Pixel found
16 May 2008 23:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juldeaShe's back. I feel so goddamn incredibly lucky that my cat got outside and I found her within a matter of hours. Somehow I feel like I have cheated insurmountable odds here.
We don't know when she got out of the house. I can honestly say I don't remember seeing her around this morning before work, but I don't remember not seeing her either. londo says he didn't see her when he got up and was puttering around, but that was likely midday. When I got home at 8:30 she was nowhere to be found, and this was noticable because it was food time.
I opened all closets and all internal doors and set the food out, and only one cat (Matrix, the one in the user icon) responded and showed up. I did some more research around the house and ended up with the horrible realization that she just wasn't around.
I immediately initiated Operation Alternate Crying Hysterically And Being Useful. To be useful, I: took the cats' blanket out into the front hallway, opened the front door (to the building; the front door to our apartment was closed), and sat on the porch opening a can of tuna and putting it into her bowl, which I left there. I went to the upstairs neighbor and told her about everything. I posted here. I informed londo of the situation and he came home from the D&D he was playing at Pandemonium, and he came home. He took Matrix out on the porch for a while ("Pixel bait - her best friend"), but Matrix didn't like that idea so she came back in. He went out on his own with the bowl of tuna and a flashlight. (I wasn't allowed to go out alone due to it being late, a not-great neighborhood, and my being a female in distress; and both of us going out would be a bad idea if she started scratching on the door.)
Not long after that I heard loud pounding on the back door, so I flew back there where londo was frustrated in the rain. She had apparently been as close as the stairway along the house that leads up to the upstairs neighbor's porch! However, neighbor had opened the door and scared Pixel down, past londo who failed his reflex save to catch her in time. So now she was on the other side of the house behind ours, probably having turned a corner and gone further down, too. We moved the trash cans and went down that space between houses, then between those houses and the ones behind them, spreading out. I doubled back for a sweatshirt, then returned back to the same spot, following the gap between houses to a dead-end of a short piece of fence with what looked like a rolled-up sheet of sheet metal ten feet long lying on the ground providing a scalable route to the next row of houses. I turned around to go back and had almost turned the corner when I heard, "Mrrrwoooowwww!"
I spun back around, shined the flashlight, and saw Pixel under/inside the sheet metal tube, just her head sticking out and YOWLING at me! Remembering how![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ratatosk had interacted with Abbie to get HIM back, I didn't rush her, but instead came very slowly, a step every few seconds, talking to her the whole time and asking her to come out and come home with me. She was LOUDLY protesting her situation. (It was raining, by the way.) I finally was close enough to reach out and pet her head, but she wasn't coming out yet. I was actually afraid for a while that she was somehow stuck inside, since she would partway emerge and then yowl and go back in. But eventually, after several minutes of pleading, she slid out enough that I got her around the chest and lifted her to me.
At that point, she's already wet, what's wrong with crying on her a bit?
She's now inside, where she headed immediately for the food dish and then slunk around for a while. I bribed her into interacting with me with catnip, and made her an impromptu catnip toy with an old single sock. She's mostly dry now, not obviously worse for wear, and home where she belongs.
Epilogue: londo had returned to D&D after we had found her, to leave me some alone time with my cats. A little while later, there was a knocking at the door - a deliveryman from Spice & Rice with some surprise Thai tea and appetizers. I'm keeping him.
We don't know when she got out of the house. I can honestly say I don't remember seeing her around this morning before work, but I don't remember not seeing her either. londo says he didn't see her when he got up and was puttering around, but that was likely midday. When I got home at 8:30 she was nowhere to be found, and this was noticable because it was food time.
I opened all closets and all internal doors and set the food out, and only one cat (Matrix, the one in the user icon) responded and showed up. I did some more research around the house and ended up with the horrible realization that she just wasn't around.
I immediately initiated Operation Alternate Crying Hysterically And Being Useful. To be useful, I: took the cats' blanket out into the front hallway, opened the front door (to the building; the front door to our apartment was closed), and sat on the porch opening a can of tuna and putting it into her bowl, which I left there. I went to the upstairs neighbor and told her about everything. I posted here. I informed londo of the situation and he came home from the D&D he was playing at Pandemonium, and he came home. He took Matrix out on the porch for a while ("Pixel bait - her best friend"), but Matrix didn't like that idea so she came back in. He went out on his own with the bowl of tuna and a flashlight. (I wasn't allowed to go out alone due to it being late, a not-great neighborhood, and my being a female in distress; and both of us going out would be a bad idea if she started scratching on the door.)
Not long after that I heard loud pounding on the back door, so I flew back there where londo was frustrated in the rain. She had apparently been as close as the stairway along the house that leads up to the upstairs neighbor's porch! However, neighbor had opened the door and scared Pixel down, past londo who failed his reflex save to catch her in time. So now she was on the other side of the house behind ours, probably having turned a corner and gone further down, too. We moved the trash cans and went down that space between houses, then between those houses and the ones behind them, spreading out. I doubled back for a sweatshirt, then returned back to the same spot, following the gap between houses to a dead-end of a short piece of fence with what looked like a rolled-up sheet of sheet metal ten feet long lying on the ground providing a scalable route to the next row of houses. I turned around to go back and had almost turned the corner when I heard, "Mrrrwoooowwww!"
I spun back around, shined the flashlight, and saw Pixel under/inside the sheet metal tube, just her head sticking out and YOWLING at me! Remembering how
ratatosk had interacted with Abbie to get HIM back, I didn't rush her, but instead came very slowly, a step every few seconds, talking to her the whole time and asking her to come out and come home with me. She was LOUDLY protesting her situation. (It was raining, by the way.) I finally was close enough to reach out and pet her head, but she wasn't coming out yet. I was actually afraid for a while that she was somehow stuck inside, since she would partway emerge and then yowl and go back in. But eventually, after several minutes of pleading, she slid out enough that I got her around the chest and lifted her to me. At that point, she's already wet, what's wrong with crying on her a bit?
She's now inside, where she headed immediately for the food dish and then slunk around for a while. I bribed her into interacting with me with catnip, and made her an impromptu catnip toy with an old single sock. She's mostly dry now, not obviously worse for wear, and home where she belongs.
Epilogue: londo had returned to D&D after we had found her, to leave me some alone time with my cats. A little while later, there was a knocking at the door - a deliveryman from Spice & Rice with some surprise Thai tea and appetizers. I'm keeping him.