Category Archives: Animals

Standoff through the catflap

Cats were making a strange noise this evening as someone else’s cat tried to get in through our catflap.

This is the first time I’ve been able to record the cats making a noise. They are normally very quiet, well-behaved cats who give us no trouble at all. Whenever I’m cooking, and particularly if it’s meat, Smudge goes frantic and tries to bite my fingers off. And whenever there’s another cat around, Fudge’s defensive noise is the one you hear here. Smudge is there working backup on the defence, but mostly just stands two paces back and eggs him on.

The videos are here and here. I’m working on trying to get them to display right here.

NB, standoff through the catflap is sung to the tune of Tiptoe through the Tulips

My cats are Mighty Hunters

Hmm, did I really need to upload 6 videos of my mighty hunting cats to Google Video?

For some reason I always mistype that the first time and wonder why google.video.com isn’t playing ball. I look at it and rub my eyes cartoon-stylee before doing a Homer-like d’oh and retyping video.google.com

Those cat videos in full:

  1. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8951294257259750828&hl=en
  2. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8545977164428227701&hl=en
  3. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4763328426337947820&hl=en
  4. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3135252504509427891&hl=en
  5. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6067798981786042045&hl=en
  6. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-488241744138881657&hl=en

My cats are unfortunately not as funny as OCD Toilet Flushing Cat, but they’re going through a nightly workout and we’ll be getting that Oscar soon.

Mind you, they might have OCD – they don’t seem to be able to drink without pawing the bowl a set number of times, and tipping water all over the kitchen floor. We’ve had to get a special untippable dog bowl with a rubber rim to stop them making such a mess.

Feline Freedom

After watching the cats sit on an upstairs window ledge shouting at neighbour cat usurpers and what I think were tits flying very close to the house, we decided it was time to let them have their freedom outside.

P was watching Chocolat on TV so we opened the French windows in the sitting room and let them out.

Smudge, the timid, grey and white one very sensibly went a little way, then ran back, and then back out again a little further, then back, and so on.

Fudge barged out into the garden, and started on the route the other cats take, sniffing things, hiding where the other cats hide, marching down into the rest of the garden, and then vanishing.

Time passed.

Smudge came in and out again.

No sign of Fudge.

Went for a bit of an explore of the garden.  No sign of Fudge.  Three other cats inhabiting the lower garden, no Fudge.

It’s now dark.  Decide to banish Smudge to back of house and leave French doors open.

I come up to computer book ferries for French holiday.  A few minutes later, P comes up saying Chocolat has finished, but no sign of Fudge.

A little worried now.

I go down, out onto patio, calling name, banging dish (this doesn’t work indoors, why should it work outdoors).  Put on shoes.  Go back down the garden.  No sign.

Look back at house.  Fudge sitting on back step.  When I called him, he came from inside the house.  How did he get back in?  His fur is cold, so he can’t have been in long.  Grrr.  No going out tomorrow.

Muddy pawprints in the bath


Muddy pawprints in the bath

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

The cats have been with us for almost two weeks now, punctuated last Tuesday by a return to the Centre for booster jabs.

The second week has gone less well than the first. I think the jabs took a lot out of Fudge and he’s spent a lot of time in hiding. He’s been a far less gregarious cat, not insisting on attention and not really sitting on laps.

Smudge has come out of himself a lot more but it’s become clear that he does have breathing difficulties. He pants after running upstairs (well, join the club!) and also when purring. You can hear the wheeze of him hunting from the next room – so he won’t need a collar to warn the birds. The rasping noise – which doesn’t really seem to be causing any discomfort – has earned him the name Darth Pudkin.

Fudge, it appears, is one of those cats who doesn’t mind getting wet. He’s fascinated by the dripping bathroom tap, trying to catch water drips before the run into the plughole. I thought upping the flow by turning the tap on to full would discourage him but it actually sent him into a chasing frenzy that led to him getting soaked and not minding.

These are the first cats I’ve ever known that will drink water you put down for them. We’re following the lead from the Centre and feeding them dry food, which they don’t seem to mind, but some mornings this week we’ve come down to find they’ve drunk an entire bowlful of tapwater, Fudge with drips in his mane.

Cat-owning has forced our hand on cleaning a bit as scattered litter pellets and vast quantities of shed fur now cloud the carpets within minutes of the last hoovering.

But the biggest mystery is the muddy pawprints in the bath. These cats aren’t allowed out til next week. Where are they getting the mud from?

New additions to household

Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the Cats Protection League looking for cats. We had initial criteria – confident cats that don’t mind being handled (all my parents cats used to ride our shoulders, and I like that). I wanted minimum 2, P stipulated maximimum 2.

Two sets of cats at the League were an option when we got there: Fudge and Smudge — brothers, both toms — and two unnamed, 10-week old kittens.

Fudge Smudge Kitten 1 Kitten 2
All the photos from the Cats Protection League

Although I went in really wanting kittens, it was the adult cats that really engaged with us at the shelter. The kittens were timid, and the only way to engage them was to get them to play with shoelaces, and the various toys. They weren’t keen on being picked up at all, made a dash for the door whenever they could. And, harsh though it sounds, whilst they’re adorable black and white kittens, it won’t be long before they’re just another set of black-and-white cats, like the five different various neighbour cats who already use our garden.

Fudge and Smudge were different. Don’t like the names much. Fudge is really leonine, up to and including a mane. As soon as we got near his cage, he was demanding attention, rolling over into tarty poses, and he had no problem with me picking him up within minutes of getting into the cage. Smudge, however, a grey colour cat with none of his litter-mate’s longhaired tendences, is really a frightened cat. Apparently the centre found a few days after they had him that he had a collar on under his fur– it had been put on him as a kitten and never loosened, and tightened progressively as he grew. They had to cut it off him. Hopefully he’ll come out of his shell with a bit of attention over a few weeks.

In the week they’ve been in the CPL’s care, they’ve been prodded, blood samples taken, and castrated. So it’s quite surprising that either cat was prepared to be friendly at all.

When we left the cage and looked around the other pens, Fudge was hollering after us — come back! It’s us! You’re taking us home!

We need to wait now for a home visit from the CPL to check that we are a suitable home for their cats, but hopefully, we should have our new friends living here within a week.

Of course, we’ve been planning this for some time. I bought cat-dishes, a scratching post and a cat-flap when they were sale items at Lidl November last year, before we even moved home!  We bought a litter-tray when we were playing host to Libby, and in the last few weeks, we’ve been buying cat food and cat treats whenever we’re at the supermarket.  P excelled himself and found “Thank you for feeding the cat” fudge when we were in Norfolk last month, and whilst at the laundrette yesterday popped over to Mapperly Pets and bought one of those cat-pyramid things to give Smudge a little privacy and somewhere to hide.

I think we’re ready.

OMFG!

B3ta is down.

How will we cope?

oOo

I’ve spent the evening techily occupied finding a new web host that will run WordPress for me. I’ve outgrown blogger. I’ll be moving a spare domain to a new host for experimental purposes and will be migrating www.niles.org.uk in the fullness of time. The ageing content of the site is a little bit embarrassing now.

It’s been a techy few days. I spent Sunday evening upgrading a computer in the office. It now has a network card and an extra ISA parellel port and has been transformed into a print server. It’s been ages since I’ve had to do anything ISA and I’d forgotten what life was like pre-PnP.

This is Libby, our neighbour’s cat who came in through our open back door earlier today. I shot a ‘reel’ of film of her before we escorted her off the premises in accordance with the terms of our lease. She’s looks very much like my parents’ cat Ellie except that where Ellie is grey-only, Libby has warmer colours in her fur.

I’ve just started watching tapes of 24 Season 4, even though we’ve not finished Season 3. Paul has Kiefer Fatigue and has decided three seasons of high tension cliffhangers is quite enough for him. Me, I’m a glutton for punishment. “Looks like someone’s trying to corrupt the internet!” Techy bloggers the world over are up in arms.

Busy day

Today in Nottingham, there’s been a

  • peace rally in Market Square
  • Gay Pride festival in the Arboretum
  • and a Mela on the Forest Field

All connected by the tram, so a peacenik gay Asian with a bus pass can hop between all three.

Unfortch, I didn’t go to any of them. We had a delivery day in the diary from months back so I went leafletting with a bunch of Lib Dems.

I’m starting to work on the fantasies about the new house and garden. If we’re moving in at the end of the summer what can we plant? Help is at hand on the HDRA website that gives a month-by-month account of what needs doing in the garden — and what you could be enjoying if you’d followed their instructions earlier in the year. The Organic Catalogue has been constant bathroom reading for the last six months.

Will we keep chickens? There’s plenty of room. But to be honest, we don’t actually eat all that many eggs. I’m sure we can always eat more omelette, cake, quiche, egg sandwiches… We can Go To Work on an Egg, provide Oeufs Durs a la Mayonnaise to every bring’n’share… (Blimey, the Eglu has changed so that now it can hold rabbits. Are the rabbits for food or looking at? I don’t think that we’d need an Eglu when a couple of feet of chicken wire and some wood will do…)

There’s a quite a bit of garden out of sight of the house, so we could have a polytunnel and grow chillis and melons. And have a full sized compost heap instead of a garden compost dalek. But with all that garden, we’ll need a way of disposing of dead leaves and grass cuttings.

Maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself. First we’ll need to rewire, redecorate and furnish the place. That’s assuming we can sort mortgage, surveys and the conveyancing. Dammit! I want to move now!

But of course the main reason for moving? Away from restrictive leases and evil, inspection-mad letting agents? KITTENS!

Piscean genocide

The stiff, lifeless bodies of two of the five new goldfish have been unceremoniously disposed of in the traditional manner. I think my optimism re: miraculous recovery following better living conditions was misplaced.

The mussels seem fine. They seem able to move a long old way under their own steam, and are often in surprisingly remote corners of the tank.

I have just had to cry off a meal with friends at the Balti House on health grounds. My abdomen has been painful for the last week, and my jaw for even longer, and I just didn’t think one of their traditional enormous curries would help terribly much. Instead, I made some sort of Greek potato stew, improvising from a recipe found on cix:/gourmet — sliced, sauteed potatoes laid thinly across the bottom of a dish, covered in a sauce made from onion, garlic, tomatoes, olives, red wine and chilli, and baked for an hour. I didn’t quite cook it for long enough, so the onion was still a bit too crunchy. I ate it with home-made bread and home-brewed beer and felt very virtuous. I can manage more healthy eating like this.

The onions were from that nice grocery called Sheikh, where the fabulously priced oranges come from. Onions are no more expensive–there ought to be a sign that says, “Sheikh, for people who like onions.” A huge gert multi-kilo bag that was tricky lug home for only two-fifty. Spectactular. I made onion soup to celebrate, and will serve it to my parents when they visit later in the week.

Over in Ambridge, I’m convinced that Jill Archer is an evil witch, despite the placid exteriour. The way yesterday she asked whether Ruth’s cough (was it TB? Secondary cancers? Mammoth red herring?) was starting to get better–the clear implication was that she’d taken the pins out of the Ruth-Archer wax doll concealed in a dresser-drawer in the Bungalow. Today, the R4 announcer told us “Kenton Archer is helping the children look for firewood for bonfire night; what could possibly go wrong?” What indeed.