My fluffballs are indoor kitties with their own kitty-litter box.
Many british cats are outdoor-indoor cats with their own ‘cat-flap’ in the household door, window or wall.
How does such deep and freezing snow affect outdoor cats? How do they get through a cat-flap that is below snow level? Even if their human digs out the snow by the flap where do they make the cat pathway go? Cats like to bury their doings, how do they do this when the earth and snow is frozen?
I’m concerned for the many cats that do their doings outside. It’s not made national news yet but given cat ownership in this country it is a pending disaster. Worse, on a personal level I’m running low on my supply of kitty-litter.
What to do with indoor kitties that need doings doing and no litter for doing it in?
(obligatory local snow scene picture)
Matrix starts chasing her tail. She has never chased her tail before. I stop making the bed to watch her playfulness, she is bearing her teeth and growling. She falls over, her bowels open and her body twitches wildly. After less than a minute she stops convulsing and lies still. I pick her up and carry her to a warm soft bed on the floor by the phone while I call the emergency vet. Matrix and I cry as I dial.
While the vet questions me. Matrix stops crying and starts to walk around. Yes her breathing is normal, yes her movement is normal. She’s not dragging her back legs. Her pupils are no longer dilated. The vet advises me to keep her warm, let her eat and drink and watch her closely for an hour. The vet says it is fairly common for aging cats to have seizures.
I called mumzie. “Oh yes dear, Jason had a seizure while he was sleeping, about 4 years before he died. He hardly noticed it, I did because he emptied his bowels all over our nice new sofa, what a mess”
Peacefully, Matrix watched while I cleaned the mess.
When the wind blows the slates on the Wendy House roof rattle, or could it be something else?
On a hot day the Wendy House roof timbers creak, or could it be something else?
Picture of a Glis Glis hosted on the Daily Mail website
According to an article in the Mail, edible doormice are invading the home counties, first introduced to Tring by the 2nd Baron Rothschild.
Luckily the Wendy House is out of the current glis glis play grounds and if they do come here I wont be spending a fortune on pest control services to remove them, I’ll just put the fluff balls in the attic for a wee bit of fun every now and then.
The local cat herd has well choreographed dance routines. The balletic movements involve sudden, synchronised, dashes and leaps that are contrasted with subtle coordinated pre-dash tail-fluffing demonstrations.
The garden stage provides props for leaping over, dashing around, hiding under, elegantly perching upon and a liberal dose of insects to piroette with.
Here we find Matrix lurking in the Nigella, where she prepares to launch straight into a dash, bypassing her weakest move, the pre-dash tail fluffing.
Matrix is considering expanding her fundamental skill set into a profit making business by running stress reduction clinics for busy professionals.
The main obstacle is that she’s way too busy (sleeping).
In a highly controversial move Matrix’s photograph appears on a website of cats impersonating Hitler. She’s not a cat you should risk appeasing, I’ve tried and lost my favourite chair and the side of the bed nearest to the radiator. She’s ruthless.
Can you see them? 
Scary!
<long sentence warning, take a breath now>
Combat cleaning’s monthly stop-by to put their duster, vacuum, or wet-wipes in all those places that spiders congregate, to make sure that I don’t drown in the discarded natural insulation produced by the fluffballs, is a particularly pleasant luxury.
<long sentence over, you can relax now>
Pleasant because they
- ask about the building work then giggle endearingly at the answer.
- don’t complain when my tap (US = fawcett) handles fall-off (if twisted at the wrong angle) in their hands.
- take the drapes diving for the floor, because the super-glue holding the drape-hangers up just isn’t quite as super as the advertising would have me believe, in their stride.
Today I am focussing all my emotional energy on striving to achieve the dizziest heights of most strikingly ordinariness. The cats have already fallen into snore-laden sleep.
I’ll let you kno ho it goes, though it ont be anything special, so maybe I ont let you kno ho it goes. e’ll see if its orthy, after a bout of affly indecisveness of extremely ordinary proportions and hacking my mini-hammer on the wwwwww key.
“how are the cats settling in?”
Thankyou to everyone who inquired after the wellbeing of my darling fluffballs. I am happy to confirm that they have quickly adapted to this Wendy House and are exhibiting a full range of healthy fluff-ball-ee activities, most notable of which is the Monaco-ish, formula-1-ish speed and agility, dangerous-staircase dash.
Dangerous-staircase dash
Starts in the garden where Sampo cues-up Matrix by strutting backward and forward in front of her just out of paws reach. Next, Sampo runs for the front-door gathering sufficient speed to arrive before Matrix, maintaining sufficient control to take the entrance-hall-front-room 90 degrees doorway-bend. Occassionally Sampo misses the bend and ends up in the bathroom where she is cornered by Matrix and has clearly lost the chase. After several months of practice she has the hall-front-room doorway-bend almost fully mastered.
The subtle curve on the approach to the foot of the stairs occassionally causes loss of footing on the bare floorboards and is invariably accompanied by liberal doses of meowing from both teams. The main course-obstacle is the dangerous-staircase u-turn. The dangerous-staircase u-turn either involves a headlong crash into the front-room wall for those missjudging their momentum, or falling down the first couple of steps for those misjudging their paw-friction. Sampo tends to crash into the wall due to belly-induced-momentum, Matrix tends to slip on the steps. Once past the first few steps, if Sampo is still ahead of Matirx she’s pounces safely to the finish line on the first-floor landing and is ready to start the next round. Fresh water, views of local trees and birds are provided on the landing at the end of the course for the competing kitties.
The cats are regularly able and willing to practice this tricky F1 course on a daily basis often changing chaser-chasee roles and investigating route variations including the dinning room table top, sofa-bends and comfy chair corner.
Ringside tickets are available.
Corporate bookings and sponsorship considered.
An exciting evening was spent studying pussycat-paw-preferences. If you are already yawning, stop reading now, this is the excitment climax sentence for this blog post. This is the sound made by the fluffballs decending the staircase of danger in WendyHouse:
Matrix: bur-bump, bur-bump, ber-pump
Sampo: bump—bump–bump-bumpbumbbump
Watching the bumpy affair indicates that Matrix always first puts her left-paw onto the next step while Sampo uses the not-insubstantial momentum of her stomach to launch herself down planting her left paw on every other step. The cunning corner two steps before the bottom of the staircase has occassionally taken advantage of Sampo’s momentum to literally bump her. Sampo, not the brightest of kitties.
Matrix = left-pawed
Sampo = Ambidextrous
Today I’m catless, carless, surrounded by dissembled furniture and half packed suitcases.
Goodbye blubbing by me and soulful wailing by Sampo. Matrix looked her normal relaxed self.
Matrix and Sampo can’t join me in the UK until the last 4 months of their PETS passport process, 6 months quarantine, is finished. Today they moved to their US foster home.
a striking disparity in per-kitty fluffball production
Do cats have an informal, accurate, theory of static electricity?
My kitties adore paper. I leave sheets of crumpled paper on the floor aound my home. They prefer rolling and writhing on the paper than the carpet. The carpet is not natural fibre. Rolling on the carpet builds static electricity. Rolling on paper does not.
Coincidence or clever kitties? You decide….
