectly at the age of thirteen, but you the author need to know when they’re being a creep and/or dumbarse. These books aren’t perfect, but they’re close.
The Arcadia Project by Mishell Baker
These deserve a BIG trigger warning as the viewpoint character attempted suicide before the series begins. It resulted in serious injuries ranging from having significantly less than the usual number of legs to often losing touch with reality.
However, while I almost always end up triggered by any fiction portraying mental illness, this series is like therapy to me. Partly because the main character is trying her best, and improving, and even putting strategies from therapy into practice. And it’s working—sometimes well, sometimes not so well. But she’s smart despite her neurological issues, and she’s alive, and she’s making a difference.
Meanwhile, there’s an excellent fantasy story to be had, which is often horrifically tragic, and sometimes the main character makes awful mistakes. One of the things she knows is that suicide is always a bad plan. Another is that when she’s at her worst, she just needs to keep breathing and a good day will come around again.
The Floating City by, uh, me
This is one of my interactive novels. The viewpoint character’s legs stop just above where her knees would be. Her best friend is Hard of Hearing. I’m really proud of the work I did on this book, even though I know very little about prosthetic limbs or Deaf culture. Yes, I hired sensitivity readers, and of course did research. I chose those disabilities because (a) Prosthetics are cool, and (b) Sign languages are cool. And because I wanted to be a good ally to disabled people, partly through sheer representation and partly by representing a society in which those disabilities are far less difficult to deal with due to the society around them being more adaptive.
It was research for this book that made me realise that I am disabled myself, and that my daughter has ADHD. So it was quite life-changing, and I’m grateful. It’s also a pretty cool climate change fiction story. There’s a shark farm.
Click here. It’s on steam, Googple Play, the App store, Amazon, and your PC.
Oh yeah! The series I’m reading has a couple of minor disabilities too. One of the main characters has periodic bouts of malaria. Another has an eye that gets fatigued, so he sometimes wears a patch.
Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn
This is a delightful story of an irrepressible spinster and lepidopterist gallivanting about in steampunk times. They are excellent (although not for a reader averse to a sex-positive heroine).
My apologies for the poor-quality images this entry. I’m having worse neurological problems than usual (current theory is that it’s due to being very low on iron for a year—it’s very much the focus for my doctors and I at present) and I’m severely lacking in even the rudimentary competence required to divvy up the screenshots into individual pictures rather than sets.
DIY Cat Enclosure, Part 4
Here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
I can’t remember if I blogged about the second small section of mesh that Chris put up. If I didn’t, here’s a pic, featuring a blurry Zoom. As you can see, one of the cat tunnels is incorporated in the mesh.
It is 2023, yay! As a public servant, Chris gets a ‘free’ holiday between Christmas and New Year’s every year. I eyed the coming holiday with a great deal of nervous excitement. This, clearly, was our time to get more of the cat run done!
Amazing, we actually did. Chris put together the greenhouse (bought purely because it was relatively cheap, see-through, and enclosed—ideal for watching cats playing). Here is Buttons investigating it, since he is the only cat currently in our household who doesn’t assume that anything designed for him is clearly some kind of trap.
I’ll put more cat toys and stuff in it soon. The cat tunnel (same one that’s attached to the most recent small mesh segment in the gazebo) is tied into place, and will eventually be tied more securely (and the plastic door of the greenhouse will be closed) but for now it’s open so the cats can explore the greenhouse and get used to it when I’m not looking.
During the same holidays, Chris put a BIG section of mesh up. Here is Zipper pretending to ignore it from one side.
And here she is pretending to ignore it from the other side:
Either brilliantly, lazily, or both, Chris chose not to trim the bottom edge of the netting on this section. The tangled mass of it works as a lower boundary, and some friends have said they have some cat netting that won’t be useful at their place, so hopefully we’ll be able to just leave it like that (and use the new stack of netting for the final gazebo section).
(In other news, Zipper and Zoom are going to be SO ANGRY when the cat run is finished and they’re fully enclosed.)
The original cat tunnel, which is firmly attached to our cat door, has had its loose end flailing about wildly for some months now, and part of the wire has come out. I realised during the holidays that we already had a tarp-covered table that might as well become part of the cat run, so I tied the loose end of that tunnel to the table, and placed the table by the wall. That will hopefully anchor the whole of Cat Tunnel #1 to the wall, making the rest of the yard more convenient for humans.
So here’s the ultimate plan and current status:
Cat door–> Tunnel #1 –> tarp-covered table = Section 1
1.5 metre gap between Section 1 and gazebo (the gap may get filled with the trampoline at some point, or that may be too finicky). This is Gap #1.
Gazebo: It has a shade-cloth roof; more shade-cloth is clipped to the fence to extend the roof on two sides. The small vertical gaps on two sides are both covered in custom mesh panels; one of which has Tunnel #2 leading out of it. One large side is also completely covered in mesh. One large side (the side facing Section #1) is still completely open.
Tunnel #2 leads from the gazebo to the greenhouse, although it is not properly enclosed at the greenhouse end.
There is a large/long gap between the greenhouse and the shed. It will probably take two cat tunnels, at $59 each. This is Gap #2.
The shed aka the cats’ toilet, is set up and in its rightful place, with a cat-sized hole cut in the door. The door is still standing open in order to make it as easy as possible to use.
I’m still liking the (rather expensive and rather large) cat tunnels we bought. I’ve observed both cats relaxing in them, so they clearly like them too.
Gap #1 is by far the most complex, because we need to have some kind of human door to get in and out of the gazebo. I have several pieces of scrap wood that are likely to get involved somehow.
Lizzie’s having her birthday at our house this month, so it’s unlikely we’ll do anything else until after that, because whatever door we end up making for the gazebo won’t be as convenient for a bunch of 11 year-olds as an open side.
Bonus picture of Buttons and Zipper.
Taming a Feral Kitten: Two Weeks
Pretty soon this sweet attack-oriented angel will go to a new permanent home.
How’s his socialisation going? Well, it’s a mix of good and bad. . .
Does he sleep at night?
Yes. Every night I put him in my bathroom and turn off the light. The first night he meowed for a little while. Ever since, he’s been cartoonishly obedient—like a pet parrot that immediately goes to sleep if you just put a blanket over his cage.
Now that I don’t lock him in the shower each night, he tries his best to escape the bathroom any time someone actually uses the toilet. Ah well.
Does he use the litter box?
Yes. This was also an instant success… until it wasn’t. He has urinated and defecated in a variety of locations around my house, but every single instance was in my presence—and his clear favourite toileting location was my bed. That strongly suggested he was deliberately mixing our scents.
I’ve started changing his litter every two days instead of once a week (I’ve always removed his poo very quickly). But I think the real breakthrough came because I stopped feeding him in the bathroom (near his litter) and gave him food and water in my bedroom instead. I THINK I’ve solved the problem—but I still don’t let him in my cupboard or in the kids’ rooms (so he’s not tempted to add his scent to other beds or to our nice soft, fragrant clothes).
Does he claw up the carpet and/or couch?
Yes, a little. Couches are my Achilles’ Heel when it comes to training cats. When a kitten is tiny, it is natural for it to climb up beds and couches because it’s too little to jump that distance. And it’s adorable. But by the time the kitten is old enough to jump that high, the bad habit of using claws on the couch is already formed. Buttons definitely much prefers the cat tower, so hopefully his new owners have a couch that’s not too alluring.
Yes, he has a bow on in this picture.
Does he get underfoot?
Uh, yes. I’ve had at least one cat in my life since I was seven years old, and Buttons is by far the worst when it comes to putting himself next to, in front of, and directly below my feet. It’s worst when he thinks I’m about to feed him (naturally) but it’s extremely common and extremely bad. He’ll circle round and round under my skirt—stuff like that. He’s been stepped on three times and kicked across the floor more times than I can count. The only real solution is to pick him up from wherever he is (even when he’s asleep—he’ll come out of a dead sleep just to hurl himself, kamikaze-style, at your path) and put him down only when you stop moving.
How does he feel about getting picked up?
He loves it. Every time. Even if it’s a young child he’s never met before—he’s all for snuggles, all the time. Having said that…
Does he bite and scratch?
This is where he’s shown the most dramatic improvement (not even counting our initial meeting, when he tried to kill me). He wants to snuggle a LOT but he wants to be playing even more. The perfect solution in his mind is to be attacking his human family. Toes and fingers and arms and unprotected bellies, oh my. Warm, loving, AND delicious!
For the first few days with Buttons, we were all covered in scratches. Hands, arms, legs, feet, and necks suffered the most. The deepest cuts were on the legs, as he was a major climber of human legs. Why not? Such a convenient path to snuggly violence in the warm lap of the legs’s owner. He didn’t particularly care if we were wearing pants or just our skin: we were for climbing.
He’s already learned not to climb humans, or to have his claws out at all if he’s playing with us. (From Day 1, he was clearly moderating his violence in order to not harm us, but he was still drawing blood frequently.) It’s not perfect, but he’s well above the usual standard for his age (now seven weeks). Well done Buttons!
But it’s still a good idea, if one wants him in one’s lap, to have a toy within reach. Because he’d love to be in your lap, but he’s especially love it if he could be attacking something at the same time.
And over the last few days, he has learned that we usually pick him up when we’re about to open a Forbidden Door, and he has started deliberately biting us in hopes that we put him down. This is not ideal.
How is he going with the other cats?
My cats are NOT super friendly, even with humans. (Cats always prefer humans to other cats.) They have gone from terrified to angry to merely annoyed—at which point, although we continue to closely supervise their interactions, we don’t need to be within arm’s reach.
At the ‘angry’ stage, Buttons was perfectly meek and mild, keeping his body low to the ground and backing off when the other cats hissed. But now, after many hours spent carefully keeping out of reach of the other cats, he is getting bored. He wants to play. So although he is still definitely putting himself at the bottom of the totem pole, he is now batting at the other cats’ tails and things like that. Which is upping the annoyance factor, but also continuing to prove that he is not out to hurt them.
In this video, you can see that Zoom (the older cat) is curious about Buttons, and is nervous of him but confident enough to do some experimental slow blinks (remember how that was the very first sign that I’d made positive contact with Buttons?) and to look pleadingly at me. If she was still properly afraid of Buttons, she wouldn’t take her eyes off him—and she wouldn’t try to sniff him.
You can also see Buttons thinking about attacking, but definitely not attacking.
In this more recent set of videos, you can see that Buttons is definitely attacking now (but not in the first clip, where Zoom hisses—but softly—and Buttons makes sweet little mews). As of today, the older cats are still curious about him, and about 89% sure he’s not dangerous, but they’re not in the mood to cheerfully coexist just yet, especially when coexisting with Buttons means a guarantee of being adorably attacked. If they’re really had enough of him, though, they leave.
All of this (and there are many many hours now invested in this process) is about establishing who is boss, and what the rules are between them. The older cats would prefer a “Live and let live” approach (now that, “Make it go away” appears to be off the table) but Buttons cannot be awake without attacking something. Thus, negotiations continue.
He is incredibly sweet, and will often burst into purring just to be near one of his pet humans. Or if one of us looks at him. Or when he invites himself into our lap. When I go to the bathroom at night, he pokes up his stoned little face to see if there’s any chance of a cuddle.
He treats anything and everything as the floor under his feet, and has more than once made himself comfortable on my face.
And, unlike our other cats (who were born suspicious), he adored playing in our Christmas tree.
The friend of mine who was going to adopt him has an older cat with fast-declining health so they had to bow out. However, they have cat shelter connections so we know he’ll find a good home.
I’ll most likely ask the friend to contact their animal shelter person on Tuesday aka 3 January, aka the day when dates and days of the week begin to mean something again.
In the meantime, here’s my favourite pic of Buttons again:
Felicity Banks 