Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In other news:

• I made it to rehearsal tonight, despite fatigue and a handful of small obstacles (well, one medium-sized one and a bunch of small ones).
• My back is a maze of crisscrossing lines of fiery sharp pains. %$#@ing OW.
• Perrine is getting more bold, venturing out for short reconaissance missions before running back to the relative safety of the bedroom. Still not bold enough to confront the dog when she jumps the baby-gate to come into the bedroom to steal Perrine's food, but at least not acting like a prisoner.
• Perrine is asking for food more often -- rather more often than I would normally feed her, but she still looks skinny to me and feels awfully light when I pick her up, so for now I'm giving her all the food she'll eat (and trying to get the portion sizes right, so there's not much for Pepper to steal).

To the folks who answered my bird identification question: thank you. Sure enough, armed with that great big clue, we quickly found images of juvenile red-tailed hawks online, and yup, that's the bird. (Which also fits with my brother having seen an adult red-tailed hawk here in the past.) I got more pictures, which I'll post once I've decided which I like best, and done the crop/scale/adjust-levels dance with them.

And about the dog, the cat, and the gate: the gate as currently positioned (a little off the floor) comes to 29.5 inches high. The first time I saw Perrine leap it, she did so at a dead run, looking like she was going over a steeplechase fence. Since then, I've mostly seen her walk up to it, rock back, think a moment, and spring clear over it from a standing start. Pepper is 10.5 inches at the shoulder, and a squirmy approxiation of 21 inches long from snout to rump -- that is, excluding her constantly-wagging tail. Pepper gets over the gate by leaping atop it and landing with all four paws precariously placed on the narrow top edge -- front paws together, hind paws to either side -- then tipping forward and kicking off on the far side. I'm told that if she couldn't cros it by leaping, she would climb it. But the gate does seem to work as a signal that she's not supposed to cross it, so she waits until the humans are all out of sight, and it does reduce the number of visits she makes to the bedroom. (Also, she can't sneak in, what with the thump of landing followed by tags jangling and nails skittering on the hard floor.) When caught, she'll sit by the gate trying to say, "I can't cross that; you'll have to open it," until I growl and she gets the message that she'd better get herself on the right side of the gate, and performs the maneuver I just described.

And now to see whether I can stay asleep longer than 45 minutes at a stretch, unlike last night.