Foxy visitor

I thought i would write how the boys are getting on.............oh yes they are mad and naughty and delightful as ever, but i wouldn't have it any other way. Once or twice as i have stroked one of them i have felt a pang remembering how Jonesy was but on the whole time is indeed a healer. I am glad i have some really good memories though :-)

Anyway the boys get to have a daily walk in the garden soon. While i was at work on the last Bank Holiday hubby was obviously bored and spent a whole amount of time on the internet ordering stuff for Dylan and Chester. Before i go any further i would say that he hasn't forgotten about Ripley. It's just she is so old now that most of the time she sleeps. She does wander into the garden if we go out but not often now. Because we live on the main road the boys dont go out by themselves but we use harnesses. It sounds weird but it works at keeping them safe....

Five days ago i was even more glad about not letting them out unless they had the harness and leads on because we had a visitor. A beautiful but old fox appeared on the garage at the end of our garden sunning himself. He has been there every day in the morning and evening........and although i love foxes i feel it is better to keep the cats away from him. I dont think he is hungry as he doesn't snap around at the birds or pace or attempt to go in our bins but certainly he has made his presence known. If any of us go out in the garden he runs away ...but is back again later. I have checked out the RSPCA sites and other 'fox' sites and they all say not to worry and you can feed them if you want. I would love to but foxes are wild and maybe it is not a good idea to do that? I do feel guilty wondering if he is hungry but i think someone else is feeding him as he is around so much? We shall see what happens. the weather is good right now but being a softy i will worry if it changes and rains. You read such stories about foxes, but i have always maintained that if you treat them with respect then it will be okay.

Kitty kats update :-)

It's been a while since i have written here, as i am dedicated to my diet blog, but the boys are growing so much and will be a year old this month. Time to celebrate...along with musings about what on earth were we doing getting two kittens again, ha ha?
Yesterday i checked out a picture of Jonesy on my sideboard. I have his picture on my mobile phone too, as i never ever want to forget him. Time does heal and days go by where i just have a fleeting thought about him, but yesterday i missed the closeness we had. The bond between a cat and his human is very individual. My relationship with all my other cats have been different and certainly not so close, although i am hoping Dylan and i may be like that one day. Relationships change and strengthen over time and when Jonesy died i think ours was at our peak. I can look back on that time with very great pleasure mingled with sadness. he was such a character and even now my neighbour will talk about him in fond tones :-)

So anyway...what are the cats up to right now. well old girlie Ripley (19 this year) is asleep on the arm of my soda with her head in her paws. She is a little scraggly these days and meows constantly. Being deaf she cant hear herself......but we most certainly can!! She doesn't run about as much as she used to although she still has some mad moments. Her favorite hobby seems to be chewing grass and hacking it up again over the sun lounge carpet. Yuk.
The boys are, as ever, young active ginger toms and i do find them amusing! As the year has passed they have developed their own individual traits and they are very different. I do call them brothers as they were born within a week or so of each other and from 7 weeks have been together. The relationship between Dylan and Ripley has mellowed and he doesn't annoy her quite so much now. Maybe the odd bap with his paw on her head as he walks past but not so often now! Currently Chester is glued to our lounge window. He realised yesterday that a pair of blackbirds are nesting in the hedge around a foot from the house and he is fascinated. As i type this he is avidly watching the hedge, ears flickering, body ridged and head darting around as the birds fly in and out. He settled down on the arm of the sofa in the window bay where he can see them after breakfast an hour ago and has not moved since! He may be there some time? Dylan is curled up on a chair in our sun lounge. Normally he likes to hide behind the sofa, or under a cushion....and he has always done this....but the sun lounge chair is one of his few 'open space' places.He has already pulled the cushion and blanket off and chucked them on the floor and now he is resting on top of a little flat cushion! They all spend a lot of time together but also a fair amount of time doing their own things. Chester will walk about with my dressing gown cord, or a stick from my plants, like a dog with a bone. He latches on with his teeth and will not let go!! Dylan will scratch anything and everything, while looking at you, in spite of a multitude of scratch posts being around the house! Grrrrrr. Chester will sit on my lap in the mornings for around an hour, Dylan never does. But Dylan will sprawl at my feet in bed and lay there for hours. They are needy in their own ways.....Chester needs food and it doesn't matter if he has been fed two minutes before. You open any cupboard door in the kitchen and he is there, even racing from upstairs. Dylan wil come and purr and slide all around you from time to time when you are sitting down, as if to reassure himself you are still there. Chester has always been vocal but suddenly the last week Dylan has found his voice. We are getting howls and meows like i have never heard before. Maybe it is the fact that we are responding to both of them by answering when they call, so they do it more now? Anyway they are lovely and although they are not Jonesy replacements they have gone a long way to healing my pain at losing him. maybe one day i will write a book 'A Tail of Ginger Cats'? That is not to say, by the way, that i haven't adored all my cats. ginger or otherwise, but the gingers i have had all seem to have been very strong personalities.......

The yucca is dead!!!

Day two of Dylan and the yucca tree fight..........
Dylan won.........

The 'Yucca' saga

Dear oh dear i had forgotten what young cats are like!!!! Dylan and Chester are fast growing up....and fast learning what they can do, and cant. In the process they are rapidly wrecking my house, ha ha. Actually it appears that Dylan, who was such a scaredy cat when he was tiny, is the delinquent one!! he still shoots off if he is freaked out...and it's always at stupid things like Dylan spying Chester sauntering down the hallway towards the kitchen. Such a perfectly normal thing and yet he will perk his ears up, his eyes will go wide and he will suddenly dart off into the sitting room and hide behind the sofa. He will often do the same upon seeing hubby or myself coming down the stairs. To be honest i have no idea if he is showing off or scared but he is jolly fast when he runs! Recently he has been trying to climb on the banister post at the bottom of the stairs. It takes around 3 attempts at jumps and a lot of paint scraped off before he makes it. The look on his face is a hoot as he appears as pleased as punch. Chester, on the other hand, delights in trying to get on the upstairs banister railing. Considering we decorated the hallway 4 months ago i am not sure how well the painted woodwork will fare at this rate? Dylan likes to scratch....and will scratch our sitting room coffee table at random moments. He will start on one leg, hubby will growl Dylannnnn, so he will move to the next leg, and hubby will growl again, and hubby will even try to push Dylan away......and all Dylan does is roll over and look at us as if to say "what? I was doing zilch...it was not mean" He is daft!!
Anyway the newest thing for the boys is to try to get as high as they can. Chester is sensible! He used the top of the cat tower and perches there surveying the world. Dylan uses my yucca plant! Right now it may not survive the week........Trying to get him out of it is a trial. It is amazing how a cat can hide in one of those. Not only that but the leaves are spiky 'ouch'. So if it comes to it am i going to get the cat out of the tree? heck am i, ha ha. Not sure how long my plant will last but we did get some pretty good pictures *sigh*

Kitties with fishes

Sometimes, as i watch the boys playing and mooching about, i try to think what Jonesy was like at 9 months old? Was he as mad as the boys? Did he get up to so much mischief? To be honest i actually cant remember. We had 5 cats at that point, all with very individual characters. Because we also had Jonesy's mother, Peanut, I think he was kept in check! Our relationship grew closer as he got older and he was definitely my favorite. You shouldn't have favorites, should you, but i did. I still miss him, and strangely enough, quite a bit recently.
It's because Dylan and Chester seem to be more affectionate towards us all and that reminds me of how i was with Jonesy. Their personalities are developing and, although they are naughty, naughty, naughty, they are wonderful and lovable too. It's like having two whirlwinds whizzing around the house, sometimes. Dylan tends to take a running leap at the rug in our bedroom, so that it slides along the floor boards with him on board, until it is scrunched in the corner. Chester will burrow under anything he can find, including the bedclothes, where he squirm around like a caterpillar making chirping noises. Dylan will leap onto the work top in the kitchen and snuffle anything he can find...including the cinnamon which made him sneeze so the whole place was covered in a brown cloud. Chester will follow you to the bathroom and jump in the bath, where he will bap the shower head lying there until it drips and he can slurp it up. They will race around the house, thundering up and down the stairs, until you cant hear the television. If you are really lucky both of them will overdose on cat nip toys and crash out for half an hour where ever they drop!!
Where is Ripley while this is all going on (poor old girl that she is)? Usually oblivious to it all, being tone deaf, or jerking to the side if she is made jump by one of them......or swiping Dylan round the head as he leaps on her.
Do you know what? I love them all..............and at the moment i don't have a favorite as they are all so different. But i do miss Jonesy on my arm as i read in bed. It will come...it will come.....

It's all change.....

Well it's been a while since i wrote on this blog! I have to say that it did everything i needed it to do, and more. I used this particular 'Jelly cat Therapy' to help me get over the loss of Jonesy cat in 2011 and  because i couldn't find anywhere to help me understand why i was so devastated at his death. Writing it all out helped me immensely and enabled me to let out all my anger, sadness and wonderfully happy memories!!

In among my musings i sometimes pondered the idea of getting another cat. We lost Peanut, Jonesy's mum, in the early months of 2012 and this left us with one 17 year old mad totally deaf female called Ripley. I had heard that animals feel loss but was not sure i believed it until i heard Ripley's yowls. She was alone and she knew it. Okay we were around,, but the other two were not. For hours she would pace the house. She was restless all the time, and the agonised noises she made broke our hearts. No amount of petting and cuddling seemed to provide comfort. We couldn't call to her as she was deaf and so our days were spent running to get her when she howled. It took 3 weeks, that was all.
To my mind, Ripley was lonely. I talked it over with hubby....very tentatively. Should we get another cat? We had always said we wouldn't after the three died, after all they did tie us down, in spite of the fact we loved them to bits. Back and forth the conversation went for 2 days. It was a big decision. What if we got another cat and they didn't get on, after all this was Ripley's territory? She was old and deaf. Would another cat understand?
2 days and hubby knew he was fighting a losing battle. I didn't push it but all of a sudden i caught him looking on the internet site Gum Tree at cats!! Good grief!! We thought long and hard and felt that it would be better to get a young cat rather than a kitten...in fact probably 2, as they would be company for each other when Ripley died. We had to be realistic!  I desperately wanted another ginger tom. Not to replace Jonesy, but just because i adore them. Actually the 2 we fell in love with first were cream and tortoiseshell, and off we went to view. They were beautiful but petrified of people. The lady assured us they would come to us, but you could just tell they were too scared. they skittered about and hid, and after 3/4 hour we gently said it just wasn't right for us to take them home. It would not have worked. As we sat in the cat i looked at my hubby and said i wanted to check out a ginger kitten i had seen on Gum Tree.......one phone call to our son to get the contact number, one phone call to the owner, one viewing just down the road from the cats, and we had a ginger tom kitten!!!! How did that happen, ha ha?? Well....you know??
The next day i decided we needed another kitten to keep him company....hubby saw an advert in a shop and off we went. One lovely ginger tom ended up back at home with us! Two ginger tom kittens from different litters and one very old deaf cat. How on earth was that going to work..............

Cow pats on the football field...........

A day off and what am I doing? Well actually I am sitting here listening to music and relaxing! I do feel I deserve it, though, as I have been working most of last week and all over the weekend.
I do wonder how people, years ago, used to spend their days off work? I have been trying to think back to when I was younger, and what my parents did. Thirty years ago....okay, ha ha, maybe forty years ago.....shops were not open as long as they are today. Most women who had children did not work, and most men worked during the week and maybe a Saturday morning. School children did not have teacher training days, and I cannot recall as many school holidays as now, but then maybe that is my selective memory? So what do I remember about the days we spent as a family? My father mowing the lawn while my mother sat in the sunshine on a bench and my brother and I played 'tents'. Picnics at Bradbury Rings, before it was hacked about and had the archaeological dig, with lots of other friends and families. Swimming in the sea at Bournemouth Beach, and making sandcastles in the sand. Oh and eating sandwiches that always, somehow, managed to have grains of sand in them however careful you thought you were being! Visiting other aunts and uncles and playing with my cousins. Sitting in the car on cold windy days with my mother, watching my father play in his amateur football team. One great moment springs to mind of my mother, my aunt and myself sitting in the car when we ended up surrounded by a herd of cows who then decided it would be great to rub themselves up and down the side of the car. The resulting shrieks from all of us as the car rocked from side to side makes me giggle now....and yes my father's football team played in all sorts of open areas, and usually had to dodge the cow pats on the pitch! I also remember, at the end of our Saturdays out, sitting together in front of our new Parkray fire eating hot crumpets and watching the football results and then Dr Who.
All of this makes me realise what wonderful cosy memories I have, and I do wonder what memories my children have? Mu husband and I did make an effort to take them out a lot and spend time with them, but I also wonder what memories children today will have. Are their weekend memories of playing computer games? Will they only recall supermarket shopping on a Saturday or Sunday? Hopefully this wont be the case, as we seem to have become an alfresco nation once the sun comes out, or indeed in the rain during summer.
So back to my day off. Okay so I do not have young children any more. I work far more than I have ever worked in my life, and actually can see that still happening for quite some years ahead. So my day off is generally spent doing housework and catching up on bills and letters and all sorts. As I get two days off a week I try to have just one day for the 'work' and one day doing the relaxing things, like catching up with family, or generally reading. Depending on the weather this is inside or outside! Right now the weather is not warm enough for me to swing gently in the sun on my swing seat, while reading a good book or snoring after falling asleep, so I am curled up with one of the cats typing this. I am going to have a nice lunch of any bits I fancy, and a treat of a custard tart for after. The cats will probably get to share this!! seeing as Peanut likes savoury food she will most likely get a titbit of cheese, and Ripley is all sweetie addicted so I will let her have a tiny bit of the custard tart. No doubt we will all end up snoozing on the sofa for half an hour afterwards..........what a picture that will make!!