Big Workload

My in-tray is completely overflowing.  Remember how small and manageable my workload used to be?

I'm not getting very much of anything done today.  I've been sleeping poorly recently and that makes me super-cranky during the day and leaves me with a very low frustration-threshold.   It's enough to make me want to toddle down to the video shop and get a movie that Hayden wouldn't ever want to see, watch it at home with the aircon on full bore, my feet up on the coffee table and a bowl of ice-cream on my lap.

Come to think of it, it would be a complete waste of the day NOT to do that.

Seeya later.

Love Cat Friday

So did you ever wonder what happened to Lily's litter-sister?  We we wondering.  We hadn't seen her since February, not all that long after she came out of the womb second and literally walked over baby Lily to beat her to the milk.  

She's been bigger and stronger than Lily since then.  Initially we thought she was a boy.

We knew that she'd gone to live with some neighbours of ours and that they'd called her Kuta.  But we hadn't seen her at all until recently, when we spotted her scrapping with another (much bigger) neighbourhood cat.

She's grown into a strong independent woman-cat, tough but beautiful.

The road back to normality

Lily is recovering slowly but surely.   As you can see,  she's still got the cone on but she's now allowed outside to play.

She's sitting in her favourite spot in the garden.  Right on top of my coriander plant.  

We gave up eating coriander long ago.

Sad Washing

Lily is not herself these days.  She went in for her little operation last Friday, and she's been wearing that disfiguring cone on her head for a week now.  She's well and truly sick of us mistaking her for a lamp.  She's made it quite clear that she doesn't find it at all funny.

The cone is to protect her stitches from her gnawing; we've also taken away her climbing post and we no longer let her outside to play, so she can't burst her stitches jumping up and down.  She's been so quiet and sad since we took all the good stuff out of her life. 

To cheer her up I put her up on the kitchen bench to watch me do the washing up.  She loves water, and bubbles, and she is keenly interested in everything we humans do.  Under the circumstances, it was the perfect treat.  

Unpredictable Winner!

With the names of the six competition entrants spread out on the floor, I attached to each name a small but highly valued kitty treat.

When I let Lily back into the room, she went straight to the one that looked best to her.  (She's always extremely particular about which of the identical biscuits she'll go for.)

With little fuss, Lily selected a clear winner.  Congratulations Mags!  You'll receive a signed copy of Eileen Cook's debut novel Unpredictable.

Well played everyone else.  

And a special thank you to you Eileen - this was really fun!

Only Cat

OK.  From now on, this is just a cat blog.  Any mention of books, writing, movies or events outside our tiny home is strictly supplementary to the full-on coverage of our CAT.

But really, there's not much else happening at the moment.   After the months of over-booked weekends leading up to our wedding, we are still luxuriating in the stillness of the aftermath.  This weekend was a long one due to the Townsville Show (pity we didn't go to the show actually, we would have seen a baby being born on the grass outside the information booth) but the most remarkable thing we did was purchase Lily's first collar.

Oh, but do you not think it a little bit stylish?  Is it not a little bit Hotel Chevalier?  A little bit Memphis Belle?  Is this how a mother feels when she dresses her kids in little matching sailor suits?  

Probably best not to answer that.

Meanwhile, under my desk

my new winter slipper was being shredded!

I'm reading this book about how to raise a happy cat, and it's always describing the terrible scenarios and dangerous situations in which cats can risk their lives; e.g. who knew that Christmas could be such a traumatic time?  apparently kittens are always getting thrown out with old wrapping paper, strangled by tinsel and trodden to death by visiting relatives.  The book advises me to keep a current photo on file so I'm always ready to put together a 'lost kitty' poster should the need arise.

Do you think this one would do?

the iCat

Over the last couple of days I've been making the somewhat painful transition into new Mac ownership.   It's really worth it, I think - for me anyway, but don't worry, I'm not going to get all evangelical about it to you.  

The best part is  ... hm, I can't decide. 

Is the best part the huge screen? or the fact that Lily doesn't know where the off switch is?  Back on my greasy old Acer laptop, her favourite place to nestle was on the delightfully soft warm flat keyboard.  And she managed to push some of those buttons; including, more than once, the off switch.  So irritating, to have your computer turned off in the middle of typing.   One time we came home and she'd been sleeping with her nose on the enter key.  She had navigated her way through all the steps to reach this question:  Would you like to delete all the files in this folder, yes or no?  It was the programs folder.  I quickly hit 'No' while Hayden gently lifted her off the computer.

She's not such a fan of this iMac keyboard.  I'm so relieved.

Lily at 11

Last week was Lily's 11th week. Just recently, she's transformed from kitten into fully-fledged miniature cat. Oh, she still does kittenish things like chasing string and playing soccer under the dining table with little screwed-up bits of paper. But now when she sees us watching her she'll stop, get self-conscious and sit up tall and neat.

Here she is in my in-tray, waiting patiently to be attended to.

Ms Lily

When we arrived home from New Zealand, those cats were waiting for us at our front door like they had read our flight itinerary. As we took the mother cat and the father cat back across the road to where they are supposed to live, we were already deciding that we would keep one of the kittens. We kept the smaller, fluffier one. We've called her Lily.




Of course, she is already queen of all our house.

X miaow

So we had to give the kittens back to our neighbour. That was the main thing that happened this week. We were due to give them back on Tuesday, a day when I had to start work at the coffee shop at 12 noon. It was raining, all morning, in a very heavy monsoony way, and I was sad all morning because of giving back the kittens, but there was no sign of our Neighbour who was going to come and pick them up.

I remembered how on the night the kittens were born, it was raining then too and our Neighbour didn't want to walk over the road to see them because it was too wet. Instead she came two days later. I didn't want that kind of procrastination to happen again - it was all too sad-making - so when the rain stopped I gave her a call and said "please come and get the kittens now." By the time I'd put the phone down, it was raining hard again.

At last our Neighbour drove her car through the rain over the road to our place, and came in our door carrying a plastic washing basket with a towel in it. She knew where the kittens were, so she went straight to their box and snatched out first one kitten and then the second one and put them in the basket. The kittens' mother came bounding across the room to see what was happening, but she was too late - when she got into the box, the kittens were already gone. She started to make a very low growling noise.

Our Neighbour carried the kittens out of the room, and I leaned down into the box to pick up the mother cat. She didn't even protest, she just hung limply in my arms. It was so sad. I hurried to catch up to our Neighbour, so I could show the mother cat that her kittens were safe in the plastic washing basket. When she saw them, the mother cat jumped straight into the basket with them and began to check them all over for damage.

Then I handed our Neighbour an umbrella and an extra towel to put over the basket to protect the little kittens from the rain. Our Neighbour took the kittens in their basket out our front door and put them in the back seat of her car. Before she drove away she gave me back my old towel, but she didn't give back my umbrella.

More Cats

Well, those two little kittens just keep getting cuter. Meanwhile, their mum has become much more protective of them ... so no more photos of them at this stage.

Mum has also become quite restless. She's bored of being cooped up in our house and I know she just wants to go out to play. Instead she just waits for her man to come and visit her in prison.

Ahh, here he is.

He's a pretty dedicated prison-visitor. He comes every day, and if she doesn't come to the door to see him, he'll sing her a really loooong looooud song.

Update

Well, there's one thing I can update for you:

This cat, who's been hanging around our place for a while now, not discouraged by us and actually allowed to look all over our bedroom, in any draw that takes her fancy:

She's had her kittens! She had two. And even better, she had them at our place, not in a draw but in the box that we had prepared for her with old towels and flannelette sheets.

As I think I mentioned before, we were pretty sure that she was getting close last week, and on Friday when I came home from a meeting (at which I was given more writing work to do - yay!) she was waiting for me at the door. She beat me inside and went straight to her box and waited there very quietly.

I sat down at my computer, but soon decided that I needed to go out and buy some paper and/or get a takeaway coffee before I could get right down to work. I peeked into Kitty's box to tell her that I'd only be gone an hour or so, and I saw that she was having her babies.

Hayden and I are both so stoked that she chose to have her kittens at our place, after weeks and weeks of secret encouragement on our part. I was feeling slightly bad for Kitty's real owner, our neighbour across the road, until we phoned her on Friday and she said that seeing as it was raining she wouldn't come over and meet the new kittens until after work the next day. Eventually when she did come and meet the new kittens, she asked us if we could keep them here for at least a week.

We're really loving having them, and we weigh them on our kitchen scale every day (that's not something their owner asked us to do). It's amazing how they're putting on weight - like 10 - 15 g every day between morning and bedtime. That's 10%, like a person putting on 7kg between leaving for work in the morning and coming home at night!