Hmmm. That entryway....

I should have stopped and formally evaluated it before I opened my mouth. dormouse_in_tea asked for photos to look at, and I went to take some just now. And was struck by three things:

1) It's wider than I thought, at the narrowest point. That will make the baby-gate solution very, very hard.
2) It's deeper than I gave it credit for.
3) It does NOT go clear to the ceiling, there is an area of it that is only one story high and then it opens up.

Which means that a baby-gate solution may not work (unless they make those very wide), but a construction solution WOULD. Adding a wall with a door in it might work okay. (Probably need to involve glass somewhere to not make the entry area miserably dark, as it has no light of its own.) Of course, that means arranging for, living through, and paying for the addition of same. But, we'll see. A short-term solution may be to baby-gate the hallway prior to the garage door, and come and go through that (again, making sure the garage door's closed before coming in, in case they DO scale the baby gate).

Right now I just want to wail to the universe. I shouldn't have to be doing this. These cats should be staying at home with Dad taking care of them. I love them and I'm glad to take care of them, but they ought to be there and none of this to have happened.

Progress, of sorts.

Yesterday, we brought Basta and Babe over. They are presently residing in the hallway bath upstairs. We had to chase Babe down as she saw the carrier and freaked. I felt so guilty - and then she cried for the whole 45-minute drive. Basta was ill. I felt so bad for them.

Babe has taken to hiding in a corner of the cupboard in there (when I saw she was trying to shove into corners, and mostly picking the ones by the door which made it hard to open, I opened the cupboard up and wiped it down - I even managed to get some padding in the corner later on but she didn't seem to mind it without). Basta I knew had had some water to drink, and Babe had debated coming out of her cupboard then, but not dared. So I wasn't sure Babe was drinking, but she doesn't pass the nape-of-the-neck dehydration test recommended by the vet, so so far so good.

I just took in a small serving of canned cat food to both of them. I set Babe's up in the cupboard and she was eating it when I slipped out - and even seemed curious about the hallway I slipped into, for the first time.

Basta, on the other hand, has been curious since, oh, about an hour and a half after she arrived. We really need to get more of the house cleaned so we can open that door and let them pick when to come out. Basta's been happy to be petted and to purr; Babe has been willing to be petted but has been a silent blob of cat during the process most times, though I've heard her purr twice. And she has voluntarily come out of the cupboard when the door to the hall is shut, though she huddles either on a lap, or between a person and the wall. (The first time she dared, I was sitting on the floor and she dashed across the open space to duck into my coat, which I was wearing, and hide there.)

Poor scared flustered thing. Poor confused kitties. I felt so guilty last night, even knowing they had to move so we could take care of them. I feel a little less guilty and emotionally-sore about them today, especially since I saw Babe voluntarily eating. I'm going to be adjusting their diets more, but not yet - I don't want to have two or three sources of stress going at once. But the current one lets Babe get too fat and Basta not gain enough weight. (Dry cat food - regular formula. They should probably be on 'older cat' formula and Basta, at least, needs soft-food supplements as more than a treat, as she hasn't got teeth enough to really make a good meal of the dry.)

But...for the moment, so far so good. (And I called their old vet, who recommended a vet here, so I called them and got some info. No licenses needed. I can make an appointment to have them micro-chipped, but that will be sometime after they are more settled in, I think. I don't want it to be too long, though, in case they get out.

So far my allergies don't seem to be any worse, but since they're confined to one room and I can go in and out, that's not as indicative as after they get around, especially in carpeted areas.

By the way, please consider doing two or three favors....

(Pretty sure Dad did the first two, and they didn't help him. He was not the sort of man to skip either of them. But please do these things anyway...they are often helpful, at least.)

1. Drive carefully.
2. Keep an eye on road conditions, no matter what the weather report says.
3. Keep a record somewhere for whoever follows you, detailing at the very least whether you have a will (you do, right?) and where it is and what lawyer wrote it up (and their number). Ideally give also any info on people you would want contacted, where all your accounts are, and that sort of thing. Passwords for anything you want them to get into and update after you're gone. (Dad did this. I thought, when he talked about it years ago, that it was morbid and macabre (I also figured it was practical but I didn't want to think about my Dad dying - still don't, but...). That may or may not be the case, but it is also very useful. There is nothing that can make this less upsetting, but it could be more upsetting if I was having to figure all that out the hard way.)
4. Do up a little "in case of emergency contact...." card and put it in your purse or wallet. List several people, in order, and their relationship to you. My understanding is the police back-tracked to the house, got an address off a card in the mailbox, contacted that person, got to Dad's journal, got to my journal, and got my home address that way. How much simpler if they could have gotten the info from the wallet in his pocket.

(Speaking of contact info, some while back there was a meme encouraging people to put their contact info in a private entry on a particular day, and link it from their user-info. The LiveJournal administrators can access those posts, provided there is sufficient need - suicide threats or things like this. I don't know if that is how they got my address off my journal, but I suspect it may be, because I don't believe it's posted publically anywhere. I'm not quite going to make this #5, but it isn't a bad idea all around.)