yonmei

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

Tags: kittenlove!, wolf

10:57 am: Naarmamo 2008: Day 1 and Day 2
naarmamo: Days 1-3 here.

( August 1: Light from a mirror )

( August 2: Hunter in the grass )

Tags: naarmamo, naarmamo2008, photos, reflections, wolf

10:54 pm: Wolf! Foxes are not cat toys!
I was coming home this evening, shopping bags in one hand, phone in the other, chatting to Mike (miking to Chat?) and this rough-looking fox-coloured ...oh, it is a fox! ...raced past me, out of my garden into my neighbour's garden and away down the street.

And after the fox, black tail bushed out and more than slightly bouncy...

Whether Wolf really did chase the fox, or the fox just heard me coming and ran and Wolf is crediting himself with scaring off the fox, or, Wolf got delusions of grandeur and figured since he could kill a mouse he could kill a fox...

...I dunno. On the one hand: it's extremely cool that we have a neighbourhood fox. Seeing a fox around our gardens is much neater than seeing rabbits.

On the other hand, eek. I am glad that Wolf is probably too big to be acceptable prey for a fox - my guess is an adult cat (and Wolf is big enough to be considered adult, even if he's got a year's growth to come) is too big/too well-clawed for a sensible adult fox to tackle. But I could wish that Wolf was warier.

Tags: wolf

02:51 pm: What bloody mouse is this?
( Feline mayhem )

Tags: bob, cats, wolf

05:47 pm: Hee!


By the way, I have discovered who the dominant cat in my household is: yup, still Bob, even if Wolf's bigger. Bob growls: Wolf gets out of the way.

Tags: bob, cat politics, wolf

12:28 am: Wolf, the Mighty Hunter
Wolf just brought me a cow.

(It's about as long as my hand, white-and-black and fluffy.)

He's also yelling at me when the cow doesn't move around enough by itself to be interesting. Unfortunately, while it did once have a string attachment, some overenthusiastic Mighty Hunter broke it some time ago.

( wibbling about Bob )

Tags: bob, wolf, worrying about my cats

11:32 am: OMG. Wolf is a sexual harasser!
I was working out that as I got Wolf on 7th August, and he was six weeks old then, that puts his birthday at about 25th June - so I can call him a midsummer cat and remember his birthday that way.

He is very nearly a year old, and he appears to be going through whatever kind of puberty a castrated cat can go through, housed with a human and a female cat who was spayed 10 years ago (Bob was 8 when I got her in December 2005: I keep not quite wanting to do the arithmetic, but that makes her 11 this year).

This morning, Bob was curled up around my hand and I was petting her lovely furry tummy and she was purring happily - and Wolf leaped up on the bed, eyed us both, did some sniffing around Bob's bum (which Bob ignored) and then he settled himself down behind her, which Bob also ignored... and then he bit her on the back of the neck and clung to her, which she growled at. Eventually he got bored and let go, and now he's sitting on the windowsill chirping at the birds, but...

Oh, Wolf.

( more seriously )

Tags: bob, cat politics, feminism, wolf

10:25 pm: Long day
Wolf does this thing that I love. He sits on my chest with his backside on my right arm and his forepaws on my left, and just completely relaxed, purring like a small motor. That is, I learned to love it when he learned to position himself where I can see the screen and type. It is a good position for a writer's cat. He's doing that right now.

( Long day )

Tags: garden record, just my life really, wolf, work

09:47 am: Holy cow! ...or rather, cat!
Both my cats are curled up peaceably on my bed, inches apart, both washing themselves in that comfortable relaxed way cats do when "hey, nothing else to do, not sleepy: might as well groom".

Bob just sniffed at the back of Wolf's neck - Wolf has proper grown-up cat collar now, but the only silver-luminous one I could find was a flea-collar, which ordinarily I wouldn't have considered - and when Wolf turned to sniff back, Bob did a rather lazy "hiss! spit!" but neither of them moved.

Translated into human-type dialogue:

Bob: Hmm, what's that you're wearing?
Wolf: Unh... hi. What did you have for breakfast?
Bob: I still hate you, you know.
Wolf: Yeah, yeah.

I just took twenty minutes I didn't really have to spare to clean out their cat litter trays, but, well. Their cat litter does, in fact, cover up the odour of cat piss, and to a certain extent of catshit. However, when wet, it exudes a certain unpleasant chemical odour of its own, which is nicer by comparison, but only by comparison.

I try not to think about how bad it probably is for the environment.

Tags: bob, cats, 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

09:23 pm: Photo requests 1: Wolf and Bob and Dalek and Wol
( Wolf then and now )

( Bob and Wolf, more or less together )

( Dalek, lurking, with sidekick )

These photos were requested by muninnhuginn and ide_cyan and ruthi.

Tags: bob, cats, dalek, photos, wolf

10:08 pm: My little kitten...
Wolf is now wearing a collar.

(And would have been wearing one 10 days ago for my own peace of mind, but the pet shop kept not getting the kitten-size delivered.)

It's a slightly awesome moment when the collar goes on: and by awesome I mean can lead to lots of kitten-jumping and acting spooked.

Just to make matters awesomely worse for Wolf, since the shop didn't have any reflective collars kitten-sized, and since he is almost completely black, I got the kitten-collar that was light, bright green, with a little shiny doodad hanging from it, and I'd got the address tag in white, and... there was the Flasher.

So the collar clipped on, and suddenly, no matter where Wolf ran, there was this little ringy bell, and this little shiny doodad, and the address tag, and... the Flasher.

The Flasher is a gadget that comes in various different sizes (I got the last kitten-sized one in the shop. It's red. It has three little batteries sold with (the tiny little silver sort that look like mini-aspirins for robots). And it has an LCD chip in one end that flashes bright red/bright blue. All the time. Once everything's put together (which took me quite a while and one embarrassing phone call, because Wolf thought it was a fun toy, and also I dropped one of the batteries without realising it, and spent a while trying to figure out how to get it to work with two, before realising what had happened during the phone call to the pet shop, and going back to re-examine the stretch of hall where the battery must have fallen now I knew it should have been there) you turn it on and the thing flashes. I am not leaving it on the entire time - I think that would drive me and Wolf mad, and possibly Bob, too - but hopefully, whenever Wolf is out and it is or will be dark, I can turn it on and give car drivers a fair chance of realising that the black cat in the dark night is actually there.

Because I live in a dead end street, with not much space for parking, cars usually come up the street extremely slowly, and they're usually driven by people who live here, and who don't want to kill neighbour's children or cats or their own children or cats. Still, it was worrying me, because you can't expect a car driver to avoid running over a cat they can't see, and I recall a couple of instances where Cally clearly avoided being run over only because the driver could see her and didn't want to do it. (Cally and Gallus shortly developed a very wholesome dread of loud noises, such as those caused by cars: I hope Wolf does, too.)

Wolf is sitting on my lap at this moment, with his head resting on my left forearm. It really is a very ugly collar. The silver one suitable for adult cats is much prettier, and will look extremely decorative against his black fur. When he's old enough. *mentally urges Wolf to grow*

Tags: cats, 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

12:05 pm: Flower pizza
There is a flower pizza baking in the oven for my lunch: it smells wonderful. (It's not 100% flowers, of course: but the filling includes nasturtium, golden marjoram, and lemon verbena flowers, as well as a good handful of the flower buds sprouting at the tips of my enthusiastic lettuces.)

Wolf watched me using the shears and the scissors in and on the garden, from a step or two down from the front door, and sometimes shouted at me in his little voice. I don't know what he was saying, but it was probably something like "What are you doing out there in the big dangerous world? Come in where it's safe and I can sit on you!" (He was sitting on me while I was writing most of the previous two paragraphs.)

GJ seems to be down. :-( [Update: oh, it's back up again. Good.]

The flower pizza smells really truly wonderful. The pizza dough was made with salsa and nasturtium petals in the mix.

Post-pizza update:

I ate it all. I am now too full - even though I used my small pie pan to bake the pizza, I usually eat only half of that and freeze the rest. But I couldn't resist this. It smelled too good. The slight green bitterness/savouriness of the mixed herbs/flowers, combined with mature cheddar and goats cheese: oh, it was fine. Why did I never think of doing this to a pizza before? (Primarily, I suppose, because this year is the first year ever that I have had so many fresh herbs growing in my garden just available for me to pick and use.) It looked pretty, too: the nasturtium petals were still bright yellow in the mix.

Tags: eating some delicious food, my recipes, wolf