A few days ago I heard back from the NYC Midnight people with the results from the second round of the writing contest.  For some reason, my story Lieber’s Report came in 4th in my group of 50, good enough to get me through to the final round where the final 80 writers would go head to head, with the top five winning cash prizes.  The genre was up to the writers to decide, which in a way made it more difficult.  The action we must include was holding hands, and the word was ‘secret.’  I figured about 75 of the 80 would be turning in a romance story, but they specifically said original ways of using the action would be encouraged.  After I got my assignment, my son suggested a fixed horse race.  I had nothing better, so I went with his idea.  Like the first two rounds, I’m not in love with my story, and will be surprised if it isn’t a middle of the pack entry.  Still, coming in 40th, let’s say, out of 4000 isn’t necessarily a failure.  Anyway, here is round 3, The Fix.

 

---

Swabby sat silently in the racetrack bleachers and watched the parade to post.  An atonal loudspeaker introduced the horses in a nasally drone.

He had successfully paid off only five of the nine jockeys to lose, leaving uncertainty about the fixed bet.  He popped an antacid, inhaled deeply and dug in his jacket for a cigarette.  In his view outside the grandstand stood the other two members of his gang, a young couple, watching the horses.  They had been in the locker rooms to bribe the remaining jockeys, then relay to Swabby by way of a secret cue which horse was designated to win the race.

His wife and baby girl were gone, and his share of the bet money represented selling his car and emptying his savings.

“Number Six, West End Wally,” continued the loudspeaker, “Owned by Hamilton Stables, ridden by Oscar Mendez.”  At this point the young couple reached toward each other and held hands, the signal he had waited for.
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He threw down his smoke and headed for the betting wicket.  He glanced at the tote board: number six, 28 to 1.  “$10,000, six to win,” he told the cashier and slid her the money.

He paced outside, too nervous to sit.  The tote board recalculated and flashed 15 to 1.

There was a sudden commotion near the rail to his left.  Two cops and a Racing Commission official were handcuffing his friends.  Someone had squealed.  He wasn’t arrested, but if he ever cashed the ticket he would be.  It was over.

 

---

So that’s it.  It’s not knocking my socks off, but I hope it surprises me like Lieber did.  The name of my character is a little unusual.  Swabby is a nautical nickname used mostly for deck-swabbing deck hands.  In the horse racing sense, Swabby was a small time crook who got caught fixing some races at Fort Erie racetrack in Ontario in the early 1950s.  He succeeded for a while, netting him and a couple friends around $200,000 before he got busted.  In that sense, my story might be called Historical Fiction as it is the fictionalized account, more or less, of a real guy named Swabby.  The other stuff is purely made up, and I checked to make sure.  I don’t need any lawsuits.

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Several weeks ago I wrote about a writing competition I had entered with my daughter Crystal.  I said there were 5000 entrants, but I was mistaken.  The first round only had 4000.  Anyway, to survive the first round you had to finish in the top 10 of your 50 person group.  My RomCom bit actually shocked me by finishing 3rd in my group, when I had prepared myself for failure.

Here is round 2, in which I now must finish top 5 in a group of 50, all of whom have had top 10 finishes.  My genre this time is Sci Fi, and I have to include the action of shivering, and the word never.  I have never written anything Sci Fi before, so it’s terra incognito to me.

 

---

Aboard the Exoplanet Investigator, the cryogenic system was waking up Lieber.  He shivered under the foil blanket and his eyes burned from the intensifying light.

He trembled as he stood for the first time in seventeen years and pulled on his suit. Trillions of miles away, Earth was becoming a hostile environment, and Lieber and others were tasked with helping to find mankind a new habitat.  He climbed into his landing pod and sealed the hatch.  He would never see home again.

Planet Wolf 1061c kept the same face toward its star, and half broiled mercilessly while the darkened half froze solid.  Between the hemispheres was a warm twilit band with liquid water and an oxygen rich atmosphere.  It was here his lander descended.
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Stepping from the landing pod, he was amazed to see lush grasslands and glittering lakes, untouched by malice.  His probes found the ground rich in nutrients and the atmosphere warm and breathable.  He stood on a mesa high above a vast plain that spread for many miles before him toward a distant rim of intense light.  Millions of people could survive here.  The gravity was slightly stronger than Earth, but muscles would adjust in time.

Lieber’s hands shook as he wrote his log entry.  “Rocky environment.  No growing medium for crops.  Poor atmosphere, trace toxins, carcinogens in water.  Hostile native species, airborne insects.  Oppressive gravity.  Recommendation: not suitable for settlement.”

The report would reach home in 13.8 years.   Wolf 1061c would be better off without us.

---

 

Well, I’ll find out in January what the judges thought of this.  A few notes: Lieber is Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s maiden name, and he is my writing hero and he began by writing science fiction.  Wolf 1061c is an actual planet that astronomers have identified as having the right conditions for life, and it does keep one face baking in the sun while the other half freezes.  After I submitted this story, I went to the store and basically diddled around for a while. Then for some reason I checked for an email from NYC Midnight confirming they got my story, but I didn’t get one.  I re-checked the submission form and found it had rejected my story because it had 251 words.  I chopped a word out and got it in under the wire.  The deadline for submission was 9 pm PST, and I got my confirmation email at 8:55.  Whew!

A few weeks ago I entered a writing contest along with my daughter Crystal.  It is run by NYC Midnight and is being judged by NY publishing people.  The parameters of the contest are pretty restricting: you have no more than 250 words for the entire story, and they give you a genre, an action and a word you must include.  And, you have 24 hours to complete the assignment and hand it in, so to speak.   Crystal and I wound up with exactly the same assignment, a pretty unlikely event since there were 100 different categories assigned randomly.  Our stories were Romantic Comedy, making a wish, and the word ‘bargain.’  Here is my entry in all its glory.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

The fresh snow crunched under their boots as Jeff and Ruby wandered in the park, holding gloved hands.  There, under a pale light, was a brick wishing well, awaiting their desires.

“Hey Jeff, let’s make a wish,” Ruby giggled.

“What’s the going rate? Payday isn’t until next Friday.”

Ruby took off her glove and rummaged up two quarters from her purse.  “Two bits, tightwad!”

Ruby backed up to the well, eyes shut tight.  She ached for Jeff to marry her, but it had been three years already.  She tossed her quarter.

Jeff walked over and dropped his quarter, vaguely wondering how deep it was.

“Well Jeff, what did you wish?”

“That the Broncos can make it to the Super Bowl.”

Gynecomastia is physiologic in infancy, adolescence and in middle-aged discount on cialis to much older males. In the beginning, viagra ordination find over here chocolate will trigger vomiting and diarrhea. No more than that. .Once you have ejaculated, the penis will levitra 60 mg cause an erection. Like oestrogens, testosterone get viagra in canada amerikabulteni.com has recently been shown to block the effect of THC in the nervous system. “Really?  That’s the biggest thing on your mind?”  Ruby started back for the car, hiding her angry tears.

“What’s wrong with that?” Jeff protested weakly, trudging after her.

It took Ruby several wordless moments of marching to get back to Jeff’s car, the night suddenly cold and damp, the mood shattered.  Stupid men!  She wiped her cheeks and took a moment to compose before turning to him.  There was Jeff, on one knee, holding out a little  box.  “Well?  This isn’t exactly how I pictured asking, but will you marry me?”

She laughed with relief and threw her arms around Jeff.  At last!  “Yes, you immature cheapskate, I will!”

Jeff’s long arms bundled her tight, radiating joy – fifty cents for a fiancee and a Super Bowl was a real bargain.

---

We will find out our fates on November 20.  Success in round one is being among the top 10 stories in a 50-person category, which will move the winners on to another group of 50 from which you must be among, I believe, the top 5.   I was mortified that I got rom com as a genre, but it was better than some of the other ones!  If you’re curious, Crystal’s story is published in her blog “Beauty in Life.”

 

 

 

This is a blog I started writing about six months ago.  It’s based on a game theory situation that has real world implications.  Despite the simplicity of the game, there are computer programs written to play the game, and tournaments and strategies invented to excel at it.  The blog wasn’t going very smoothly and I feel that the point I was trying to make is bigger than the sum of my explanation and examples.  I have thought about this idea every day, and I have kept trying to edit it and dress it up in my head ever since.  Time has expired, and now I will toss it out, three quarters baked, but at least out of my hair for now.

---

Prisoner’s Dilemma is a very simple game.  The idea is that two gangsters (or better yet, petty criminals who won’t have to fear being a snitch) have been arrested and put in separate rooms where they can’t communicate with each other.  The cops are pretty sure they did a big robbery (or any crime, doesn’t matter) but they can’t prove it.  Without a confession or one gangster testifying against his accomplice, the cops can only implicate them with a smaller crime.  The first gangster can either keep quiet and maintain his innocence or tell the police it was all the other guy’s doing.  The other criminal has the same two options.   So if the first criminal says he’s innocent while his accomplish tells the cops criminal #1 did the crime, then criminal #1 goes to jail for 20 years and the second criminal goes free.  If the exact opposite is true, criminal #2 goes to jail for 20 years and the first guy goes home.  If they both finger each other, they will both go to jail for 10 years.  And if they both keep quiet and claim innocence, they both get charged with the lesser crime and go to jail for two years.

The main point of this scenario is that, while cooperation seems like the right idea, no matter what the other guy tells the cops, each criminal gets a shorter sentence by ratting his buddy out.

You rat, your friend keeps quiet: go free

You rat, your friend rats: 10 years

You keep quiet, your friend keeps quiet: 2 years
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You keep quiet, your friend rats: 20 years

Where Prisoner’s Dilemma gets interesting is in its real world applications.  Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA was one example.  Neither side could start a nuclear war because they had to fear their enemy would live and retaliate.  If either side could have guaranteed they would destroy the other, they would have done it, but they both kept missiles in hidden, untraceable places the other couldn’t be sure they’d hit.  So they spent 40 years or so cooperating.

Another example where it is better to cheat, a la PD, is steroid use in sports.  If you take steroids you will either be superior to your honest opponent, or even with a dishonest one.  Not taking steroids will assure you will not be superior, regardless of whether your opponent cheats or not.

In some cases, it’s better to be bad as long as you are in the minority.  Aggressive, impatient drivers will get where they’re going faster than most people, but only as long as only a few people drive that way.  They say if everyone shopped at Walmart, all the local stores in your town would go bankrupt, and service workers would all get minimum wage.  But you go there to save a few bucks and hope that enough other people are willing to shop elsewhere to keep the local economy moving along.

In these examples and many more, cooperating is the most common result, but cheating or choosing the non-cooperative option gets you farther ahead, just like Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Another bonus for the selective cheat is that women prefer liars and cheats to honest people, on a primitive level, because it is seen as a survival trait to be passed on to their offspring.  Being a poor schmuck stuck in traffic is appealing to no one.

 

Well, it’s Saturday night and I find myself alone at home with only the radio and a little herd of Mooseheads (a rustic beer brand from New Brunswick) to keep me company.  It is time again to ramble about nothing much to no one in particular.

In the on-going roller coaster ride that is our empty nest/adult children at home status, it looks like the last one is getting ready to fly away again.  She and her 21 month old toddler are leaving to go occupy a basement suite in Aldergrove, 15 minutes away.  This time I’m not excited to see them go.  Having a wobbly, babbling little guy at my feet has kind of grown on me.  I love all my grandchildren, and they all have totally distinct, interesting personalities, and I think of them and miss them and look forward to spending time with them all.  But the one who lived here, Kingston, whose birth I noted in a blog in September 2017, has become my little day to day buddy.  I hasten to stress that this doesn’t make him my favourite, but it does make him a part of my daily home life.  The last time I got greeted home every day from work by a midget with a big smile was when my son was that age 32 years ago or so.  Oh well, they wont be far away and I will still see them often.

The Toronto Raptors are on the brink of winning the NBA championship, and oh lord how I have tried to be excited by it.  I am not.  I have taken to watching the last five minutes or so of each game to absorb all the crucial, tense moments of the battle.  Invariably I find myself switching channels to watch a Simpsons episode from 2008 or Wheel of Fortune.  Sure, I go back and forth in case something of competitive interest occurs, but it rarely does.  I guess I’m just not a connoisseur of the sport.  And this is me watching the final moments of an NBA Finals game.  Think back to some mid winter Tuesday with two mediocre teams squaring off, and it’s early on and the score is 8-6, on its way to 100-96, and oh my god I doubt you have enough money in your pocket right now to make me watch.  If that game was happening across the street and admission was free, I’d probably shut my curtains.

The Stanley Cup Finals are on now, too, and while I obsess about hockey in general, it is a match up of one team I have zero interest in versus a team I actively dislike.  So far the team I don’t give a rip about, St Louis, has a 3-2 series lead and could end it tomorrow.  The last game did provide some comedy, as the Blues scored the winning goal after getting away with a blatant un-called trip, and the Boston Bruin’s president Cam Neely had a childish tantrum which the cameras caught and replayed many times.  The game was delayed for several minutes while the ice crew used snow shovels to clear the garbage off the ice, thrown by the seething mob.  The Boston fans, despite seeing their home teams win championships in every major sport repeatedly over the last decade or so, still manage to be angry with violent tendencies.  As the Bostonians file into the arena they are scanned for weapons with a metal detector, but they get around that by bringing in glass marbles to throw if they get provoked.  In baseball, the fans have been known to throw batteries at the opposing outfielders.  People wearing jerseys or hats from the visiting team are often physically assaulted, and being subjected to verbal assault is guaranteed.  Even their former anthem singer Rene Rancourt used to finish his patriotic song with a violent gesture of pulling out the still beating heart of his sporting enemy with an intense, teeth-clenched grimace.  YouTube it!   Yet, if someone tugs a little at the sweater of one of their heroes, the whole crowd goes into a frenzy of injustice.  Tears flow, chants start, marbles fly.  I just want it to end in St Louis’ favour – the sooner the better.
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Well the Mooseheads are beckoning, so I’ll quit ranting now.  Summer is starting any minute now, so things are looking up.  Hockey and basketball are winter distractions and it’s time for them to go away for a while.  Time to go outside and eat meat cooked on a fire.  Time to strip down and read a book in the shade.  Time to watch day slip into starry night with a beer in hand.

I haven’t written anything in a while, as I hope at least someone noticed.  I have been reading a lot though, and a lot of what I’ve read makes me nuts.

We like to think here in Canada that we are doing better as a society than our noisy neighbours to the south, but sometimes I wonder.  In their election in 2016, social media was full of memes and posts nudging voters to be angry and move toward the political right, ie vote for Trump.  The conjecture is that many of these posts were made by the Russians and that it was interference from a foreign country.  We have an election coming up in the fall, and I have seen dozens of posts on Facebook about how badly Canada is doing, how repressive the current government is, how our Prime Minister is a chicken/spoiled brat/wiener who has ruined the country etc.  Most of the time I scroll by, in the interest of preserving my sanity, but every so often I research the subject and find that it is nearly always false.

Every time I correct the facts, I get verbally assaulted for defending Trudeau and all his sins.  Fact is, I never defend him, and if someone suggests this or that about him as an opinion, I let it go.  Opinions are fine, but telling lies to sway others’ opinions is not.  I suppose if I saw a post that told some huge half truths about Andrew Scheer I would stop and correct them, too, but I never see such a thing.  The fact is that every single meme and post that is breathlessly angry and full of exaggerations comes from the right side of centre, aiming at the political left.   It is the same modus operandi and political slant that the Americans dealt with three years ago.  Do these posts originate in Russia too?  I saw warnings early on that they might interfere here, but I haven’t seen anyone connect this wave of bullshit to them yet.  Key word: yet.

A few examples of the crap I have wrestled with the pigs over:

-The Liberal government has lost its moral authority to govern based on the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the five, count ’em, five, times they have been investigated for ethics violations.  I had to remind the torch wielding mob that their hero Stephen Harper abused his power 70 times, which got me called some choice names until I actually posted all 70 for their enjoyment.

-A meme of an angry guy who writes on his tax return that millions of illegal immigrants, poor people in far away places and various criminals and drug addicts are his deductible dependents.  I crunched the numbers and found out that his numbers were hugely inflated.  Also we give less to foreign aid than we did when Harper was PM, and in fact we give the least per capita of any developed country.  Then I mentioned that Angry Meme Guy’s biggest dependents were, by far, seniors and veterans which he should be proud to support.
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-A super right wing Christian newsletter says Canada is forbidding Christians from demonstrating, and it showed a picture of that commie Trudeau.  I didn’t really set out to defend the guy, but what the site was referring to is a new piece of legislature in Ontario that prevents people with hate agendas to gather and spout nonsense. (Funny the Christians think that applies to them, isn’t it?) Doug Ford’s government came up with that Bill, but he’s conservative like they are, so they don’t want to cast him in a bad light.  Why not just post a picture of Trudeau so the person scrolling by gets another negative image of him?

-The price of gas is super high now because of the Carbon Tax, so we need to get a new government to save us from this family-killing tax.  Fact is, since 2012 the Carbon Tax has gone up 2.2 cents per litre.  I drive 112 km a day to work and back, so I figure it is bringing poverty my way at about a dollar a week.  I sure hope I can hold on!  Besides Canada is only producing 1.6% of the world’s carbon pollution, so why do we bother?  Well, that makes us the third worst polluters in the world – our carbon emissions are more than twice the per capita rate of China – so there’s that to think about.

If all these memes and posts were true, changing governments would be a great idea.  My fear is that there will be a lot of people who will vote based on this crap, and won’t bother to question anything.  Maybe we as a society are complacent about our information, assuming if it’s published it must be true.  We should either teach critical thinking or have some resource or watchdog to keep ‘facts’ factual.

I’m a little disenchanted with the government too, to be honest.  If someone comes along with something other than mudslinging and baloney, I am willing to listen.  But if your campaign strategy is character assassinations of your rivals, then no thanks.  Every candidate running must have ideas of what they’ll do when they get elected, why not spend a few advertising dollars on telling us what they are?  Rampant negativity is what got everyone sick of Harper in the end.  He wasn’t doing a terrible job, but his campaign was nothing but attack ads, which I read afterward had everyone tuning him out.

Just take this stuff with a grain of salt and don’t be afraid to do some research if the facts seem a little over the top.  Think of it as a boil water advisory for your mind.  I’d almost welcome a chance to be fair and defend Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh, but so far I haven’t encountered any angry hordes calling for their heads.

I wrote a story about being mentally blank a while ago, mostly as it pertained to the interview I took to get my current job.  Looking back, it was the beginning of something larger and scarier.  For the next six weeks or so after that interview, I continued to get less and less focused.  I was leaving things laying around, forgetting conversations I had just had, stuff like that.  I once tried to get out of the car but couldn’t because my seat belt was still done up.  If I put my keys in my pocket, I would basically do the Macarena where I had to stick my hand in every pocket twice to find them.  Just before Christmas it got to its worse point.  One morning I got to work and left the interior light on in my car and wandered off into the office.  Of course, I needed a jump start after my shift.  Then the next day I did almost exactly the same thing with my work truck and needed a jump, too.  Then I threw away my work ID badge and fob by accident.  I was frustrated, embarrassed and anxious.  What was going on?  Was I starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s?  Few things in this world scare the crap out of me like dementia.

I was pleased to see that one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s was falling down frequently, which I didn’t have.  I had some of the other symptoms, but not all of them.  I researched side effects of the medicine I take for diabetes and found that the only one that listed “confusion, memory problems and trouble concentrating” was glyburide.  Glyburide is an old drug, developed in the mid 1960’s, that stimulates insulin production.   Coincidentally, not long before this I took a test to see how much insulin my body was producing, and it turns out it was producing a normal amount.  My diabetes, according to the test, was due to insulin resistance.  The question was, did I produce enough insulin to give up taking the drug?

Over Christmas I decided to take a little holiday from glyburide.  Over the ten or so days off I watched in horror as my blood sugar went from 7 or 8 mmol/l, which is high but not crazy, to the 15-16 range, then up to 25-26 , then finally so high my monitor only read HI without giving a number.  Normal blood sugar should be between 4 and 6.  After a week or so I was forced to start taking my brain food again, but my mind was a lot clearer from being off it a while.
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And then… a few weeks later I lost my ID badge and fob again.  This time it might just have been a one time thing, as it was an isolated incident, so far.  Next month I see my doctor again, and this time she might prescribe me insulin like she’s been threatening, and it may mean I can do away with glyburide for good.

And then, god willing, I can get back to writing stuff and getting through the day without doing anything stupid.

Well it’s time to tally up the BC 50/50 winnings from the little villages that do the winning.  I had a question for the Lottery Corporation, and I only got an answer from them yesterday morning, which is why this took a week to get started on.  In the last six months of 2018, the village with the big winnings was Pemberton, winning almost $23,000 more than Burns Lake in the same period.  In fact, the gap is actually even wider, but I started out by only counting wins made at the Pemberton Petro Can gas station.  It doesn’t change much, though, as almost all of the town’s winning tickets were bought there, with a couple wins from the Frontier Pharmacy not included.  For the whole year, Burns Lake was still the champ, but it was close.  First, the facts:

July:  Burns Lake won 8 draws, $25,109.50, Pemberton 6 wins, $17,306

August:  Burns Lake 3 wins, $11,380.50, Pemberton 4 wins, $13,732

September: Burns Lake only 2 wins, $4,210.50, Pemberton 7 wins for $19,770.50

October: Burns Lake 3 wins, $5667, Pemberton 6 wins, $23,272.50

November: BL 9 wins, $44,985.50, Pemberton 8 wins, $43,496

December: both towns must have been on holidays after all the money they won in November, as each town only won one draw, BL for $6219 and Pemberton for $2732.50.

Total for the six months: Burns Lake 26 wins for $97,572, Pemberton 32 wins for $120,309.50.

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Here is the info that the BC Lottery Corp sent me in response to my question about how much the average 50/50 win is and how it has increased since its inception.  No matter what I do, I can’t seem to make it any clearer.  It looks great until it gets inserted into this story.

 

If your best spectacles aren’t handy, it says the average win has doubled in the last four years.

The BC 50/50 started a couple days before Halloween 2012.  It replaced the Sportsfunder 50/50 that used to draw every half an hour, and at off peak times often had prizes of $10 or less.  I won it a couple times, $33 once and I think $11 another time, when I had to fish my ticket out of the trash at the pub.  The BC 50/50 only had four draws a day, so the prize was much higher, even at the beginning it was usually over $800, even in the slowest times.  Oh, except for the first time I won it when it was nearly at its lowest ever point, $671.50.

The first year or so, the little town that was winning like crazy was Fort St James, population 1700.  They won like Burns Lake for a while, then they petered out.  Even at the start it was dominated by small towns and obscure gas stations.  Maybe someone moved from Fort St James to Burns Lake around 2015?  Of the larger cities only Kamloops and Victoria seem to win their share.  If Vancouver, Surrey or Burnaby supported this lottery the way Burns Lake and Pemberton do, the prizes would be huge.

 

Fall has got to be my least favourite season.  The pretty colours?  The dropping temperatures?  Those are all signs of nature dropping dead before our eyes.  Sure, it is a cycle, and sooner or mostly later it bounces back and blooms and produces tasty food again.  But still, I find it mildly depressing to witness.  Add to that the fact I work outside and have an hour drive wrapped around my day at work like a commuter sandwich.  These days I leave in the dark and come home in the dark.  Golf is a distant memory, as is sitting on the patio with a beer.  Some days I get a good soaking at work and have to stand under the hot shower for a while to thaw out my bones.

It’s a lousy backdrop, but it’s almost ready to give way to winter, and life continues to be mostly happy and interesting despite what’s happening outside.  Hockey is in full swing, and already my favourite teams are in power nose dives heading for the bottom of the standings and oblivion, yet it still holds my interest for some reason.  I get to see a lot of some of my kids and their kids which is nearly always a good thing.  Christmas will be here in five weeks or so, and my birthday follows along 16 days after that.  By the time the last of the wrapping paper is being hauled away in the recycling, the days will already be getting longer.

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I wonder sometimes if my cat is happy.  She doesn’t associate with other cats.  At home she is chased around by a mini Frankenstein toddler who terrorizes her.  She hardly goes outside in the cold, dark or rain.  She doesn’t hunt or do crossword puzzles.  Mostly she sleeps and eats kibble and watches people from a safe distance with a scowl.  She likes me, however, and it is a definite mixed blessing.  Everywhere I go in the house, the cat is a few feet away, waiting for me to sit down so she can curl up on me.  Sometimes she heads off to sleep, other times she tears at me with her claws and purrs.  It is too much neediness for me.  I am patient with her, but I really wish she’d expand her horizons and claw someone else once in a while.  My day is long enough without having some love starved cat cling to me like the last chopper out of Saigon.  At Christmas we are lodging another cat for a couple weeks, and our cat will be distraught.  The other cat and our cat don’t get along, and the other cat bullies our cat.  It’s too bad they aren’t pals, but maybe she will be too distracted to follow me around for a few blissful days.