Kaitlyn Dunnett (aka Kathy Lynn Emerson) here. We’ve had Shadow living with us for a year and a half now, so its time for another update. I’m hoping the video below will play, but if not, I have plenty of still shots to share.

The video was taken when we first introduced Shadow to the concept of the cat door. We installed what is actually the “small dog” size ages ago so our cats could get to the cellar, where their litter boxes were kept. Since Shadow had been living on one floor before she came to us and wasn’t used to stairs, we decided to let her get used to the two main floors of the house first. We put her litter box behind the wood stove and closed off the cat door. It’s only lately that she’s started showing an interest in the cellar, usually when I go down to do the laundry. A couple of times she was even brave enough to go all the way to the bottom of the stairs and step onto the dirt floor, a common characteristic of rural Maine houses. The video shows her trying to figure out how to get through the cat door. She’s since managed it just fine in both directions.

Her other accomplishments since the last update include all but climbing into my husband’s desk drawer (photo above) in search of the thingy he uses to hold his mask out to give him a bit more breathing space. He has several. We finally gave up and let her have the one she’d chewed on as a toy. Now, of course, she ignores it.

A real breakthrough came when I was sitting on the reclining loveseat a couple of weeks ago. For the first time, she voluntarily hopped up, climbed into my lap, curled up, and stayed for a good twenty minutes, even allowing me to pet her while she was there. Unfortunately, when I had to shift my weight (she’s a big, heavy girl!) she left in a huff and hasn’t yet repeated her act of affection, but I’m hopeful that she’s mellowing toward me.

Most of the time, she has other favorite places to sleep. For some reason she spends the afternoons upstairs, where the heat is turned off. When she gets cold, instead of coming back downstairs, she has other techniques to keep warm.

And, of course, she is queen of all she surveys, both in the house and through the windows.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-three books traditionally published and has self published several children’s books. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary “Deadly Edits” series (A Fatal Fiction) as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a standalone historical mystery, The Finder of Lost Things. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen.