Last night, after dropping Audrey off for band, I went to three pet stores in search of an electronic dog door. We had decided that two cats disappearing was more than enough, and this seemed to be the way to let Judy do her business while keeping the cats inside.

I met a friend who volunteers for an animal group, and told her I wanted to join. She had told me of her misgivings about the group I’d contacted before, and asked me if I had given them my address. I told her no, just my street. Her concern about the other organization was that they trapped animals and brought them to the shelter for euthanization. It hit me like a ton of bricks that Rhonda and Dave might not have been trapped by a neighbor, but by this person after I’d told her what neighborhood I was in. After this, after seeing all the cats in the store, after the frustration of finding no electronic doors in all my driving and shopping, I came home and finally cried about the cats.

I’ve been keeping it in, not wanting to make the girls any more upset than they are, but it finally had to come out, and I feel much better now. Guilty, Angry, Frustrated, but not bursting with repressed grief.

So I spent a lot of time searching for electronic doors. One determining factor was how well it would fit into the existing opening, and this was a bigger problem than I expected. Even the company that made the door we have doesn’t make an electronic one that comes close to fitting. The only door that would work cost $450. O.M.G. . . I began checking other options – electronic fences for the cats (the collars for three cats brings the cost up close to the dog door price) barriers (impractical because of the placement of the current door), and finally we came to the conclusion that we’re going to have to keep the cats indoors. This means manually letting Judy in and out when we’re home, and closing the cats in a room with food, water, and litter when we’re not.

This isn’t going over well with Toby and Calvin, both of whom made rushes for the front door a couple of times already. Calvin has been meowing at the dog door quite a bit, and it’s only 9:30AM. It has to be done, though. It’s one thing to let a cat out and take your chances that it’ll get hurt or killed. It’s another to send it out knowing someone is out there waiting for it. They don’t know that, and they’ll do their best to make me let them out, but they have to face the fact that they are now indoor cats.

The girls and I headed up to New York. There was a little traffic on the Parkway, a less than usual backup into the Lincoln Tunnel, and free valet parking at Port Authority. We parked, went down to the subway, and into the American Museum of Natural History.

Bought the combination tickets – went to see the Frogs first. We really, really liked the frogs. They were beautiful and fascinating, and since this was a school day for many, and too early in the year for field trips, we had two docents following us in the exhibit and giving us even more information than the displays did. We had a little time, so besides getting some ridiculously overpriced food for lunch, we visited the new evolution exhibit. It was OK, but there were certain things that were put in to placate people who might be disturbed by the idea of human evolution, like a video featuring scientists explaining how religion and spirituality were important to understanding our development, and some information about hominids that shared ancestry with us but weren’t our actual predecessors that was buried in display text. Coulda been better.

Next, we went to the Mythical Creatures exhibit. Some of the display items and information were splendid, but it was a fairly small exhibit that seemed aimed at a much younger demographic than I’d hoped for. We wandered some more, tried to find some things we hadn’t seen before, looked closer at some things we had seen but wanted to revisit, then we did the Imax dinosaur movie and the Cosmic Collisions planetarium show one after the other. They were pretty good, but we might not have enjoyed them so much if we hadn’t been so desperate to sit down by then.

We headed down to Greenwich Village so I could show the kids around a bit, have dinner, whatever. Audrey would have liked to spend more time shopping, Carolyn would have preferred to go straight home. Ah, well. I might just take Audrey up for a day sometime and let Carolyn stay home. Next trip will probably be Liberty Science Center instead of Manhattan, though.

In other news, Dave has gone missing now. I don’t want to make a whole post about this because it’s really upsetting, and I don’t think Audrey is allowing herself to think he might be gone for good. A volunteer animal rescue person had told me they’d gotten reports of cats that had been clearly killed (she didn’t elaborate, thank goodness) a couple of streets north of us, but I didn’t give it much thought. Rhonda could have gotten killed somewhere and we’d never know because she didn’t have a tag. Dave, however, is a very street-savvy cat, not likely to get in trouble with cars or other animals, and he had a collar and tag – if I had found a cat dead somewhere and could contact the owner, I would. That he’s disappeared and we haven’t heard a thing makes me fear the worst. If there were a way I could change Toby and Calvin into indoor cats, I’d do it right now, but once they’ve been outdoors, you can’t keep them in. Until Toby learned how to operate the dog door, she’d go from bed to bed in the middle of the night walking on people and yowling until someone got sick of it, got up, and let her out. This business of having a pet disappear without a trace, and suspecting an unpleasant end, sucks.