Post 472: the blahs

Cats need variety in their lives, too. Dougy and Andy are no exception.

Though they were eager players when I first gave them their “cat’s meow” toy for a birthday a year or two ago, they quickly learned they didn’t have to hop around like kangaroos and carry on like they were on speed the way the advertisement cats do! In fact, both lie down next to it to play with it…if they play.

I set it aside months ago when they showed signs of toy fatigue, but brought it out today on the chance it would be a fresh and fun toy again.

You’ve seen the post title. I suspect you know the result:

🙁

Post 467: the boys are back on routine

Andy and Dougy missed my brother when he left for home last weekend, but they now are recovered from the blahs that came with reduced play time and attention. I try to give them all the attention they want, but it’s impossible to give them the same amount as two or more people can!

Sunday, they were inactive. Andy was so lethargic, I worried about his health. “If you don’t look better in the morning, it’s to the veterinarian for you, buster!”

Andy spent most of the time between my brother leaving and yesterday sleeping or lazing on top of the blue carrier.

Monday, they were a more like themselves. Ornery.

This morning…whoa! Don’t stand in the way because they ran several foot races against each other, at top speed. “Kill the antelope” is the game, with each cat alternating between predator and prey. It is clear they are “back to normal”! That means they eagerly play when I get their toys out, enjoy “kill the antelope”, and find things outside the window very interesting.

“Do I have to play?” This isn’t normal Dougy behavior…!

Yesterday, Andy still spent a lot of the time on top of the blue carrier, but he was more engaged, watching birds out the backdoor. He also spent a lot of time watching birds out the dining room window since the neighbor’s bird feeder hosted scores of yummy-looking treats on the wing all day. Dougy even took to the window, chittering in excitement.

Andy reacts to birds outside the back door.

Dougy took his seat on the little red chair by the back door, a favorite bird and squirrel watching spot for both boys.

dougy 3 july 14 2014

It’s great to have the household back on routine!

Post 451: Happy Canada Day…and Happy Birthday Andy and Dougy!

Let’s get this straight: Canada came into being before my cats, so, technically, it’s Canada’s “birthday” first. Happy Canada Day to my Canadian friends! Pop a few, though, in celebration of the other significant July 1st event, my Persian cats Andy and Dougy’s third birthday!

My Seattle sister sent this greetings, which, I hope doesn’t self-destruct after a time:

http://www.care2.com/send/pickup/418/050/600/132/757/707

There aren’t any wild plans for the boys’ birthday — they’re cats for goodness sake! — but I will try to be extra nice to them, to overlook Dougy’s bad habit of scratching on furniture when there’s a scratching post one cat length away, and to remember Andy’s sometimes moodiness hides a sweet kitty heart.

Happy Birthday, Andy and Dougy! You captured my heart when you were kittens and are a continued joy every day! This is your day! (In “people years”, Andy and Dougy now are the equivalent of 28 years old.)

The birthday boys!

Post 445: hot day

The forecast is for a July-like nasty hot day (81°F or 27°C, with a thunderstorm in the afternoon). It’s a more tolerable 61°F (16°C) at 5:30 AM, a pleasant coolness I will enjoy as long as it lasts!

I make sure my boys, Andy and Dougy, have plenty of water available in their cat fountain. They are very good about hydrating themselves, though cats sometimes are water-shy. (Especially when immersed in it!) That helps them keep cool.

If the temperature inside gets too warm, I do turn on the air conditioner. When I am away from home for any extended time, I like to leave it on for the cats, too, just in case it gets too warm for their comfort and safety inside the closed apartment.

Andy is cool~!

Cats, though, are pretty smart about coolness. (“Cool cats”!) Andy likes to sleep and laze one of two places in hot weather: the top of the washing machine, which is cool to the touch, or on the floor by the shower. Dougy lounges on the cool floor in the bathroom, too.

Neither cat is as active in the hot part of the day as they are in cooler weather because they are smart about such things. “Mad dogs and Englishmen” alone go out in the mid-day sun, as they used to say, but not “cool cats”!

A friend used to talk about the life lessons he learned from watching his family cats. In defense of other animals — dogs, for example! — I think it is fair to say most animals instinctively know to avoid heavy activities during hot weather, and have developed strategies that work very well toward that end.

I mean, how many dogs do you think would deliberately lock themselves in a hot car while their human runs into the store for the weekly groceries? They are smarter than that, animals are!

My childhood dog Peanuts, for example, went inside his dog house, which had a dirt floor, and excavated a good-sized hole in the moist, cool earth for his hot day comfort. Good doggy! He had lots of water and a nice flowering crabapple tree over his doghouse, too, which added to his comfort.

Myself, I will avoid going outside today. Tomorrow, another hot day predicted, I have no choice since I go to the military museum in the afternoon for my weekly volunteer “work” there. Fortunately, it’s air-conditioned for the safety of the displayed items — and any humans who stumble off the sweltering streets!

My home air will be turned on for the boys.

You! Keep hydrated, remember to treat yourself to any coolness you can, but don’t forget to help your pets keep cool, too.

Post 445: whoa! time to stand back

What a day! Andy was especially clever today avoiding his medicine, though my brother (more clever by far!) trapped him by the open back door by whistling like a bird. That got Andy’s attention long enough for my brother to snatch him up. Poor baby!

I’ve had Internet issues and television issue the past few weeks that came to a head today. Worked out through the provider’s automated help service, I learned the two-way coaxial splitter was the issue. What?! Not unlike cars, anything I know about computers seems to come from bad experiences, failures of parts within the larger device. “Two-way coaxial splitter” is one of those concepts, things, I just want to work. I could give a flip that there is such a thing — and truly don’t want to know there is such a thing! — let alone have to find out they can go bad and I had to locate one of these unicornish devices before I could continue on.

Tried to get one really nice photo of Dougy today. This is the sort of thing I got: Dougy’s closed eye portrait brought on by his knowledge that the camera sometimes flashes a bright light…!

Oh, once I re-established connections with/through the two-way coaxial splitter gizmo, the television turned on immediately without any annoying glitches (like it’s been doing) and the computer had instant Internet connectivity. Even videos worked faster on YouTube. “Two-way coaxial splitter” is a new thing to me, but I’ve come to accept it as good. It’s surprisingly common, too, unlike unicorns! I located one with my first telephone call. Whew!

Yes, more photo failures with Dougy!

My brother has a cellphone that needed minutes added. Grr! Came at the same time I was learning to know what the two-way coaxial splitter was. Too much technology at once! Should be simple. The first 23-number code I punched in was just the start….! (My brother’s daughter’s boyfriend patiently lead me through the process.) Step two was to punch in a 27-number code. Thank you sweet Jesus! The phone was happy with that code, too, and the minutes magically appeared on his phone! Curious, though, that if every human being alive had a unique number, starting with 1 and ending with seven billion whatever, no one would have a number longer than 10 digits long! Clever monkeys, my rump.

Hee! Hee! The challenge just gets bigger and bigger. At least Dougy’s in focus. Isn’t he?

Did I mention I broke the glass front of my stove the other day? Why a smoked piece of safety glass was incorporated into the design I don’t know. Seems kind of impractical. Good design? Aesthetically pleasing? Stupid use of a delicate material for the application? Who knows. Damn inconvenient, but the oven and stove still work fine. In time, I’ll figure out what to do with the oven door without the picture window. I suppose I’ll end up buying a new door since just replacing the glass would be too simple. Yep. In the meantime, it looks pretty primitive, just raw metal and parts. Some door.

Hey! Dougy’s eyes are open and he actually looks pretty good in this photo!

Well, Dougy’s photo with open eyes is a bit “soft-focused” but that may be as good as it gets. What the heck! I tried one more time!

dougy 1 june 24 2014

Heck, that’s about as good as it’s going to get today. So I tried taking a photo of Andy.

Yep, Andy turned his head to avoid getting flashed, too. Time to call it quits. There’s always another day.

Post 443: Andy makes an entrance

Andy and Dougy get along most times, but there are times they fight for the best spot by the door for bird watching: the little red chair! Not today, however. On top of it, when Dougy took a rest on Andy’s cat lounger, Andy didn’t shoo him off.

What is Andy’s game today? Dougy is confused!

Post 436: we’re adjusting, slowly

I don’t expect my brother and sisters to follow my cats’ schedule. I mean, I have no choice: They know where I live! But my siblings live real lives elsewhere. This is a temporary situation, where my cats stalk them at night, jump on their beds, maybe make a racket hopping onto a favorite windowsill to view the nighttime outside the apartment.

I, on the other hand, expect this constant assault on my sleep. Dougy pounces on my bed, then hops up to walk on me from foot to head, head to foot to let me know it must be time to feed the kitties! (He has a good sense of this mythical time, after all, and it something like what you humans call 3 AM!) Andy just sits on a high place and stares at me. Also an effective strategy since one starts to feel watched when one is, well, watched!

So, struggling out of bed, stepping on the favorite string toy Andy drags around the place and leaves in random places, I begin my day.

You think the shot’s out of focus, but this is a realistic representation of how the world looks when the cats get me up. A “before I can focus my eyes” shot

I’m used to finding Dougy waiting in his favorite salmon-colored tub for the day’s play to begin. He’s always “up” for play, believe it! He’s in kitty paradise with four people willing to play cat games with him. Thanks to the new toys that even Andy likes, the boys eventually tire out and take a nap.

Sounds like a good plan. A nap….

But first, gotta grind some beans and make some industrial-strength coffee to get my plane off the ground. Oh, yeah, and catch Andy to give him his yummy tuna-flavored medicine. At least it’s supposed to be yummy, but I guarantee he makes a face.

Post 435: their favorite things

Andy loves to knock this wastepaper basket over. He does it right in front of me!

Andy is a rascal when it comes to trash. I have to hide candy wrappers (the cellophane kind in particular) and bread ties because they look like $2000 emergency cat surgeries to me. Andy will chew on them, and I did have to pull one out of his mouth one time that he looked like he wanted to finish with a swallow.

He makes me laugh!

Looks uncomfortable to me, but Dougy manages to squeeze a round kitty into a rectangular tub. Cats!

Lounging…! Wait! This is someone else’s cat!

Post 434: the water fountain

Just like at work, a guy’s gotta keep hydrated on a warm day.

Sometimes others see it as an opportunity for funny business — or to avoid work. [“I know that robin will come back. I’m sneaking down to the water fountain!”]

Or just to catch up on the latest catty remarks about co-workers, for a little laugh at their expense!

“Back to the grind, but my head’s elsewhere….”

Post 430: He’s here!

I arrived a few minutes late at the airport when I drove to the next town to pick him up. Or, a happier way to put it, I arrived on schedule, but his plane arrived ten minutes early!

The boys were pleased to see my brother, as was I, because the place is neatly picked up and vacuumed (don’t check for dust…!) even though I didn’t finish the job until literally the last minute before I had to leave to pick up my brother.

andy sniffs air 7 4-25-14

We’ve lived in filth and squalor lately because I figured I should wait till the last minute to clean up before my family arrived rather than clean up when the place needed it, then have to do it again at the last minute. I don’t know, but I think next time I’ll clean twice instead of live in filth and squalor again!

Even I have a limit, I discovered. I had to empty my vacuum canister four times, there was so much crud on the floor. This is not that big a place! And I forgot yesterday was trash day. I barely got the trash out the door, but the sack with the week’s accumulation of “cat litter” — well, clumped urine and poop — didn’t get out in time. Not what you want to live with a second week. Andy and Dougy are cute, but there are some downsides to them, too.

As cats will do, they made sure the scent-marked him by wrapping their tails around him as they nonchalantly walked past him. At least Dougy did. Andy was more discrete about it.

food comes 4 4-25-14

My brother and I sat down, being old guys with bad knees and sore feet. I’d brought out a new toy the cat brothers both really, really, really like. Andy oftentimes is a bit fussy about toys, so anything he really, really, really likes counts as a major home run! Have you seen the price of cat toys?

I hate buying something both Andy and Dougy won’t play with. Andy, anyway. Dougy is a play slut: He’ll play any time, any toy! Especially if its his favorite human uncle, my big brother! Both boys enjoyed their play session with my brother and the new toy.

After all that last-minute cleaning, I hadn’t managed to bring in anything easy to make, so I was happy I had some frozen sloppy joes in the freezer. My brother and I had that for supper, and topped it off later with some mixed nuts.

Time to finish this update and get on with the icky chores for today!

We managed to stay up till a bit after 9 PM, though we both managed to nod off from time to time doing it. Yeah, we had to watch all the Andy and Dougy videos I made since the last time he was here, then we watched something on television.

The cats got me up at the usual time this morning, after two, before three. I caught up on my e-mails, videos, blogs, and Facebook since my brother wisely stayed in bed. Of course the cats know I’m the one who feeds them, so my brother gets to sleep in! 🙂

Today, I have to apply flea-tick-whatever stuff on the boys, clean their water fountain and put in a new filter, and — still — give Andy his medicine. He’s been begging me for attention, but I’ve ignored him on the thought he might be ready to be caught when I complete this update. Or not. Andy is no idiot, unfortunately, and he can run faster than I can!