Bemused to report on another tagging trend

The phrase "idiots to lovers" has gained so much popularity that the majority of users don't realize that it means that the pairing are supposed to be idiots (about the romance).

I wouldn't have guessed a population existed anywhere that would be capable of that level of linguistic misunderstanding, but here we are in the wide, wide world of fandom - the young 'uns keepin' it fresh.

Cat divorce, living room aversion

One of the things that has happened along with being Cat Divorced is that we've almost completely ceased to use the living room.

Since two of our cats can't ever be allowed in the same place, there have to be closed doors in the house all the time. Any time we try to spend together is usually swiftly curtailed by whichever cat is not with us throwing a tantrum about it. Sometimes Tristana will accept being with Snookums as a substitute, but Snookums has health issues so he sometimes needs to be with a person for monitoring, and he's also a grumpy old man who sometimes just decides he wants to be somewhere specific (somewhere warm or sunny, usually). And in general, both of them demand attention in the evening. Right around the time Wax gets off work through dinner time is peak time for both Anubis and Tristana to demand human attention.

This little diagram of the downstairs of our house shows why Anubis's home base (and Wax's bedroom since January) is the dining room: it has two doors to seal it and it's not the kitchen. We removed the door to the living room (right now it's the sofa and bunny room - that's what the little doodles are on the map) when we moved in because it and the door to the bathroom intersected and were always getting tangled otherwise, but then we lost it somehow and we failed to find it when this Anubis problem started. Possibly we accidentally had it carted away with the trash at some point, which sounds like just our luck.



So the living room is open to the staircase at all times, and at night Anubis has the kitchen and dining room and Tristana has the rest of the house. I could just use the living room as normal by myself - my desktop computer is in there and we used to hang out there all the time! But it's not really as nice to hang out in there by myself. It doesn't feel as nice and welcoming; it always seems like it needs a bunch of lamps lit, which is partly just because it actually does need more lighting, but could partly be because we were unwise to paint it a dark medium green. Also it is actually less cool than the dining room in the middle of the summer, and less warm than the dining room later on, because the dining room just happens to be the best-positioned room in the house for temperature equilibrium. So in order to spend time with Wax I usually come into the dining room, which now has a futon and a laptop connected to her bigscreen monitor, and we suffer either Anubis or Tristana outside the door, drumming on it constantly or yowling piteously. And when we give in and separate to placate both of them and it isn't time to just go to bed yet, it still seems easier to just go sit in bed with my phone or a laptop.

In October the chimney will be swept though, and in the winter we can use the wood stove, which definitely makes the living room the cosiest. Before that happens we have to take down and rebuild the bunny cages on the other side of the room and move the furniture into the winter arrangement though. I'm not sure how much that will help, or how well we'll adjust our habits to hanging out there instead. And I do wonder how much wallpapering the living room in a mostly-white pattern will help - Wax thinks it will, and there are two windows in there to the dining room's one. We're not doing that yet though. We conspicuously lack the energy for renovations in the colder months.