Tag: cats

Injury to felines

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We had a bit of an adventure yesterday when we found an injured cat in our garage.

After I got home last night I looked out of the kitchen window and spotted a grey and white cat with its collar hooked under its armpit, something that happens to our cats occasionally and severely hampers their movement. I dashed outside and saw its tail disappear into our garage through a hole in the door (must get that fixed!) Janet and I found the cat cowering at the back of the garage behind the lawnmower, and it quickly became clear that it was in a bad way. The collar was a nasty red plastic one and it had rubbed the skin raw under the leg, removing all the fur in a large area which was red and evil-looking. The poor thing must have been in agony.

Intrepidly donning a pair of chunky gardening gloves I managed to grab the hissing beast and desperately tried to remove the collar while it struggled and bit me frantically through the gloves (which proved fairly useless at resisting cat fangs). Finally Janet cut the collar off with scissors, at which point the cat settled down a bit and we managed to get it into one of our cat boxes.

Then we rang around every local vet we could find, all of which were shut. One answerphone directed me to a 24 hours vet helpline, which in turn sent me to the RSPCA, who gave me a log number and told me to, er, find a local vet. Finally we got one that was open til 7 pm and kindly agreed to stay open long enough for me to get there with the injured cat. The RSPCA log number means the vet can claim £60 + VAT, and ring if they need to ask for more money. According to the RSPCA this makes for much more cooperative vets!

Then I came home, slathered my bloodied finger in germolene, and Janet did some “Injured Cat Found” posters which we taped-up in nearby streets, pub and shop. I was still a bit worried to be honest. The wound looked like it was many hours or days old, and although the Vets took the cat in last night they couldn’t treat it properly til this morning. Also the cat could have been miles from home and the owner might never be found.

Thankfully Janet took a call today from someone who saw our poster and recognised the description, and we’ve just had a call from the vets. The owner has collected the cat, Megan, and it should make a slow but full recovery. Apparently it’s been missing since July, when it was being looked after by a friend of the owners during a holiday, and went missing. (Oh the guilt that friend must have felt!) They haven’t seen it since.

All told that put paid to most of last night and I have a sore finger for my troubles. Cats mouths aren’t the most hygienic things so I’m keeping an eye on the finger but so far it doesn’t seem infected.

Phew. I’m very relieved, and the owner has passed on their thanks. As Janet says, we’d want someone to do that for our cats, so it’s only fair we do it too.

All creatures alive and dead

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Had a gorgeously hot and sunny couple of days here, which in the last couple of hours has suddenly become that deep gloom that signals either a solar eclipse or a heavy rain shower. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be the latter.

Presumably this is because our cats have begun sacrificing mice to appease the Great Sky God. For some weeks now Pixie has been intermittently trotting into the house just after dusk with a tiny grey mouse clamped proudly between her teeth. I, in turn, have been rescuing said mouse, checking that it appears uninjured, and releasing it back into the wild where it runs off to forage happily (until its next impromptu trip to our hall carpet).

Last night however I was summoned to the hall by Pixie’s plaintive cries, and discovered her patting her pet mouse indignantly. It had rudely stopped moving, probably on account of the gaping hole in its side. Sad. Even later last night I went into the kitchen to find our other cat, Charcoal, excitedly patting yet another small rodent in the hopes that it would rise from the dead and do a bit more scampering. This one had no injuries, but was just as deceased. Clearly it’s time to keep the cats in of an evening, in order to spare the local mouse community any further atrocities.

On a positive wildlife note our swifts are once again nesting in the eaves of our house. Every so often they launch from the rafters in a high-speed parabolic curve and whoosh past your ear.

We also went for a nice walk in the local park on Saturday, which has some really big old trees, and came across a nesting pair of woodpeckers (possibly the same ones that visit our garden, but just as possibly a different pair). They were scouring the bark of an Ash tree, which had three neat circular holes drilled into its trunk. I’ve never seen an actual hole made by a woodpecker, so that was quite cool. I’m still amazed that a bird can drill-out such a large space. We could hear the near-constant twittering of what we assume were woodpecker chicks coming from the general direction of the holes.

Which reminds me – Springwatch starts again tonight. Bill Oddie has been replaced by Chris Packham, in what is almost certainly an improvement. I remember Chris from kid’s TV, when he had the same hairdo as Limahl from Kajagoogoo.

Easter

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Had a great Easter weekend involving no (count it) no work, and lots of relaxing. We had friends over for most of the weekend which was fun.

We did a pseudo-BBQ on Saturday (cooked indoors, eaten outdoors to ensure that Janet didn’t get any undercooked meat) which was lovely. We did some potato and tomato ‘curry’ as a side dish which in no sense is a curry involving only some chopped potatoes, tomatoes and onions fried with mustard seeds, turmeric and coriander. Very nice, very mild.

Then on Sunday the sky was blue and the sun was hot so we pottered around the garden fixing and weeding things while Janet’s brother carved a new paddle for his canoe. The cats helped, of course. Here’s Charcoal helping:

More helping here. Pixie helped too, but in a more sedentary way.

On Saturday night we watched Doctor Who (what I thought), which included a nice shout out to Tom Baker’s first story ‘Robot’, but was otherwise slightly dull.

On Sunday we also watched Skellig on Sky, in which John Simm continued to be as great as he is in everything not called Doctor Who. I was expecting something slightly twee and cosy, which it was in places, but mostly it was surprisingly honest, real and edgy for a kids drama. A bit low key and moody, but otherwise quite interesting. It’s possible that the moral is to talk to scabby-looking strangers, but I’ll let that pass…

It’s a good job we had the nice weekend because the weather has been relentlessly foggy ever since. Yesterday with sea fret (but we had a nice pub lunch anyway). Today with full-on fog and low cloud extending well inland. Chilly, dank, and gloomy. But at least we had a lovely Easter.

Not enough room to swing a cat

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Space Age! Our old hot water tankI do love our old Space Age hot water tank shorn of its cladding. Very steampunk.

We’re having our central heating system completely replaced with a new boiler and all new radiators, which involves three days of British Gas engineers under the floor and in and around the house. I’ve taken holiday and am house-sitting, but unfortunately I’m also having to work. I spent most of yesterday holed up in the bedroom shortlisting CVs for an upcoming vacancy. (I was even in work for ten minutes first thing this morning.) This is becoming increasingly impractical since the engineers are flitting from radiator to radiator and no room in the house is safe! I can’t get moved.

They even needed the power off earlier. No computer! I know.

The cats don’t know what to make of it. It turns out that once you pull up some floor boards there’s a dusty crawl space at least a metre deep under our ground floor, and the idea of one of the cats slithering under there doesn’t bear thinking about. They’d never be seen again. Or if they were, I can only imagine the cobweb-strewn Poe-like apparition that would claw its way back into the light.

Yesterday we locked them out of the house, which was fine until it started to drizzle. When the Ringtons tea salesman came to the door Pixie seized the opportunity to dash inside like an indignant bullet train. Naturally she made a bee line for the hole in the floor, and only the presence of a man working inside said hole prevented disaster. Many annoyed mrr-OWWg noises when I scooped her up.

Today we’ve got them both shut in the bedroom. Unlike Pixie, for whom all this is just a terrible affront to her sovereign feline rights, Charcoal is actively terrified of the engineers and either slinks into a corner with her head near the floor or panics and dashes frantically from room to room (often back and forth between the same two rooms repeatedly) seeking an escape. Poor thing.

By ‘eck

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By ‘eck, it’s bloody freezing outside. We just went for a walk in our local park to kick through the Autumn leaves, and my ears are now cold enough to conduct high energy physics experiments. It was very pretty though. It would have been even prettier with a dusting of snow, but despite some nasty sleet yesterday the Met Office have otherwise failed to deliver on their promise of heavy snow this weekend. I try not to meddle in the affairs of the Met Office, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Pixie was found at the bottom of the bed this morning in a bemused state with her cat collar hooked under one armpit. Quite how she got onto the bed while hobbled is anyone’s guess. I dutifully rescued her, and she seems none the worse for wear. Our other cat Charcoal has one of those break-away collars, but Pixie still has the elasticated kind which was barely long enough at full stretch to cope with this latest escapade. We may have to remedy that. Also at some point I’d like to see documentary footage of a cat inserting its leg under its collar as it appears to both violate the known laws of physics and constitute an impressive stage act.

I haven’t been posting or commenting much this week as lots of busy Things are going on, but I’m still here, honest. Now that we’re back in the warm my main plan for the weekend is to do some Christmas shopping. I know it’s a few weeks yet, but this time last year we’d nearly finished. This year we’ve barely begun. We’ve opted not to take the week before Christmas off as holiday this year, but take the week after New Year off instead. Working in HE we’re fortunate to get the Christmas and New Year period off anyway, so with an extra week that’ll add up to a good long break. Our first in quite a while.

The News and Weather

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We’ve been intermittently pummelled by hailstones this afternoon. What the weather forecasters euphemistically refer to as “wintry showers”, but in practice are more like the immediate aftermath of making a prank phone call to Odin. I’ve been known to enjoy some proper snow and ice in my time, but driving sheets of hailstones that quickly melt into icy puddles can’t be on anyone’s list of favourite weather. I was thinking this even before our cat Charcoal entered through the cat flap at Mach 3, drenched from head to toe, freezing cold and squeaking indignantly. She’s much happier (and warmer) now.

Meanwhile the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross1 story climbs to new depths with “emergency crisis talks” at the BBC, and journalists charging after BBC executives in the street shouting “Do we know who’s to blame yet?” (Those were the exact words). News 24 have belatedly starting asking whether this mob-mentality is all a bit much, but as far as I can tell this has only recently occurred to them and they’re mainly using it as a bonus talking point in interviews. In any case I’m going to have to join the mob now, because otherwise I’ll find myself calling Noel Gallagher rightheaded, and then the world will end.

I also caught a bit of Obama speechifying on the campaign trail on News 24. That man may or may not be from Krypton, but he certainly knows how to make speeches. Sometimes I do wonder whether (assuming he wins the election) the weight of expectations on his shoulders is so impossibly huge that we’re in for a New Labour-style backlash when he doesn’t fix EVERYthing. I also hope there’s some real substance behind the fervour. Mainly I hope we get to find out.

Lastly, and on behalf of my wife, I would just like to say ZOMGSharpe!!!111.

—
1 In the “you can’t make it up” category, Jonathan Ross currently has a book out entitled Why Do I Say These Things?.

EDIT: Now the controller of Radio 2 has resigned.

Leaf peeping? Is that something we do now?

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It’s really windy outside, with autumn leaves whipping past the window and collecting in rustling heaps that creep around our drive like sand dunes. Very cool. Our three-legged cat Pixie has been driven into a state of nervous hyperactivity all day, dashing from window to window and trying to bat leaves with her paw through the glass. She was less keen on actually being outdoors, since it’s quite chilly.

All the more surprising, then, that we couldn’t find her in the house this evening. Being outdoors in the dark, windy drizzle seemed a bit intrepid. An exhaustive search finally located her, nestled in the cocoon of warm air between the sofa and the radiator. Snoozing. That sounds about right.

Cheesy Peas

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It’s been another bring-work-home-in-the-evening kind of week for both of us, and Janet is working on Saturday too, so we were very glad to have Friday off. We decided to head down to my native Yorkshire and visit the Harrogate Flower Show so that Janet could spend her hard-earned cash buying Even More Plants to squeeze into the garden.

How to tell you’re in the North of England: On the way past York we found ourselves behind a Lorry transporting Mushy Pea Fritters (from Lockwoods, “the Mushy Peas Specialists”). No really. Take a look at that photo and tell me you don’t want to throw up just a little.

At the show we picked up a ‘wooden man carved into a tree trunk’ sculpture, which is currently looking for a home among the tree ferns at the foot of our garden. I think it’s possible to overdo this kind of garden ornamentation, but I have to say it looks pretty cool.

We were very lucky with the weather which miraculously held off from its scheduled pissing-it-down until we were safely back in the car and heading home.

I seem to have acquired a headache at some point during the day, but that’s probably because our cat Pixie decided to try to find us at 7 a.m. this morning by deploying the feline equivalent of sonar – this involves sitting in the hall downstairs and miaowing loudly until you hear a response, then (and only then) trotting happily upstairs and jumping onto your owner’s head.

Mmmm… stuff…

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My birthday yielded The Absolute Sandman, Volume 3 (the kind of gorgeous object of desire that’s so heavy, nicely bound and on good quality paper that you’d want to own it even if you weren’t interested in the contents). Also Alice in Sunderland, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, unchillfiltered Laphroaig whisky (which I’m sampling as we speak), two Raymond Chandler novels, wine, Fererro Rocher and the finest of foodstuffs, Tunnock’s Tea Cakes. I’m led to believe a few other presents may be en route, and my wonderful wife even baked me a chocolate cake. With candles. Best Wife Ever.

In order to spread my feelings of goodwill far and wide, have a few links on me.

Ittybittykitt really does feature some of the most brain-meltingly cute kittens ever captured by CCD. Every time I see one of their photos I think that kittens couldn’t get any cuter, but somehow they do. I want to adopt them all.

One for veggiesu: I notice that ITV3 are doing a six-week season of crime thrillers leading up the allegedly “glittering” ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards. What’s interesting is that each week they’re showing a specially commissioned documentary profiling “the six best crime writers working today” aka Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, PD James, Lynda La Plante, Val McDermid and Ruth Rendell. (I leave it up to the reader to decide whether these are in fact the six best crime writers working today whose TV adaptations ITV3 happen to own the rights to.) Could be interesting.

One for swisstone: Head of Roman empress unearthed near the previously unearthed statue of Hadrian in Turkey. Our local news is also banging on about visitors to Hadrian’s Wall being up on last year, which they’re — not implausibly — linking to the British Museum’s Hadrian exhibit and associated publicity. I shudder to think that it could have anything to do with Bonekickers instead.

I’ve put this on Facebook already but look: Chewbacca mouse! Awwww.

Culture

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David Simon was interviewed about The Wire on tonight’s Culture Show. It was very much a primer for the show for UK types so there were no specific spoilers. Nothing he hasn’t said many times before, but it was still nice to see the show getting some exposure on UK television. This edition of The Culture Show is repeated at about 11.20 p.m. on Thursday on BBC2 if you’re interested.

They also premiered this highly amusing animated cat cartoon, from Simon Toefield, the man who brought you the equally amusing animated short of the cat trying to wake up its owner.

EDIT: ajr beat me to it.

EDIT EDIT: In fact, don’t wait, watch extra bits from the David Simon interview on the BBC website right now. So much extra stuff it must clock in about the same length as the actual interview.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: And here’s the aired interview to watch online too.

Further adventures in crafting

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My wife’s been busy making crafty things again. As you know she’s a tireless explorer of different craft projects and gets through more in one weekend than I get done in your average month. This time around she’s turning her hand to wire bracelet making, and as usual she’s invested in a range of books, equipment and tools. She’s only made a few so far, but this is the one she’s most pleased with:

This one is copper wire shaped around a wooden mandrel, bound at intervals, with beads threaded on to make the pattern. As usual I’m very impressed. The other fruits of her labours can be seen here. She’s already taken an order from someone at work to do some more! I think Janet pretty much has a good time with everything she tries, but she’s particularly enjoying the bracelet making at the moment.

For those of you not interested in craftwork, here is a cute snoring three-legged cat:

The Birds

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Our garden has been invaded by Starlings. More precisely, several local Starlings seem to have done very well this year and had large broods, so the Dawn Chorus has been transformed into the Dawn Squawk, and our garden is full of fledgling Starlings eagerly fluttering their wings and being busily attended to by their parents. It’s very sweet, but also makes it difficult to sleep once the sun comes up. We have three coconuts full of bird fat-feeder: every day Janet fills them to the brim, and every day we get home to find them pecked bare.

Sadly today we found the half-eaten remains of one fledgling in the middle of the lawn. Since we lock our cats in during the day, and our two felines have yet to work out that if you successfully kill a bird it turns out to be full of cat-food, this can only have been the work of one of the local Toms. Sad, but the Starlings are doing fantastically well and I’m sure their gains are far exceeding their losses.

We also have a Blackbird nesting on the side of our garage, underneath a big trailing clematis. It’s managed to have at least two chicks despite being right next to our garden gate, and frequently spotted by the cats who sit nearby staring at it greedily. At one point Pixie even clambered up the wire mesh frame that the clematis has been trained up, and wound up sitting in the nest. Thankfully the chicks hadn’t hatched at this point, but with Pixie incubating them it’s a wonder they hatched at all.

Ups and downs

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A day of excitement, thrills, gardening and wildlife.

Today was the annual ceremony of the removal of bubble-wrap from Janet’s greenhouse. We use the bubble-wrap as added insulation when there’s a threat of frost, but the greenhouse is a much lighter, airier place once it’s gone. It takes quite a long time because everything in the greenhouse including all of Janet’s carnivorous plants and the aluminium staging have to be moved onto the lawn, then moved back in again. Naturally we had cat help.

At lunchtime I was startled by a noise – let’s call it a squeal of terror – from upstairs. Janet had been sitting on the toilet when a large black spider had crawled over the top of her bare leg. When I got there she was in some post-traumatic stress, not least because she could no longer see the spider. I eventually located it by turning her trousers inside out in the bath. It was fairly juicy-looking. You can only imagine what would have happened if she’d put them back on without checking. 🙂

Later on this afternoon we were standing on our patio when a bird crashed very inelegantly into the top of the huge Leilandii tree next door. The tree is home to vast numbers of birds so we assumed that an enforcer for the local Pigeon Mafia had fumbled its approach, but then a bird of prey launched back out of the tree and flew right over our heads. It was speckled on its belly like a thrush, and about pigeon-sized. We reckon it must have been a Kestrel or a Sparrowhawk. It’s really good to know that there’s one patrolling somewhere near our house. Janet was so pleased about this it nearly made up for the Spider of Doom earlier. However she wishes me to be clear that nothing could ever make up for the HORROR.

We also found a couple of frogs in our pond a few nights ago. The newts are still there — we’ve counted at least three of them anyway — but we had a fine pair of yellow-brown frogs lurking under the surface. We’ve seen them a couple of times since then, always at night. I love the fact that we live in a suburban semi-detached house and yet we can see newts, frogs, toads, hedgehogs, bats, birds of prey, spiders and a wide variety of garden birds.

Pixie

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To our great relief Pixie is feeling much better. I can tell this because she’s resumed her customary practice of waking us an hour before we’re due to get up and snuggling in next to us in the bed, and then miaowing when she feels enough time has passed that she probably ought to be fed. In Pixie’s world there is a strict daily rota and we fall sadly short of her high standards. Janet was so delighted she’s recovering that she didn’t even complain about being woken up.

We really did think she might be on her way out if she didn’t start eating and drinking soon.

The vet yesterday evening gave her a dose of antibiotics and that’s what seems to have turned her around – within a few hours her appetite started coming back and when Janet let the tap run over her palm Pixie lapped thirstily at the running water for several minutes. Hardly surprising since she gets most of her water from her food and she hasn’t been eating. She’s still a bit picky and her appetite isn’t fully back, but I think she’s out of the woods.

Our part of the bargain is having to squirt antibiotics down her throat twice daily for a week, something that we more often have to do for Charcoal than Pixie. It was surprisingly easy this morning, but I suspect that’s because she didn’t know what we were up to. I’m expecting more of a struggle tonight.

(The vet told us that if we parted her gums and squirted the pipette through her clenched teeth this would work without needing to prise her jaws open; certainly it seemed to work and it’s less traumatic).

Cats

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Bit worried about our little three-legged cat Pixie who is uncharacteristically quiet at the moment. She’s sleeping most of the time (nothing new there) but hasn’t eaten much of anything since Sunday. She’ll hardly nibble at tuna flakes from my hand, won’t touch her favourite cat treats, and licks her lips a lot as if thirsty but won’t drink water. She also seems a bit shaky, and won’t go outside unless I carry her out, when she has a desultory scout around the flower bed and then returns to her bed indoors.

I’ve checked inside her mouth and can’t see anything obviously wrong there. We’re taking her to the vets tomorrow night to see what’s up, but I hope it’s nothing serious. (Plus our other cat, Charcy, has Cystitis again and is weeing small drops of blood all around the house, but these days that’s a semi-regular occurrence which generally clears up on its own.)

Por cats.

Conehead no more

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It’s over. Charcy has been back to the vets and after 9 long days has been declared officially healed, so we’ve removed the dreaded cone. Big relief. She was so very unhappy before, slinking around, hardly eating and generally laid flat out looking miserable somewhere. She couldn’t wash, so her head was all dusty no matter how we tried to clean it, and her backside was becoming increasingly matted and horrible looking. She finally resorted to licking the inside of the cone since it was the only thing she could actually keep clean. She’d probably decided it was here to stay.

Cat Pictures…

Free Rice

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I’m finding the Free Rice word game strangely compulsive. It’s a multi-choice word definition game that adjusts to your vocabulary level so it’s always just on the cusp of knowledge and instinct. I can reach a vocab level of 45 47 briefly, but tend to lose it with wrong answers. The game seems to be a very effective fundraising tool.

While I’m here, this is a lengthy but satisfyingly logical dissection of why homeopathy shouldn’t be excluded from normal standards of evidence. [Via badscience.net]

And if that’s too heavy for you then–look! Cute cat! Sadly, most of the time she looks more like this.

Rocks, water, newts and cats

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When last we left our struggling hero he was attempting to build a pond. Thwarted at every turn by the evils of pond liner, water, and pretty much all the other things you need to make a pond, not to mention gravity, it would be fair to say that he was making a bit of a meal of it.

Now read on…

So over the last couple of weekends we’ve continued pottering with the pond, on and off. It’s still not finished but now looks a lot more complete.

I must confess there was a stage after I’d done most of the rocks that I felt pretty fed up with it. We don’t have the budget or heavy lifting equipment to throw great slabs of rock into the ground as if a mountain spring had coincidentally thrust its way out of the earth in the corner of our garden. As a result it’s fairly small and stylised, and has an awful lot of cobbles and small rocks in heaps. However since Janet put some plants in I’m feeling much more positive. It looks like what it is: a nice, small garden pond. It’s certainly tranquil.

Pics

Sob

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Our small three-legged cat Pixie sniffed suspiciously at the cat litter tray this morning and refused to enter it–and with good cause because it was a filthy and smelly affair, so I helpfully changed the litter for her.

Whereupon she stepped into the middle of the tray, turned around once, and emitted what can only be described as a horizontal jet of urine from her hind quarters which travelled a good two feet without losing momentum and sprayed up against the wall. This continued for quite a long time.

When the torrent subsided Pixie pawed the pristine cat litter in front of her a couple of times, sniffed it to check that, yes, amazingly it hardly smelled at all, and happily trotted off with the certainty of a job well done.

Behind her a vast pool of cat wee slowly advanced across the kitchen tiles, and I started grabbing hand-fulls of kitchen roll.