Tag: cats

Not a morning person

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I'll be the first to admit that I am not a morning person.

Seriously, I'm not.

My normal morning routine is to snuggle next to Katy until the snooze button has been smacked a few times, then go downstairs to make tea and get breakfast ready. I'll watch the news, wave Katy off to work and then sometimes make myself another cup of tea while I check my email. I'll get dressed and mosey on off to work.

This, I find, is a gentle way to get ready for work.

Giving a shit-covered cat a shower at 7:30 in the morning is not, I repeat, not a preferred way to start the day. It happens to rank quite highly in my most-unpleasant-things-to-do-before-tea list of badness…

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Long weekend update

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Katy and I had a very productive weekend. We'd both taken Friday off to go into town and finish up the last of our xmas shopping. People look at us like we're insane when we mention that all our shopping is done. It's not our fault – we were forced into it. And think, Katy's folks' shopping is not only done and completed, but also already all gift-wrapped. Scary!

I'd managed to book myself an appointment at my optometrist on Friday afternoon. The good news is that my eyesight is stable and as good as they can make it and my eyes are in good shape. The bad news is that my eyesight is just about borderline to drive. As in, it would probably come down to the DVLA eye exam to determine if I can drive or not. Not the news I wanted to hear, really. I'd hoped they could have tweaked my prescription just enough to allow me to drive, but that's not possible. Meh. I'll see if I start taking driving lessons anyway in the new year and hope for the best. Coming back home was a nightmare. We were stuck in rush hour Cambs traffic for well over an hour (for a journey that normally takes about 20 minutes) and then we finally made it home in time for Donna and Will to come over for dinner.

On Saturday, we went to Saffron Walden to go have a look at the new Adnams Wine Cellar that opened there. It's not as big as the main one in Southwold, but it was still interesting enough to pick up a few bottles of wine. We also stopped by the butchers there and couldn't resist walking away with 4 kilos of prime Scottish beef. Half of that is in braising steak form and the other half of that is cubed (and already marinating to be turned into a steak and strong Suffolk Ale pie tonight – watch this space!)

I took some pictures of the pussy cat.

   
 

He's such a grumpy animal, it's not even funny. This morning, even, he bit me while I was trying to get some stinging nettles and other flora seed pods out of his fur. He's also a crap guard cat. When we came back from grocery shopping on Saturday, I opened the front door and heard a cat bell jingling about upstairs. Nothing unusual about that. Except that the cat that was jingling about wasn't ours, but some unknown black & white spotted cat that we've seen before in the village. He'd simply wandered in using the cat flap and was having a mosey around the house. He seemed a bit shocked to see us because he bolted out the front door as soon as he saw me :)

We had to go into Cambs against our better judgement to go meet a friend of Katy's who was in town for a College dinner. Even taking the Park & Ride, it was insane. It was so crowded as to be unpleasant. It'll only get worse for the silly season. In that sense, I'm glad we don't need to go into town again for shopping. Our trip into town threw a bit of a spanner in our dinner plans and we ended up eating at 8pm. Not good. We'd planned to make nachos and pizza again but – gasp! – I'd done something silly and bought flavoured tortilla chips instead of the plain ones we needed. That wouldn't have been so bad if the flavoured ones didn't have garlic in them. Our food crisis was thankfully solved by a quick trip to the Sawston Budgeon's (we called to make sure they had some. They had, yay!). Homemade nachos? They rock.

Sunday was a slob day. We decided to take a break from the gym and spent as much of the day dressed down as we could. We decorated the house with xmas lights and put up our “tree”:

   
 

I'm also inordinately proud of the fact that I finally fixed the damn lock on the front door. The thing was getting so loose that the whole cylinder was wobbling when we were trying to lock or unlock the door. I had to take the backplate off and tighten all the screws holding everything in place but, thanks to that and a bit of WD40, it feels like a new lock. This makes me happy. It'd been getting on my nerves for weeks now.

We did the usual weekend stuff (dishes, laundry, tidying up, etc) and we also did something that I hope will become a staple of our weekends: we played a round of cribbage :) I've been teaching Katy and her parents how to play. Katy's a natural. I keep (jokingly) commenting that she's picking up the game too quickly for my liking.

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How not to wake up on a monday

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When we got up this morning, the cat had horked up another hairball – on the stairwell landing this time. Pleasant animal. He seems to be having a bit of a hairball problem these days, so we're going to look into a change in his diet to see if we can't sort that out.

Just as I was leaving for work this morning, he came through the cat flap with a live vole in his mouth. He was quite happy about it. The vole? Less so. He knows that whenever he brings us a gift, we get rid of it as soon as we see it. It would seem that this one wasn't a gift though, cause he didn't want to part with his latest plaything.

Cut to the scene of me chasing the cat around the kitchen to try and get rid of the thing before he lets go of it on the floor and it scampers and dies in an unreachable corner.

Now, normally, we'd just find dead rodents on the floor and we chuck them in the green bin. This one was still alive though, and not in any sort of good shape.

I just couldn't in good conscience chuck it in the bin, and I couldn't just let it go either. It was a small vole pup and when I put it on the green bin lid, it was still able to hobble around, but in rather a lot of distress.

Now the humane way to cull a rodent is cervical dislocation. That's all well and good to know the basics of it, but when you've never done it yourself, it becomes more than a simple theoretical exercise. I went to get a pair of work gloves and used the plier head on my leatherman to immobilize the head at the back of the neck. A sharp pull at on the tail should normally suffice to dislocate the neck.

Except that I was rather nervous.

I might have pulled a bit hard.

Cause the head flew off.

Um… ew?

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Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired.

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Usually, you can set your watch by the cat's schedule. Last night, to throw a spanner in the works and to prove who's really master of the house, the little bugger decided to not come in when we went to bed.

We didn't think much of it when we went to bed, but when we woke up in the night to go to the loo and found he still wasn't in, we began to worry. And worry. And think about the worst. So at midnight, 3am and 5am, we were up and yelling as quietly as possible for the cat to come in. That's when we really started feeling the bad mojo – thoughts of the cat being eaten by foxes, run over by wild rampaging horses, or abducted by cat-eating aliens. You get the picture. We didn't get any sleep last night.

And the cat?

He ambled in this morning, shed a few slugs on the living room carpet as usual, wolfed down some food and buggered off outside again.

Bastard.

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Busy (and costly) weekend

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Katy and I spent in excess of £10,000 last weekend.

First, we bought a car:

It's a 2003 Toyota Corolla 1.6 T3 with just a little over 20,000 miles on the counter. It's had 3 services and 2 MOTs and the body work is in fine shape. We just need to get the loan deposited in the account now and we can sort the final paperwork exchange next Saturday.

We drove up to Leicester because we just couldn't quite grasp the enormity concept of having bought a “new” car. While we were in Leics, we finally bought the plane tickets to go to Canada for the holidays (after much badgering from Katy's parents). We're leaving Heathrow on the 19th and coming back on the 30th-31st. It really is a pain that Zoom doesn't fly to Ottawa in winter because we could have saved about £250 per ticket – and flown with more leg room in the process!

Then, to top it all off, we also booked the hotel in Montreal where we're going to be spending two nights around the time of Katy's birthday. For those of you who know it, we're going to be staying at Le St-Sulpice, in the old port.

Now that the flights and the hotel are sorted out, we just know that Katy's parents going to start banging on about a full trip schedule for Ottawa and Montreal. They – and most specifically her dad – are complete planning freaks. They put Michel's parents to shame…

When we got back to Cambs on Sunday night, there were pictures of our new pussycat waiting for us in my inbox.

Isn't she just the cutest thing EVAR?

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He did it again!

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The little fucker did it again. He peed on the couch. Twice in the same day!

We woke up this morning to find a damp spot on the right side of the couch. I used the cleaning spray that Katy bought when he peed on the couch last weekend and it got rid of the smell. When I got back from work today, everything seemed hunky dory. We went for dinner at the pub and when we came back, lo and behold, he'd peed on the couch again. On the left side of the couch.

Katy thinks that it's because we've introduced him to going outside, where he smells a bunch of other cats and this has somehow triggered the instinct to mark his territory. Maybe. Looks good on paper, but it will not be tolerated. Trouble is, there's no way to really enforce that. We're going to get a cat flap installed in the back door so he can go out when he wants to. Hopefully he'll catch on to the concept of peeing “outside” where we won't want to kill him every day.

Besides from sliming the couch on a regular basis, he's in fine form. He gets lots of fuss and still likes a good game of fetch-the-catnip-mouse.

I really hope this behaviour stops quickly though, cause we're running low on cat pee remover and I'm running low on patience.

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He peed on the fucking rug, dude. That rug really tied the room together.

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Well, he didn't pee on the rug, but he peed on the couch (again) and he peed in a laundry basked. I am talking, of course, about our cat. For reasons unknown, he's boycotting his litter tray and making contributions to the decor of the soft furnishings around the house. We've already had to throw away a backpack that had gone unnoticed until it turned rancid, yellow and generally biohazard-esque. We're also going to chuck two cushions cause they just smell nasty. I just hope it's a temporary situation; otherwise things will get unpleasant :(

In other news, I'm a bachelor for the weekend. Katy is in Derby visiting Rita. I spent the morning lounging around then went into town to run a few errants. On the way back, I saw a sight that really made me want to reach for my camera but I didn't have the time to do so because my bus arrived and I had to hustle to get in. Imagine a gaggle of 14-15 year old girls wearing black fuck-me boots, cammo crotch-hight mini skirts and black wrap-around tops a few sizes too small just hanging out in front of an off-license shop. Now the same sight if the girls were 5 years older would have made me drool (come on, I am male after all). That one though was just wrong in so many ways…

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