yonmei

11:56 am: Play Whack-A-Kitty!
As one might expect...

( cut for video )

Thank you ruthi, mercurychaos, randomsome1, and eileenlufkin, who shared silly stuff of great cheer.



Tags: kittenlove!

04:17 pm: Of strawberries, carpets, cats, and kittens
I am in my bedroom, and Bob is sitting beside me, looking very wary and disconcerted. A bloke called Alan, who looks far too young to have a regular job (yes, yes, I am getting old) is cleaning my hall and stair carpet, for £45. The company what is doing it is H2O. He is using some kind of powdery green chemical which - I was checking out the label on the giant carton - is remarkably short on specifics: it's Heavy Duty Detergent, made by Prochem, 30% phosphates, do not get on bare skin, keep away from small children. Contains ionic and anionic cleaners, FWIW.

Anyway. The point of paying someone else to clean the hall carpet is to find out if this improves my nose. My allergy, rather, but we'll call it my nose. Properly, my guess is, I would need to have someone else clean every carpet in the house, but as I am achieving this by stacking the various things that normally live in the hall in my bedroom or the sitting-room, I'll stick with the carpet which I definitely notice as incredibly dusty a lot of the time. (It gets vacuumed more, but needs it more.)

Alan rang this morning to find out if he could come round earlier than 4pm (the original appointment had been made for arrival any time between 4 and 5:30) but I said no, as I had my usual Saturday stuff to do.

Walked over to the pet shop (the nearest one to me that sells Hills Science Diet: I also bought a bag of Burns biscuit to see if Bob could also be tempted with that, and a wee bag of cod liver capsules, which I intend handfeeding to Bob on a daily basis (because it will make me feel better about her being so skinny, since you ask, not because the vet is specially recommending this). And as I was packing all this into my backpack, the assistant tells me they have a new litter of kittens in.

Cally's mother Amber came from this shop, back in 1988 - back then, before the SSPCA had got going on "Please sterilise your cat unless you intend to be a breeder", the "new litter of kittens" happened quite a lot. Less frequent now. Much less frequent now. The pet shop always used to accept a healthy litter, at least six weeks old and weaned, and offer them for sale for £5 each plus. (The plus would be where they made their profit: when Ajay bought Amber and Witch, she got a stack of stuff with them - the kitten food, litter tray, handbook, plus a load of free advice.)

Anyway, so, I went to look and stayed to squee. I feel slightly guilty because of the health risk (to the kittens: while my cats are vaccinated, no one asked me if I was safe), but I even picked two of the kittens up: a tiny little fluffy grey thing with four white paws who looked at me with amiable bewilderment, and a slightly larger fluffy grey thing with a ginger mask, who was practically dropping asleep from over-excitement (I put her back in the cage after a minute, and she went from bounce to nap before she could yawn). I was tempted - I really was - but Bob was not happy about Wolf, and though the pair of them are getting on much better now (I distinctly saw Bob sniffing/licking Wolf over last night) I don't think she'd be happy to be presented with Brand New Kitten. Though Wolf would probably think it was cute. But no. One should never impulse-buy kittens. Though I saw a couple of girls who were squeeing before I left who very evidently wanted their mum to impulse-buy kittens for them. There was also a very bouncy long-haired tabby, who if I'd been seriously on the look-out for a kitten, would probably have been my serious considered choice: awesomely pretty when she grows up, plus clearly extremely healthy, active, and definitely weaned. (The smaller kittens, I suspect, were still doing a "where's mum??" a bit.)

And then I walked down to Tattie Shaws and bought pears from Belgium and apples from France, and four satsumas, and ... my first strawberries this year. I've been resisting the berries flown in from Spain or elsewhere, because really, I know they won't taste of anything much: but Scottish strawberries, misshapen and slightly pale though they are, perfume the air: I bought a whole punnet, and ate half within minutes as soon as I got home. Yum. (The other half I kept for breakfast tomorrow.) You can get "fresh strawberries" that have been airlifted in so easily that it's way too easy to forget what strawberries really taste like - the scented, indescribably sweet, fruity flavour of a berry that was sun-ripened and attached to a bush only 24 hours ago.

The Alan finished, and my carpet is now way cleaner than it was. (He poured the water from downstairs down my kitchen sink, which I am none too happy with: I need to go buy sink unblocker now.)



Tags: berries, bob, carpet cleaning, cats, kittenlove!, nose of a nose, wolf

12:02 am: Wolf's new friend
( ...is called Scallawag )

Tags: kittenlove!, wolf

07:49 am: My little Wolf-kitten
The main reason I'm still sorry (and you-all are probably secretly relieved) that I didn't have my camera between August and November last year, is that I didn't get to take photographs of Wolf growing up. I'm glad I have the first two photographs I took of my tiny black nameless kitten, because it is astonishing to compare/contrast them with my lovely young giant.

I had to loosen his collar again, you see. And remember to buy him an adult-sized collar next time I'm in the pet shop and they have those luminous silver ones: because his kitten-collar is now at the largest stretch it'll go.

First night away from home.

Tags: kittenlove!, wolf

07:59 pm: What kind of day has it been?
1. I have a black boykitten sitting on me falling in love with my black fleece top. (Either falling in love or certain the black fleece top is his mum. I am not sure which freaks me out more. I thought he was going to stick with being in love with the black wool jersey. Though I did take that away from him the other day to wash it. Harrumph. Kittens are so fickle.)

2. I made flower soup yesterday. (Flowers from the garden - I trimmed the whole top of the lettuce hedge - and a head of broccoli and some celery that arrived rather wilted and some potatoes and some red lentils and two small mild green chilli peppers. So, not all that flowery.) But, when I actually tasted it, it was unpalatably bitter.

3. I discovered I could rescue the soup with the second bowlful, which had a large spoonful of garlic cream cheese well stirred into it. This creamy flavour cut the bitterness down to a palatable level.

4. The delivery from Dofos arrived just in time: one 20l sack of cat litter, 4 boxes cat food. Now I just have to try and figure out how to persuade Bob not to eat the kitten food and Wolf not to eat the adult cat food. Both appear certain that the more-delicious food is in the other cat's bowl, which I would be quite happy for them to think, except I am trying to stuff Wolf on nice fattening grown-inducing kitten food, and trying to feed Bob nice life-lengthening kidney-helping Senior cat food.

5. Wolf bounces around the garden with glee, having decided that grass is not dangerous after all. Still, he tends to come to rest by preference on one of the slate stepping-stones.

6. I watched a terrific episode of House that I hadn't seen before, because C5 did something weird after the episode with the bra-infection and I missed the next three episodes which turned out to be the last three episodes. :-(

7. Most worrying of all: I am falling in love with my job all over again.

Tags: bloody job, bob, chilli, kittenlove!, my recipes, sometimes i love my work, wolf

09:10 am: Things that have gone wrong already this week
1. My laptop charger is bust.
2. We lost humiliatingly at the Sala quiz (29 points: we only got 5 out of 5 in the Literature category, and the team that marked our questions mistakenly marked us wrong in the Dickens question that we got right)
3. I failed to successfully tape West Wing last night - my VCR got me 60 minutes of blue screen. First time I've used the timer. I don't watch enough TV.
4. My period started. (Okay, that's not "gone wrong", but as I always get cramps the first day, it's bloody annoying, all right?)
5. I got soaked last night walking home, I think I'm starting a cold (which isn't surprising, since brandnewgun has been in the office all week spreading her germs generously around), and it's still raining this morning.

...and it's only Wednesday.

On the other hand, I played with Scarlett, the brandnewgun household kitten, last night, and she is utterly adorable and does the most fantastic kitty leaps.

Tell me stuff to cheer me up.

Tags: a week in the life, being ill, kittenlove!, lists, west wing