Or an infestation of some sort. It's most likely fleas, even though I haven't let Calliope out -- even on the balcony -- since she was attacked. Elvis told me that he thought she had fleas at the time, but I had the vet check her out then (might as well, we were in there every day for a while), and she couldn't find any evidence of it. Not only that, but I figured that if she did have fleas, one of us (probably me) would have been bit by now, and we haven't.

Thursday morning, I was in the bathroom doing hygienic type things, and the cat jumped up on the bathroom counter and started taking a bath herself. I thought it was cute: "Look, Calliope has finally figured out what us humans are really doing in the bathroom, and she wants to play, too!" When I jumped in the shower, she didn't take up her usual post as guard-cat on the bathmat. She just kept taking a bath. I got out of the shower and dried off, put on moisturizer, and combed my hair, and the cat kept right on grooming.

I mentioned it to Elvis, in the "isn't she cute" sort of vein of comments.

Elvis went in to take a shower. The cat is still bathing. Elvis comes out of the bathroom a short while later and informed me that we did not, after all, need to change the cat's name to Narcissus. She wasn't so much grooming as hunting things down. I, on the other hand, thought she might be suffering from an allergy of some type, since people were feeding her all sorts of stuff on Thanksgiving, including tuna, which gives her the runs.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

Calliope's got fleas.

Elvis: 1 Dilettante: 0

Elvis took her to the vet, since he was feeling slightly better than me. The vet is, luckily, right across the street, and I could actually hear her yowling in her carrier outside, even though I had the windows shut and we live on the third floor (fourth, if you're speaking American). Calliope, as you might have guessed, is a LOUD cat. He had never taken her to the vet before, and he was surprised to find out that I wasn't joking when I told him that Calliope is impeccably behaved when she's in the actual examining room. She'd done one better for him, though, and shut up upon entering the actual building. Although I must admit she was being pretty quiet by the time of our third visit or so in September.

Anyhow, Elvis returned after not long at all, bearing a quiet and chastened feline and all sorts of medication. She has anti-flea vials that need to be applied once a month for the next three months. There are pills, too, and we need to give her one-half a pill a day. This involves splitting a very tiny pill in half with an exacto knife, which would be much easier to do if they weren't covered with a hard coating. It's much, much more difficult than trying to divide the last M&M, and that's not even taking into account the effort involved in getting half a pill down the cat's throat. We do that by a multi-step process. I attempt to split the pill, chase it down from wherever it's skittered to, repeat as necessary until I have two halves. Then I call the cat if she's not already in the kitchen (which she usually is), fiddle around with a can of soft cat food and her bowl, thereby gaining her complete and undivided attention, which Elvis exploits by sneaking up behind her and grabbing her, at which point I pry open her mouth and shove the half-pill as far down her throat as I can manage. After that, it's a matter of holding her mouth shut, massaging her throat until she's swallowed a few times and, finally, giving her the bowl of nice, smelly, soft cat food.

Luckily, Calliope is not the sort of cat to hold grudges.

The third thing Elvis brought back from the vet is a small bottle of lotion, to be applied to the worst affected areas twice a day. The first night, we figured we'd double team her again, so we got all three of us into the bathroom and shut the door. Turns out that we didn't need to go to all that trouble: she actually likes it. Elvis petted her head and kept her distracted and so forth, whilst I applied the lotion. She didn't try to escape at all. I suppose it feels really good on those flea ravaged areas, especially by the tail, which is quite bumpy. And then, of course, she gets to lick it all off. She's a cat: she likes that sort of thing.

Yesterday morning, I'm sitting on the toilet and Calliope forces her way into the bathroom. Usually, she makes a beeline for my lap. She figures that since I'm just sitting there, with apparently nothing better to do, I might as well do something useful and stroke her a bit, as well as providing a comfy place for a catnap. I try to fend her off, but she's remarkably persistent.

Not yesterday, though. She hopped up on the counter, and started to do a bit of grooming. As long as I had her there, I thought I'd give the lotion a try. No problem. Last night, she did one better, jumping up on the bathroom counter and staring pointedly at the bottle of lotion until I put some on. And, you know, it's kind of fun. I like giving her a kitty mohawk, all the way along her spine. It's fun, until she grooms it all down again. Clearly, the problem is not going to be how to get it on her, but what to do when we run out of the stuff.

When Calliope was a kitten, in Istanbul, she used to sit by the fridge and wait patiently to be fed. She soon noticed a drawback to that, though-- it only worked if we were actually in the kitchen. You couldn't see into the kitchen if you were in the living room watching TV, for example. So she took to sitting, bolt upright, outside of the kitchen, and waiting patiently until you noticed her waiting to be fed. Our next two apartments had one relatively big room containing both kitchen and living areas, so it was back to the fridge. In this apartment, she sits -- bolt upright -- on the kitchen counter at the far end of the kitchen, in order to be fully visible to passers-by, who just might feed her.

And now, she's started sitting -- in her patented, bolt-upright, I'm-waiting-mode-patiently -- in the hallway just outside the bathroom door. It took me a while to figure it out, but I get it now. I still think it's cute.

One more thing: you would expect a lotion designed to fight the ravages of flea-infestation to smell medicinal, wouldn't you? It ought to have a tough, no nonsense, kick butt kind of smell. This one doesn't. In fact, it smells like shampoo, and a fancy sort of salon shampoo at that.

Elvis and I are feeling, if not 100%, much better. We have a happy, non-itchy cat who smells springtime fresh. The rainy skies of the last few days seem to be clearing -- I can even see patches of blue. Monday is a holiday, and I am quietly optimistic.