Snowcatcher: cats

(affiliate links to my greeting cards)

Early in the pandemic, my neighbors asked if I would check in on their cat when they had to travel out of state to be with a terminal relative. (The family member passed on a couple of weeks later due to cancer, not the other 2020 killer.) Lizard and I are cat people, but we can't have a pet now due to the tripping hazard. Taking care of our neighbor's elderly, blind and hard-of-hearing cat was a show of kindness during a scary time, but it also gave us the opportunity to indulge in some purr comfort.

Last month, my neighbors' cat crossed the rainbow bridge. I know how much they loved that cat. She was their baby for more than 20 years! I wanted to design a greeting card that might express the sadness we feel and the heartfelt love we hope to share. I decided to try my hand once again at AI. Because, well, I don't have a cat. And because I snapped only a few photos of my neighbors' cat back in 2020.

One of the AI images gave me a great idea. I don't have cats anymore, but I do have yarn. What if I built a rainbow bridge from my fibers and used an image of my hand-dyed colors to generate the sympathy card I could see in my head?

I came up with a few great images, in my opinion. But many needed some heavy digital TLC. Such as this one... Check out the face on the seventh cat. And the boats in the background. I made no background specifications in my prompts.

With the help of old images from my own kitties decades ago...

...I was able to fix what AI couldn't. One cat in my favorite AI rendition looked like a gerbil with a cat paw coming out of its tummy. One cat had too many legs. One cat had a dog's tail coming out of its neck. All the eyes but one were wacky. And there was a piece of thick barbed wire coming out of the mountain to what may have been an "intelligent" attempt to generate lightning in the smaller cloud. ??? Sometimes, AI makes me roll my eyes!!!

After heavy editing in Photoshop, I came up with what I think is a wonderfully expressive card! And this is what I sent...

If I was creative enough, I wouldn't mind doing this for the squirrels that raid my bird feeders!!! I'll be trying walnuts to go along with the corn cobs I put out specifically for them.

The mice, however, are quite another story. I don't want them in my garden, in my yard, under my house or, heaven forbid, in my house! Nothing I was doing had long-term effect. I decided to get serious about cats.

One of my favorite kitties of the past, Banzai
I submitted kitten adoption applications to two different agencies. I knew kittens would not be effective mousers for perhaps a year or more, but I figured I could get lots of great photos between now and then, plus, purrballs would put adventure back into knitting and crocheting, right?!?

I thought perhaps I can just learn to co-exist with the mice until the future kittens grow into finicky human owners. Then another dahlia bulb disappeared. Grrr!

At wit's end, I was ready to dig up the entire raised-bed flower garden and move it far from the birdfeeder. Then the doorbell rang. Door-to-door sales people are not supposed to be in our neighborhood, but I suppose the pest control company knew my neighborhood was fed up with the mouse/wasp problems we've been suffering the last few years.

For the record, I don't mind the wasps at all. We have not had very many bees in the last two to three years, and wasps are good pollinators. Our wasps are not aggressive and pretty much leave us alone. So I didn't ask for high-traffic wasp areas to be treated.

Mice, again, are quite another story. I have wanted to avoid doing anything inhumane, but I also don't want to contribute to hantavirus risk. This one is every bit as nasty as what's currently plaguing our world, and mice are carriers. Colorado has experienced 116 cases of hantavirus since 1993. Back in about 2016, the husband of one of my co-workers, who both also live in a rural area as we do, contracted the hantavirus. He survived, but was very sick for a very long time. So I'm just a bit oversensitive to potential. Plus, I like my flower garden. I don't appreciate mice or bunnies eating my bulbs!!!

It's now been a week since the pest control guys did their stuff. I saw one mouse in the raised-bed garden the day after treatment. I've seen no mice or signs of mice since then.

I'm still thinking about getting kittens. I've missed having cats!