So, I’m doing research for a potential short story, and I was thinking about using the old European witch hunts as part of the background, and then I’m thinking about handsome immortal Spaniards and then I started doing some research and… wouldn’t you know it? The Spanish Inquisition was about Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims, not witches. The worst of the actual witch hunting was apparently done in Germany, France, and – get this – Switzerland, with a couple notable Scottish outbreaks. All of a sudden, the Malleus Maleficarum (the infamous Witch’s Hammer which was the witch hunting manual of choice) being written by Germans suddenly make a lot more sense. But this just doesn’t fit well with my current short story plot. *sigh* Must replace handsome Spaniard with handsome…. Frenchman? Scottsman? But I was really diggin’ the curly black hair…

In other news, I figured out why Morgan is scared of the upstairs. In yet another attempt to get Morgan to watch a movie with us, we fed the cats upstairs. Morgan, who has in the past shown that the one thing that will make her overcome her fear of the upstairs is food, flipped out and refused to enter the movie room (which is at the top of the stairs). She rounded the corner, saw the Cowboys game playing on the wall, and low-tailed it out. And then I realized that we’d never fed her upstairs while the movie screen was on, and now there she was, hunched over three steps from the top where she usually hangs out while we watch movies. Scott had to pick her up and carry her to her food bowl. She was panicking the whole time, staring at the screen like it was going to eat her, and I sat there and pet her while she downed her food keeping one eye on the behemoths onscreen.

I explained my theory to Scott that Morgan believed the movie screen was like a door and that the images were real. Scott laughed. And when she was done eating, he picked her up and she squirmed while he took her to the screen and bumped her lightly against it, proving that it was not, in fact, a portal to another world, and the football players were not, in fact, in her living room. We started 300 (good movie, btw, if you don’t mind a lot of violence), and she turned her back to the screen and hunched by the couch. Every now and then I leaned over and pet her. After about 30 minutes, apparently deciding that nothing was going to jump out of the screen and eat her, she hopped into my lap, and we continued our old trend of Morgan purring in my lap while we have family movie night.

She seemed very proud of herself, purring extra-loud during the film, making sure she was the last one out of the room when it was over, and she hung out on the stairs and batted at us playfully after we’d descended. And voila! Maybe not her favorite place on Earth, but Morgan may actually join us upstairs now!