Temporary Digs

So we made it to NYC.

I don't have a real apartment yet; I'm just subletting a place for about two weeks.  It doesn't have furniture, which is kind of interesting.  Turns out that the building I'm in is an official historic landmark, because Duke Ellington used to live here.  There's a plaque on the front of the building and everything, although you can't really make out the words in this picture.

Barry's going to be really jealous.  He loves jazz, and he's a particular fan of Duke Ellington; but he stayed behind in the Southern Domicile.

Mimsy and Khamsin are NYC natives, so they're pretty happy to be back.  Khamsin really wants me to take the kittens to Central Park.  When he and Mimsy were still living in the museum, Khamsin used to peek out the window and the park and fantasise about sneaking out late at night and scampering around without anyone being the wiser, but he could never figure out how to handle the locks, so it didn't happen.

The very first thing we did once we had moved everything into my temporary room was open all the boxes.  Much as they all like each other, we figured they'd probably had enough of each other in close quarters for a while.  They were pretty eager to get out of there and explore the new place.  Here they are emerging from their boxes.

The box captains immediately held a meeting to confer about how the trip had gone.  

Consensus appears to be that everything went about as well as could be expected.  The kittens were rather fractious; Beppe yipped the whole time; Zebulon was apparently convinced that they were travelling through a wormhole and gave a long discourse about how the physics worked; Plouie kept forgetting that they were travelling in boxes and freaking out all over again; Magick and Murchison had a confusing conversation that no one else in their box could follow and which was presumably in code.  Pretty much business as usual.

Meanwhile, everyone else was exploring.  The kittens, Beppe, and a bunch of others immediately ran all over the living room.

You can just make out Hrithik preparing to climb up on the radiator back there; it was the highest point he could see.  He's currently settled on the shelf in my closet.  Cami and the polar bears were really interested in the Internet cables.  Rusty and Navarre took advantage of the newfound space and adult distraction to start whaling on each other again.

Not everyone went quite so far afield.  Gilly, of course, immediately laid claim to the air mattress that AM left in here for me.  That's an iPod he's got there; he was quite adamant that there was no room for it on the bed. 

At first, Gilly was convinced that I'd made his dream come true, and given him his own mattress; he was crushed when I explained that it was meant to be mine.  Then he was newly encouraged to see how empty the place is - surely, he said, now is the time to invest in dozens of mattresses - and disappointed when I told him that this place isn't really ours and that the actual tenants would probably be kind of freaked if they came and found we'd flooded it with mattresses.  He tried to convince me to agree to flood our eventual place with mattresses, but I fobbed him off with a story about how NYC has really tough mattress regulations.  Please do not tell him that I made this up.

Zebulon and Nicodemus checked out the view from my bedroom; it's a pretty nice one, although you can't see much of it in this picture.

Nicky is so excited to be here.  Like, he's beside himself.  He's always wanted to see NYC, and this is like his dream come true.  Apparently the whole way over he was pestering Seleucus about whether or not they make 'I <3 NYC' shirts in goat sizes.  Seleucus, who has never been to NYC and really doesn't care much about it (or any city that isn't in Bactria), told him rather shortly that they don't, but Nicky was apparently undeterred because he asked me the same question.  And he keeps announcing 'I AM SO HAPPY!!!!!!' like out of the blue.

Not everyone took advantage of the chance to explore.  When the box captains were meeting, Jasper realised, upon saying that Sleepyhead had slept the whole time (such a surprise...), that he hadn't seen Sleepyhead leave the box, and sure enough, he was still asleep in there, curled up with the electronic equipment.  Jasper tried to get him to come out and eventually gave up.

You wouldn't think electronics would be so cuddly.  I fell asleep trying to cuddle my laptop once, and it left a dent in my forehead.

Plouie was pretty excited about the whole thing.  He was hopping around and making squee noises and stuff.  But what had him excited wasn't quite what you'd think.  Check it out:

He comes all the way to a new apartment in a new city, and what interests him is my vegetable steamer.  I'm like, 'Plouie, seriously, it's the same one we had in the old apartment,' but it didn't get through.  After this picture was taken, he started flippering through the rest of the box of equally familiar items.  I wonder whether he'll ever notice the rest of the place at all.

You'll notice that the Mini Republic is nowhere in evidence.  That's because they're having a slightly different adventure.  A bigger one, in fact.  They're all staying a luxury hotel for a month or so, and should have great stories to tell when we're reunited.  Gyork is really excited.  He's from NYC too, like Mimsy and Khamsin, and he's looking forward to showing everyone his favourite places: The Gempire State Building, the Statue of Gliberty, the Gbronx...  He wants me to take everyone to see the Gnicks play once basketball season starts, and the Gyankees of course.  The temporary place is actually quite near Yankee Stadium, as it happens, although I doubt I'll make it there.

Anyway, so we made it here, although we won't be in this specific "here" for very long.  Further updates will follow, although I no longer have access to a camera (the camera we use is AJD's), so there might not be many photos for a while.

Discipline Arrives At Last

So you may recall that a month or so ago, there was an Unfortunate Incident involving the kittens putting bubble gum - which they should not have even had - on Leprosy's tail.  This created a huge uproar, and left the kittens grounded until further notice.  The situation was pretty dire.  Leprosy was threatening to resign, and he's sufficiently high-ranked that this would have caused massive problems, not merely in our local chapter, but in the Republic as a whole.  So the Republic did something that Alfredo had been asking them to do for ages: they agreed to send a full-time headmaster to take charge of the kittens.

The traditional method for training up young animals within the Republic is a sort of fosterage system.  The idea is simple: promising young animals are sent to some chapter of the Wild Republic to learn from their elders, all of whom teach occasional series of classes on their respective areas of expertise.  It's all relatively informal.  None of the adults is specifically responsible for the young ones, but they're all expected to keep an eye out.

Under ordinary circumstances, this works pretty well.  It probably would even have worked well here; think about Tibby, for instance: he is a perfect model of how this tutelage system is supposed to work.  The problem is that our Local Chapter includes six kittens.  

I'm sure this is the result of some brilliant idea someone had, possibly upon realising that this chapter already had an adolescent clouded leopard and a baby snow leopard.  Why not station a bunch of kittens from different species in a single chapter, in order to foster interspecies harmony?  Especially if the bunch includes a lion and a tiger, with enough non-lions and -tigers to provide a bit of a buffer for the inevitable dischord?

Well, our local chapter gives you the answer.  Put six kittens together without anyone officially in charge of them, and all of that natural energy will feed on itself until it mushrooms into something exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.  You will get chaos.  And shenanigans.  And bubble gum on the tails of crotchety elite citizens.

It's not that they didn't try to rein in the kittens, but the fact that all of them had other jobs meant that they didn't do a great job of it.  Alfredo is supposed to be running the local chapter, not keeping a constant eye on the kittens.  Lady Faraday, bless her, did what she could, but she's a high-ranked visiting diplomat; she has her own job to do, an extremely important one, and it does not extend to baby-sitting foreign kittens.  Stal is a poet first and a tutor second; he's not trained for any more than that.  He's felt very guilty about it, but it's not his fault that he was thrown into a job for which he's neither prepared nor well-suited.

Alfredo has sent a number of impassioned pleas to his superiors, begging them to send someone, anyone, to take charge of the kittens; but all of his pleas were brushed aside because they failed to sufficiently appreciate the situation.  Until the Leprosy incident.  After that went down, Alfredo's superiors belatedly moved heaven and earth to find a suitable candidate.  Poor Alfredo was gritting his teeth at all the 'Why didn't you tell us how serious the situation was?' shit he was getting from his superiors.

And so they sent us Jasper.

Jasper has credentials.  He has a master's in education and was the headmaster at an exclusive all-boys school for kittens for several years, after serving first as a physics teacher at the same school.  He's also the eldest of many litters and is a world-ranked kick boxer.  If anyone is qualified to take charge of the kittens, it's Jasper.

I'm not sure who was more relieved by Jasper's advent, Alfredo or Stal.  The day the new arrivals got here, immediately after the initial formalities were taken care of and before he had even started unpacking, Jasper had a long conversation with Alfredo about what his approach would be, how he would structure the kittens' lives, and so on.  Look how relieved Alfredo looks.

Then he had a similar conversation with Stal, who feels as though a huge burden has been lifted from his shoulders.  Now he can work on his epic and some odes without feeling guilty about it.

While this was going on, the kittens were roughhousing over on the "water" in their classic style.  Rusty was doing rather well for himself, as you can see.  I really like this picture of him, actually.

Jasper watched them for a while to get a feel for his new charges.

Then Alfredo officially introduced Jasper to the kittens, and really laid down the law.  The kittens were duly chastened; they'd been aware for weeks that they were going to get it.

Jasper isn't cruel or anything.  He's not keeping the kittens chained to their desks or scrubbing floors all day.  He's a cat, and he knows that kittens will be kittens.  But he's not letting them get away with anything, either, and they know it.  Rusty and Navarre made a token effort to get the better of him and learned immediately that this would not be tolerated, and they've been remarkably well-behaved ever since.  He's always at least three steps ahead of them.

We haven't learned much about Jasper the private individual yet, in part because he jumped to work immediately and in part because, well, he is a very private individual.  We know that he's a bachelor with a lot of brothers and sisters, and that he and Alfredo really hit it off right from the start, and that he likes singing baritone in barbershop quartets.  We know about the barbershop quartets because he's trying to get people together to form a new one here.  Alfredo's in; he is, as you know, a world-famous wolf tenor.  (It's not clear whether he'll sing lead or high tenor; he's by far the best singer we have, so he'll sing wherever he's most needed.)  Barry wants to be in, but he'd have to sing bass rather than baritone and he's a little miffed about that.  I'm sure there will be pictures at some point.

Expansion!

Our local chapter of the Wild Republic has just been enlarged by five.  All of them are adults, which I'm quite pleased about; I love the young ones (they're so cute!), but I was afraid the balance was tipping too far in the juvenile direction.

Alfredo is particularly relieved.  He'd been requesting some reinforcements from his superiors for some time, and the bureaucracy finally decided to grant his requests.  This had more than a little to do with that incident a bit ago, the one where the kittens somehow managed to get illicit bubble gum on Leprosy's tail.  Alfredo had been telling his superiors for months that he needed someone sent here specifically to handle the kittens: it's all well and good that our chapter was chosen to train young felines, but without anyone actually in charge of them, they were getting out of hand.  I'll explain more about this in a later post.  But anyway, his superiors finally admitted that they really should have been listening to him all along, and they found someone to deal with the kittens.  They also agreed that, with such a large foreign delegation stationed here permanently, and with some of the members of the local chapter being more than slightly eccentric and unpredictable (*cough* Plouie *cough*), Alfredo was correct that he could use some permanent legal counsel on staff.

So here they are, our five newest denizens of the Wild Republic:

In the front row, left-to-right, we have Jasper, the leopard, who is here to look after the kittens; Quixley, the zebra, whose exact responsibilities are not yet clear to me; the aye-aye, who has not yet gifted us with his name, and who is the promised legal counsel; and the sloth bear, whose exact role is not yet clear either.  Behind them all we have Meph, the bat, who is from the Ministry of Transportation and who intends to reform the local postal service (i.e. Plouie).  ("Meph" is not his full name; apparently bats are fond of giving each other very long names.)

Yesterday was a long day, full of meetings between various old and new residents.  Alfredo was particularly busy getting everyone settled in.  He's really delighted that we have Jasper now, as you can imagine (so is everyone), but he's not sure quite what to make of the aye-aye.