The Joys of Cat Ownership III

Sunday morning I got up and went through to the kitchen to feed the cats. On the way, I very nearly tripped over a Frisbee that was lying in the middle of the floor. I didn’t really think much of it, perhaps O had been playing Frisbee after I had gone to bed the night before, yes it was early I was still sleepy. I had a bath and was generally pottering about, and noticed that the Cat was sitting very close to the Frisbee – not her usual spot. As time went on, I began to get suspicious of her attachment to the Frisbee. It was right next to two bags of bits and pieces we’d bought on Saturday. I gingerly lifted the bags expecting a mouse or other such small furry creature to run out from under them. Nothing. Hmmm, so I went to lift the Frisbee and saw the tail! Dropping the Frisbee, back into position, I ran into the bedroom doing that jumpy/hoppy up and down itchy thing where you feel like the mouse is crawling up your leg.

Me: “O? Did you move the Frisbee?”

O: “No”

Me: “Where was the Frisbee when you went to bed”

O: “I don’t know. It’s been on the bottom shelf for ages”

Me: “Well it is now in the middle of the floor with a mouse under it. Did you put it over the mouse?”

O: “You what? No I didn’t move it. Are you sure there is a mouse under it?

Me “Yup”

O: “Is it still alive?”

Me “Think so”

O gets dressed, comes through to the living room, looks at the Frisbee, looks at the shelf FOUR feet away where it is usually kept and looks back at the Frisbee and at the Cat who is still very much attached to the Frisbee. He uses a big piece of cardboard and slides it under the Frisbee lifting gingerly; he proceeds to take it down the stairs and outside releasing the mouse. We watch it run off rather dazed and a little bruised and battered but alive. Back up the stairs to discover little mouse pee all over the floor under the Frisbee and a VERY PISSED OFF CAT.

We still can’t work out whether it was the mouse who moved the Frisbee or the Cat.

The Cat

She may or may not have practically fallen off the window sill not long after this photo was taken and then stalked off like she was too cool for school throwing the window sill dirty looks.

Cats vs. Dogs

My family and I are cat people so we have been loving this story in the news recently.

"People who own a cat are more likely to have a university degree than those with a pet dog"

(image by O)

The Joys of Cat Ownership II

Our cats seem to dislike our kitchen wallpaper as much as we do. They've started removing the wallpaper on their own. They seem to have a penchant for textured wallpaper which is why I'm trying to rid my house of it completely.

Our kitchen wall

(image me)

Driving home for Christmas

(from here)

Tonight we are driving home for Christmas, top to toe in tail lights....

In our new car (new to us).

We were sad to let the old car go but not too sad as it has not been very reliable. Very grateful to have a new car considering the amount of driving we will be doing over the next week.

Weather permiting that is, doesn't look hopeful at the moment!

Please don't burgle our house there will be two scary (scared) cats there to look after the place.

When I'm at my parents I won't have easy access to the internet and they don't know about the blog so please excuse me if I don't respond to your comments or leave comments on your blogs I will catch up when I'm home.

Don't install a cat flap!

(I should probably explain that we live in an upstairs flat - so our flight of stairs is right at the front door)

So there is no denying that our cats are a pair of big girls blouses who wouldn’t say boo to a goose and regularly get bullied by the other cats in the neighbourhood.

However it is very rare that they will allow another cat into their house (their territory starts inside the cat flap)! But on Sunday morning (4am) we had an intruder, I was woken to the unmistakeable sound of cats growling and screaching at each other, and it was definitely inside the house. So to prevent the further flying of fur I leapt dragged myself out of bed and went charging through to the living room shouting and hissing hoping to scare the b’jesus out of our intruder and get this monster out of our house (I should probably mention that I hadn’t put my glasses on and so couldn’t see a bl**dy thing). I managed to scare my own cat into the other room but on not hearing the cat flap rattle at a rate of knots I figured the intruder hadn’t gone anywhere – and right enough there was a whitish blur still under the couch. So more shouting, hissing, growling, clapping and stamping (our neighbours love us) from me resulted in the cat getting to the stairs, down the stairs and to the cat flap. More shouting from me and it made some pitiful attempts to get through the cat flap but failed so started coming back up the stairs meowing pathetically like I was hurting it! So I shut the door at the top of the stairs and went to get my glasses so I could see the imbecile that had broken into my house. Thinking that there might be something wrong with the cat flap (maybe it had locked itself shut?) I went down the stairs – nothing wrong with the cat flap – so I held open the cat flap and the intruder escaped with a skelped arse from me as it went past.

I object to foreign cats coming into my home to terrorise my cats
I really object more when they are too thick to let themselves back out of the house.

The Joys of Cat Ownership I

The Owl and the Pussy Cat get on very well which is apparently quite unusual, both of them are dark tortoiseshells (their fur is black, brown, orange and blonde). The Owl does have a white bib and paws but the Cat is all dark. When we first took them to the vets we were asked if they were feisty. Feisty? They are about as far from feisty as you can possibly get. According to the vet dark tortoiseshell cats are the red-heads of the cat world. They tend to be fiery in temper and don’t play well with others.

Our cats are a couple of big pansies and regularly get bullied. How do we know that they get bullied? Because they get chased home. The cat flap rattles and you hear the thundering of paws as one of the cats reaches the safety of the top of the stairs. What you then hear is the bully cat outside battering at our cat flap rattling it back and forth as if saying “Come here and finish this you big pansy” (or so it is in my imagination). In the middle of the night it sounds like someone is trying to break into the house – not a good way to wake up.

The Joys of Cat Ownership

Written April 2009

So they say never go to bed on an argument (although yea to Practical Wedding who says just get some sleep!). I can also recommend never going to bed with a mouse in the room. Not sure where the mouse came from, or when it was brought in but the fact that we have 2 cats kind of gives me a bit of a hint.

O and I were getting ready for bed when I noticed this black dot flash into a corner, thinking I was maybe seeing things I went to investigate, and sure enough the little black dot flashed past us again, along the front of the set of drawers and behind the set of 3 huge wardrobes that are in the bedroom. I’m not usually too squeamish about these things as I’ve had to come accustomed to picking up entrails, however they aren’t usually in my bedroom, and I’ve never seen them move quite so fast (being that they are usually half eaten by the time I see them). However as it was about 23.30 by this point, and the fact that it was behind the wardrobes that we wouldn’t be moving at that time of night we decided to go to sleep and worry about it in the morning.

All went fine until 2.55 this morning when I was woken by the noise of nibbling paper – coming from O’s side of the bed. Trying to ignore that I rolled over and buried my head under the pillow, however what I failed to ignore was the mouse climbing the curtains and running along the metal blinds! If you can imagine the sound of very tiny nails running along a blackboard in the pitch black can you imagine how unpleasant that might sound? More pleasant was the thud the mouse made when it hit the ground having climbed back down the curtains – but it managed to scurry away from this adventure. At this point I decided that I had suffered alone for long enough! So I woke O up – his response, send in the cats!!!!!

So I got up and opened the door, lo and behold there was the cat waiting for duty, so I turned and walked back to bed, as she turned and went to show me where the food bowl is – this is a trick that she demonstrates every day. So I followed her, picked her up and dumped her at O’s side of the bed – having not seen anything that caught her attention she again decided to demonstrate where the food is kept – clearly thinking I was daft. Having again dumped her further up O’s side of the bed closer to where I thought the mouse was hiding she finally managed to spot it. Not being the brightest spark in the place she made one failed attempt at getting a paw on it and forced it under the bed (which it may never reappear from). At this point O was getting grumpy and ordered that the cat be left to do what she does best in the dark. (I would have to argue that although she is a very accomplished hunter outside put her and any beast – mouse, spider, wood louse inside and she is completely incompetent!). At exactly the same point I turn off the light O manages to turn over and brush against my leg, me being a little highly strung at this point thought that the mouse was in my bed! I screamed and had to be peeled off the ceiling by O who found the whole thing quite amusing.

I would like to say that the story had a happy ending i.e. Cat caught and ate mouse and R slept soundly with that knowledge. However the prospect of a mouse that she couldn’t get to kept the cat entertained for about an hour – being 100x larger than the mouse in question she makes quite a bit more noise when scrabbling about under the bed trying to figure out where it had gone! She also finds people moving under duvets equally as fascinating so wasn’t really clued up to what was required of her. However after that the Owl came in, with I think her own catch so the Cat went and played with that, leaving me to try and get back to sleep, knowing there was a mouse about a foot away from my head! I must have some how managed this as it was 6.30 when I was again woken to a mouse squeaking – this invoked absolutely no response from the cats at all, I think it might be stuck among O’s national geographic collection which is under the bed!

We have left the cats and the mouse in the house together and I hope the inevitable will happen – apologies to the animal lovers however a sleep deprived R is not a happy R!!

Pictures

My blog has been very text heavy so I thought I'd add some pictures

The Cat

The Owl

O's Great Aunt's ring which we are going to have remodelled

Our beach, where O proposed

The Owl and The Pussy Cat

Went to sea.......

Well not exactly as they are cats and they don't like water.

We have 2 cats, 1 that looks very much like an owl because of her huge big eyes and face shape. The other looks like well, a cat, but she is the Peter Pan of cats as she is tiny and she'll never get any bigger.

This is a picture of the cat I'll need to dig out a picture of the owl.

Both our cats are from rescue centres, we got them separately having spent months trying to find the right one we ended up with 2 by mistake. The owl is incredibly timid she can not be picked up and will allow you to stroke her for seconds at a time. As she is a rescue cat I truly hope that her timidity is result of being an independent stray for such a long time and not because she was mistreated but we will never know. The cat is much more sedate, she will let you do anything to her and has yet to complain, she just doesn't understand sitting on your knee and being petted, if we want a cuddle we have to go to her.

Our cats love each other, they tolerate us to a certain extent, but the cat love for each other runneth over! To the extent that you walk into the spare room (where they sleep) and you will occasionally find them spooning. No seriously.

They also enjoy regular mini-breaks together they will often disappear for 3 or 4 days together and then return within minutes of each other as if nothing happened.

When they first started disappearing together they went for a long break of 3 weeks, we were quite worried and contacted the local vets and our neighbours in case they had become locked in a shed. Everyone gave us strange looks when we informed them that we'd lost 2 cats - that is just careless surely?

A lovely lady saw our flier and phoned me to say her husband was back from walking the dog and thought he had spotted them on the river bank (presumably hiding their pea green boat) near our house. How we got them back is a long story including a dog, O being punched in the face, an animal trap, a cold few hours in a car and me looking out of the window in amazement.

We've learnt to worry less about their little holidays, in fact the only time I do start to worry is when one disappears without the other, I figure if they are together then they'll look after each other.