The Joys of Cat Carriers

Currently, 3 cats share our home with us.  They graciously allow us to live here and in exchange, they are happy to bother us for food and sometimes sit on our laps or come by for some furry loving.  Two of the cats are ours and one is our daughters - living with us right now because she works in Africa where he can't go.

One of our furry babies has been overweight for years.  Always the vets would say "feed him less" and we'd say We DO!   Finally we got a cat expert who realized that his hormones were running rampant and no matter what we fed him, he always thought he was hungry.  So much money and much special food later and many trials at keeping him separate at eating time, he is losing weight and has only about 1 1/2 kg to go.  The result has been wonderful in that he doesn't act like a fat walrus quite so much anymore and has some more energy to run around with our daughter's cat who is a good 9 years younger.

To keep him on track, we take him into the vet monthly for a weigh in.  Sort of like an animal Weight Watchers.  I get the encouragement, he gets on the scales, and everybody goes "oh how wonderful!".  And because we have 3 cats that all periodically need to go to the vet, we have 3 cat carriers.  I was having trouble finding one big enough for him without using his airline crate which is a monstrous heavy duty thing. Finally I found a good one at Amazon - my shop all for almost everything when I don't want to leave the house.  It folds flat when not in use and is big enough for him at his top weight.

I had it out last week for his trip to the vet for his weigh-in.  Of course, nobody wants to get into it when they need to so it's always sneak up on whichever cat needs to go to the vet and stuff them inside the carrier and quickly zip it closed before the cat can escape.  At which point, the cat inside starts crying piteously and all other cats in the house rush to the carrier to mock them.   "Ha, ha - it's you and not me!  See you later sucker!"  Lucky, I have learned through bitter experience to make sure ALL the zippers are closed except the entrance zipper as it is harder to catch a cat after they have run out of the carrier because you forgot to close one of the zippers.

When I came back with my fat boy last week and let him loose back into the house, the young fellow, my daughter's cat, decided the carrier was a great place to play.  What fun to pop in and out of the top and sit there and hunker down with just his eyes at exit level to see if he can scare any cats wandering by.   Or just fun to go in and have a short snooze for a bit.   As we are basically slaves to our cats needs and wants, of course the carrier is now sitting out in the dining room so he can play with it and use it when he wants.  But I know when it is his turn to get in it for a trip to the vet, it will suddenly become a dangerous and avoidable place where it will be a chase to end all chases to catch him and stuff him inside his current loving play area!  Oh the joys of having cats and stuffing them into cat carriers!

3 Day Anti-Climatic Christmas

We held off on having our Christmas holiday and gift giving this year as we waited for our daughter to be able to come and join us.  As she works in Africa on a rotational basis, she was due to come to see us on Jan 15 so our plans were to have Christmas the weekend of the 18Th and 19Th, not quite a month after the real deal.  Presents were all bought and ready, but we were going to wait to decorate until that weekend.

Part of this reasoning was due to her cat.  Yes, how silly to plan things around a cat but her cat and our two cats are all family members too and it is fun to watch their reactions to different things.  Her cat has never had a Christmas tree.  As he is incredibly smart and curious and oddly clumsy, we figured he'd just go nuts over the Christmas tree and fully expected him to climb into it and bat things off of it and just generally do mayhem, which we planned to control by keeping doors closed if necessary and watching carefully - with the camera of course. 


So our daughter arrives on time.  As luck would have it, my husband was out of town on a business trip and got back late on Thursday night so we had planned to put up the tree on Thursday but couldn't.  Friday night, everyone was just too tired by the time the usual shopping had been done and hubby home for work and all.  Finally Saturday, we managed to pull everything out of the attic/loft and get the tree put up in the living room.


 All the cats were milling around it didn't take long for our two cats to go "oh yea, we remember this - not much going on that is for us" and they promptly went somewhere warm and went to sleep.  My daughter's cat was interested in the proceedings.  He wandered underneath the tree a couple of times, stretched up into it once and then sat down beside it to watch and see what was happening.  As we expected a great deal of interest, we took care to only pull out the ornaments that were not breakable and the few breakable ones we got out, we put closer to the top of the tree to protect them.  


The entire time we are decorating, her cat is just sitting and watching.  With so little reaction, we even finally put a few breakable glass ornaments on the bottom and nada, nothing.  Then we pulled out the tinsel garland.  Surely he will take interest in this because he loves tinsel and loves to eat it!  But as we are winding it around the tree, he is not even watching now, preferring to look out in the garden as there are squirrels out there.


The tree is decorated and the lights are on and the cats are totally ignoring the entire thing.  How anti-climatic!  We had expected a much bigger response, a much bigger interest, a lot more laughs and yelling and shouting and such but he was just not interested.  Presents go under the tree and the most he does is walk around them and take a sniff here and there.  Wow, did we ever call this one wrong.

Too late for actual opening of presents so we waited until around noon the next day to open our presents.  All cats were present and the best thing, they thought, were a few empty boxes.  Again, no interest in the tree or the ornaments or the tinsel.  But it was a very nice Christmas for us, present wise and companion wise and we had a good time.


Next day, Monday, my husband is off on another business trip so I take all the ornaments off the tree and pack away everything  for next year.  no cats even bother to come watch this dismantling of our 3 day Christmas.  No batting of the ornaments, no climbing the tree, no fighting the tinsel, no eating the papers, nothing.   My daughter's cat is very smart and clever though.  Could he be waiting for next year because the others told him it usually lasts much longer and he can do a lot more damage then?  who knows.  


 
 

The Great Spaghetti Mystery

Our rental house has a couple of pull out pantries in the kitchen.  They are quite nice and pull out to reveal 5 shelves each of the kitchen goodies that we use fairly regularly.  Such things as ketchup and mustard, tuna packs, soups, various pastas, cereals, canned goods and you get the idea.  When closed, the pantries are flush with the walls.  The kitchen has been outfitted like most British kitchen so that everything looks like it is the same type of cabinet with doors and handles and such (including the refrigerator and freezer which really confused me when first looking at ads for houses, thinking there were no refrigerators in the kitchens).  Anyway, I digress.  

                     On the bottom shelf of one of the pull out pantries are our different pastas including a currently open package of spaghetti.  For several days now, I have sometimes come into the kitchen to find broken pieces of spaghetti on the floor in several places.  The first couple of times, I figured I had not closed the door tightly or that when opening and closing it, I had inadvertently broken off some piece of spaghetti that was hanging out of the package.  Just pick up the broken pieces and toss them in the bin.

                    The third time it happened, I began to get a bit suspicious that something more was brewing in my pantry and kitchen that I was not privy to observe.  Again, I picked up the pieces, tossed them but now, I opened the pantry to check the spaghetti.  Nope, no pieces were sticking half out of the package.  No pieces were loose in the pantry.   Hmmm.  mystery.   So I am now alert to checking for spaghetti on the floor in the mornings OR the afternoons when I enter the kitchen.  It was becoming more frequent.  Now there are scattered pieces of broken spaghetti on the floor about 3 or 4 times a week.  Each time, I clean up the floor, open the pantry, check the spaghetti package and then move on to the rest of my day.  Why, you ask, did I not MOVE the spaghetti package to another location?  Because now I am suspecting our daughter's cat.  He is way too clever for his own good and really likes to explore everything and get into anything he possibly can, just to see if he can.  Has he learned to open and close the pantry?  It seems rather heavy to me.  He has learned to open certain doors in the house that do not close tightly without an effort.  He knows which doors these are too and when he finds them open, he always checks them to see if he can shove them open. He hates closed doors.    I'd like to catch him at it!

                 I test the pantry now each time I pass through the kitchen.  Nope, it's fairly solid and heavy, loaded as it is with canned goods and such.  I am certain that he is not strong enough to wiggle underneath it and pull it open.   Ah HA!  Light dawns.  I reach down under the edge of the cabinetry - the part that is really a facade on the front of the pantry so it looks like the rest of the kitchen.  If I reach as far under as I can, I feel the spaghetti!  OMG.  The mystery is solved I believe.  He is going under the door to grab out bits of spaghetti, not to eat them but to bat them around on the floor late at night when he's awake by himself and feeling the need of some relief from boredom.  The little scamp.  I've gone through almost half a package of spaghetti trying to solve this mystery but I am confident I have discovered the culprit, even without actually seeing him do it.  My two cats are both too old and lazy to be bothered.  And yes, I have now moved the spaghetti and put a sad end to his play in the dark of the kitchen.