Have I ever mentioned that my live-in-colleague, Ms. Zhou, minored in audiology?

So, as I tickle the meniscus, she tickles their auditory range starting with what, text-book, is outside their natural reach. She works her way through the scale hopping from octave to octave, seeing which notes register best, and making sidenotes of which notes seem to correlate best to what they understand as tuna or water, kibble or sand.

Knowing how fast the health can change with these subjects, especially considering all the question marks about their lifestyles, it is best to keep our own tabs on their health. She does this diligently daily at 7:30 am weekdays and 9 am weekends, adjusting for the northern latitudes and shifting it seasonally. So far they seem to be maintaining a constant level of auditory acuity but they are not alwways the most cooperative subjects and sometimes ignore the clinical prompts. They seem especially unlikely to respond with their babble-kit talk in the 8 a.m. range.

We do what we can to learn, despite obstables. They are not an absolute control group; it is trickier than some assignments. You may remember the exchange I had at the doctor’s office with that other white feline. In her household, there is a hairless kit. She can monitor it 24/7. That’s a definite plus. Ours we get, effectually, only about 12/6. We never know where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing beyond what we can surmise from the bouquet of smoke, clashing perfumes, musks and colognes picked up on their clothes from hairless talls nearby. While it is an engaging puzzle to try to sort out the food and body smells that they have brought home with them and determine the age of the residual odors, at this point, the data yields little but the pleasure of the analysis itself.