The beaver is a proud and noble animal

Katy and I drove up to Leicester on friday night after work. What is normally a 1.5h drive ended up taking twice as long because we got stuck in traffic. With the heat, crazy drivers and Katy being peed on by a gas pump, it was a loooooong drive under less-than-stellar conditions. We eventually got there in the end and had a quiet evening.

The following day, momentous things happened as:
– we finally paid off the last of the wedding rings, so we now have them (we had interest-free credit on them so we paid them over a few months)
– the cat breeder delivered Tolstoy in the afternoon
– we drove back to Cambridge in the deluge-oh-noes-the-sky-is-falling rain shower from hell.

We spent a nice weekend with the pussycat. I have tons of pictures which I will be posting tomorrow from work. He's going to be trouble that one. On the positive side, he's laid back as hell and hasn't really been fussed about moving to a new house with no cats (compared to the 12 or so he was living with at the breeder's house). He purrs constantly and has been playing most of the weekend – when he's not sleeping, that is. He's already used to climbing in bed and running all over us and has no problems going up or down the stairs.

On the negative side, we have a fussy eater on our hands. Having said that, the breeder was feeding him on a diet of 3 types of dry kibble, moist cat food in pouches, supplemented with strips of cooked chicken and sardines. You would not believe the stench of his crap. It made my eyes water the first time he used his litter tray. Because of this though, he completely ignored the dry kibbles we laid out for him yesterday and today. He'd lick them, but that was about it. He didn't really make a fuss about food, so we thought he wasn't really hungry because it's been so hot this weekend but that was rapidly disproved when he climbed up me and jumped in my plate to try and steal some of the ham I'd made for dinner. Like I said, he's going to be trouble that one.

We ignored his multiplle cries to have some ham (it would have been too salty for him anyway) and mashed some of his kibble with some hot water. In the end, it proved to be the trick and he polished off the plate. We're going to try and get him introduced to just eating kibble over the next few days. It's not like it's cheap stuff – on the contrary it's quite a good brand of kitten food – but given his diet history, it's not really surprising.

We're going to take him to the vet tomorrow night for a new kitten check up, but things should be pretty straightforward. He's eating, drinking lots and playing like a kitten should, so it's all good.

I spent a few hours today rigging up some screens and muslin curtains for a few of the windows of the apartment. That way, we can finally leave the windows open and get some air without having the complete insect population of East Anglia sharing our house (and also, without fearing that the cat will take a header out an open window – which Katy's cat has been known to do in her younger days).

I also did something that I've been wanting to do for the longest time, which is to replace our craptacular USB ADSL modem with something that doesn't need to connect every time we boot the laptop (and fail half the time). It took the whole of 5 minutes to install and already seems to be working better than the old POS modem.

All in all, a very good weekend.