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I probably should have read up on things like that and tried to resolve Mel's issues with Pepper through discipline rather than just my uninformed "get a playful cat and it will solve everything" idea. I feel now like I made things even worse.

But if the disciplinary procedures work, then hopefully at worst, eventually we'll have three cats that get along fairly well, even if they don't play happily together.

At least Pepper is purring again when I pet her. She wouldn't do that this morning. I could tell she was upset. Mel and Hermes have been asleep on the bed almost all day since their altercation earlier, although they're at opposite corners, whereas Mel and Pepper (for all of their differences) can usually sleep close together with no problems.

I think the roomba has played a role in Hermes's recent aggression towards both Pepper and Caramel. I think it gets him excited, but he's too scared to attack the roomba the way Mel does, so he directs his aggression towards an easier target.

Another reason to use the can on him when he rampages in the dark is because that's when he's the biggest danger to Mel and Pepper. When he does that, they go to investigate the noise and in the midst of his running around, he pounces on them. And I think Pepper has a hard time seeing in the dark, so she doesn't even see it coming and can't get away.

Mystery of Pepper's night-time howling solved? I think she's wandering around, looking for someone to feed her wet food. The past couple of nights I've made sure she had a little extra wet food before going to bed. The night before last, she didn't howl at all. Last night, she was downstairs and I heard her let out a single meow, then she started eating her leftover wet food. When she was done, she came to bed and didn't howl again.

Yes, they're okay. I'm running the roomba again, and Mel is just trying to play with her toy balls. I put the cheese chaser up on the table for now, and she actually reached her little paw up to it and tried to bat at the ball inside of it.

I think one of the reasons we're making progress with Hermes is that he is a "people" cat. When he started that running around at night, I was worried that he might be an outdoor cat who is too wild to turn into a housecat. But he seems to be settling down with us in the bed and sleeping through the night more.

Another reason we're able to make progress with him is because he's deathly afraid of the coin-rattling soda can. Whenever I use it on him, he runs as fast as his chubby little legs will carry him under the bed and hides there for awhile. Mel will run when she hears it, but you can tell she's not as afraid of it as he is.

Sometimes, I don't even need to use the can. Sometimes if he's being bad, I'll just clap my hands and say, "NO!" and he stops.

We had another incident with Hermes today. Crawl's mother and sister came to visit, and while we were eating dinner, for seemingly no reason at all, Hermes walked up to Pepper (who was sitting on the futon), and suddenly reached up and whacked her really hard in the head with his paw. I screamed at him and he ran upstairs. I ran after him and rattled the coin can, and he hid under the futon. He seemed like he knew he did something wrong even before I rattled the can.

I found a small scratch on Pepper's ear. I put polysporin on it to prevent infection (and it also seemed to help stop the bleeding). Crawl's mother was so upset about it, she wanted to take Pepper home with her (but, yeah, they have four cats there, some of which are no better around other cats).

Hermes is usually good around Pepper. She still growls at him, but he usually backs off or ignores her. (And she wasn't growling at him then.) I think that he was just too stressed out from all the day's events and had misplaced aggression. His day started out getting taken to the vet, where he was prodded and poked at by two strangers, and then he had to deal with two more strangers later that night - strangers with the smell of strange cats about them - which I think contributed to it more than anything else. He was probably smelling these strange cats and couldn't figure out where it was coming from and concluded, for whatever reason, that Pepper was the source.

He also had a misplaced aggression incident once before when I first used the roomba. He was upset by it and when Pepper walked up behind him, he turned around and jumped on top of her (but didn't hurt her).

He is just so easily spooked, but if he does something like that to Pepper again, we may have to adopt a more aggressive way of dealing with him - such as locking him up in the bedroom for awhile.