Triumph over Itunes and cat meetings

A few months back, I got an external hard drive to store my growing collection of music and photos. I put all my Itunes music on the new drive and specified in Itunes the location of the new files. I didn't get rid of the music in the old location, because for some reason when I did, my library wasn't coming up right, but I decided I'd look into this later and then more or less forgot about it.Well, earlier this week, I looked at my hard drive and said "eek" because I really was running out of room. Time to get rid of the Itunes stuff. I dragged it into the trash, checked Itunes, and was pleased to see my entire library came up ok without it. So I emptied the trash. Imagine my horror when I opened Itunes and the files were listed in the library, but it couldn't find many of them. I went back to the external hard drive. Yep, all files there. So why couldn't #$(*&$#* itunes find them? I figured this had something to do with the library, which is stored in a file you can't open and edit. But there was a library.xml file which I could open. Aha! There was the code with the path specified for each sound file. I did a global find and replace to specify that all my sound files were in the appropriate folder in the external hard drive, patting myself on the back for my own cleverness. Saved the file. Opened Itunes.Ack! Same problem. Opened the .xml file again. Sure enough, it had reset to the old library. This is where I decided I needed to do a google search to see if anyone had posted what to do about this. (A few days ago I had checked the apple support page which was woefully inadequate.) I found out that you can hold down the option key on a mac to get it to ask where the library is or to create a new one. I created a new library and used "import" to import my edited (again) .xml file into it. Yay! Other than having all my playlists duplicated, the problem was solved. I have triumphed over the evil piece of software called Itunes. Now all my Itunes files are correctly stored on the external hard drive. Duh. Why do they give you an option to specify where you store your music but not anything about switching the #(*$&#$*(& library? Good thing I don't mind going in and editing code.In other news, I sat outside with three of the wild kittens yesterday. They will come within about three feet of me to eat from the bowl of food I put out. No kittens were in sight when I put the food out, but when I came back with water, I scared off Peaches, the smallest and most adventurous of the three. Then I found that my own cat Varda, who is old and infirm and usually shows no interest in going outside, was peeking around the door. So I thought, what the heck, she's too old and skittish to run off, let her have a look outside and see these wild kittens, as the other two were cautiously watching from along the walk.Varda looked at the kittens. They looked at her. One of the Shastas (two nearly identical cats we call Shasta 1 and Shasta 2) came to eat out of the bowl. Varda hissed, then went to eat out of the bowl herself. She ate a couple pieces, then got bored or decided it wasn't as good as her inside food, and went to explore the new patio. The kittens stared at her. They stared at me. I can only guess what they must have been thinking. I didn't want them to have physical contact with Varda because they've probably got goodness knows what in addition to fleas, but they seemed to be happy to look at each other from a distance. Besides, I was next to Varda and they won't come that close to humans.The kittens went to eat out of the bowl, and Varda didn't' get upset about it this time. I didn't want her doing too much wandering outside, so I let her back in. Because we have the new patio on that side of the house and the yard is very narrow and shaded by our house and the very close house next door, I'm not sure if Varda realized she was outside, or thought she was just in some other room we keep closed. Hard to tell with Varda. The poor thing is so skinny. I got a refill of her blood pressure medicine yesterday and I think tomorrow we are going to give her fluids under the skin again.I've called Indy Feral again to see where I am on the waiting list to have the wild cats spayed/neutered. They assure me that they are a priority. I'm afraid the kittens are too old to tame now, but at least they will come relatively close to us, while the wild adults won't. I can't be in the business of taking more cats into my house with two elderly and infirm ones of my own, but I wish I could do more for them.