Sleepless in Steuben

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

-Christopher Hitchens

Peg and I stumble into this Tuesday a little dazed, thanks to this guy.

Our first night back at the Schoolhouse after a couple nights away, and Slane obviously had been saving his pipes to serenade us on our return. As we prepared for lights out, he turned and ran from us, perhaps sensing we were going to shove him into the cat carrier and put it in my office, on the other side of the condo from the bedroom, with the door closed. Having failed to corral him, we gave up and went to sleep, only to have him start howling at 11:30 and continue periodically all night. Peg heard a lot more of it than me, from what I gather. I should have dropped an extra espresso shot into her latte this morning to help her endure the next ten hours of work on almost no sleep.

What to do about this? We are of two minds. Peg wants to find him a home somewhere out in the country. By this, I think she means actually trying to find someone to adopt the little bastard, as opposed to my father's version of finding a home in the country for an annoying pet, which entailed simply driving deep into the hinterland and dropping an ill behaved dog on the side of the road.

The problem here is whether to split the set, if we go with Plan Peg. Dean's not a late night warbler, and hasn't earned exile. But these two have been together since they were shelter mates five years ago, and I'm afraid poor Deano would wallow in disoriented grief if he woke up one day and Slane was permanently somewhere else.

My thought, in contrast, is that it's time to revisit the idea of using a shock collar to correct the behavior. Except for that one guy in Key West who'd come out at sunset on Mallory Square with his trained kitties, I've never seen much evidence that a cat can be trained like a dog. They can, however, figure out that every time the engage in bad behavior they receive a gentle but sufficiently unpleasant shock. I figure we slap him into a shock collar, keep the remote on the nightstand, and press the shock button every time he opens his mouth. It may sound cruel, but is it any more cruel than sending him away forever?

Of course, if it fails we might end up farming him out anyway.

It doesn't appear online that the local pet stores carry shock collars, so he gets a reprieve for however long it might take to order one online. And I won't do that until P and I can discuss it tonight.

Speaking of P, here's a photo that popped up on my "your memories on Facebook" thread for today.

September 30, 2020. Spartanburg, South Carolina. We were on our way up to Lawrence, Mass, and then to Corning at the very outset of this adventure when the Cardinal suffered a vacuum failure that caused the ADI to wander aimlessly. I asked Peg to stick a post-it note on it so I wouldn't be distracted by the drifting horizon, a request that sorely disturbed my poor passenger. That stranded us in Spartanburg, and after a bit of swearing and cursing our fate we found a room at the fancy, newish Marriott downtown and made the best of it. That's us at the rooftop bar, happy and oblivious to the multi-year sojourn that would stretch over the horizon from that night to right now, and with any luck a while into the future.

Today's agenda includes some business housekeeping and bill paying, and creating the shell of an appellate brief that's due in a week. A friend's comment yesterday about the futility of appellate work sort of called me up short--I've always parroted the figure I heard at a CLE back in 1998 or so, that 25% of all appeals in Florida result in a reversal. He mentioned the current figure had dropped to less than 10%, and to my surprise after a little digging around online I confirmed that to be the case. It sort of takes the wind out of your sails on the threshold of one of the hardest tasks we perform in this business, writing a coherent and persuasive appellate brief. I certainly need to alter the advice I've given for years about the odds of a successful appeal. I'm wondering if this is a consequence of surging appellate caseloads, or maybe a quarter century of packing the courts with Federalist Society members.