Aja and The New Windows

Time for another Aja update.  

I don’t think I have ever done this with any of my previous cats ... regular updates to share adjustment progress.  Nope!  But all those cats came to us as kittens - moldable as clay!  No big deal.  Aja came fully formed with a life and experiences before us ... and as such, she has been evolving on her own schedule with every month that passes! And, of course, she had an owner who loved her before and wanted to know how she was doing!  She is doing great! 

 

And then I threw a sledge hammer into that delicately built relationship we have worked on.

 I decided to do something very big, very messy, very noisy and somewhat cold!  

The big event that happened this month were window replacements - all 10 windows in the condo were ripped out in what appeared to be a very noisy demolition.  See, I got this great idea in October (when the weather was moderate) that a major home improvement project during a pandemic made perfect sense.  But what I didn’t count on was a January instillation.  

All ten windows were removed at once - letting in all the wonderfully cold January air (not!).  And, of course, there was noise!!! Lots and lots of it.  And there were 4 strange men walking in her condo, walking in her sacred bedroom where even the dog isn’t allowed.  And they were making very big holes in her bedroom walls.  And they were here from 8:30 am until 3:00!!  And it was cold.  

As this was all going on, all I could think was ... we are going to lose all the ‘brownie points’ we had accumulated with our little Diva, and we would be starting ALL OVER AGAIN!  Sigh!

You can’t see her but she is hiding behind the laundry basket.

After all, we had achieved a lot ... “lap time” on both our laps!  Yes, she had even taken to visiting my husband - the blind guy who stepped on her the very first night!  Whatever was I thinking when I scheduled this back in October.  Well ... what I was thinking was that the windows would be installed as promised in early December when it would be warmer.  And I sincerely didn’t understand that ripping out old windows was such a destructive process. 

As the work was going on, I started to worry that Aja, who was hunkered down in my husband’s closet might decide to come out and sit on the window sill - where there WASN’T A WINDOW THERE ANYMORE.  I was fixated on that thought. My God.  She could fall.  I tried to encourage her to come out so I could put her in our bathroom - where it was warmer, and had litter, had food and her comfy cube bed. Nope!  She wasn’t moving.  In fact, she looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was!! My husband assured me that Aja was definitely not leaving her hiding place to sit on any window sill - not with all these men and the noise!  

The condo temperature surprisingly didn’t drop below 50 degrees.  We sat around in our coats freezing but the temperature really was reasonable.

New and Improved.

When all was said and done ... the job was completed, the 4 men left, the heat was back on and the quiet returned ... out she came!! Like nothing had happened!  All was right in her "Diva World!"  Amazing.  How she recovers from stuff is one of the measures I have used to see how she is really adjusting and how confident she is.  How well she “recovers” from a trauma.  In the first few months any interruption in the routine took a day or more before we saw her again.  Now ... within the first hour ... she struts out like she is reclaiming her kingdom!

All in all - I think she has decided this is definitely her home

and we are definitely her servants!  

And she is definitely right on both counts!!