Ripley's world of silence......

Ripley is becoming a very needy cat as she gets older! Right now, as I try to type, her head is on the keyboard and she keeps nudging my hand as I attempt to type...........it makes for some rather interesting spellings of words, I can tell you!! Mind you I am deleting the mistakes as I type so don't worry, even if it means I am taking three times as long to do this blog *sigh*.I do think she is going deaf too, because she really doesn't appear to hear us any more, and sometimes she utterly howls the place down. It is almost like she is calling us but cant hear herself call so it is very loud indeed! Just as with all our other cats, we do call her back if she does this, but she never comes running so we have to fetch her. We have tested her reaction to sound in various ways and we are sure she only hears a tiny portion of sound, if any. Yesterday Ripley was seated on my husbands lap facing away from, and I called her name a few times. If you did this with any other of our cats , even if they didn't turn round, their ears would twitch in response. There is nothing with Ripley! Nothing at all....no response. If you tap her shoulder she will turn and chirp  but nothing else. How sad is this. I do think we will have to get her to a vets to verify this. To be honest I have had a suspicion for a while now because she doesn't run from the hoover any more. Ripley has always hated the hoover and has fled the room any time it was near her but now she just sits and watches it. She has always been very sensitive to sound and jumped at loud noises and been rather skittish compared to the other cats, so maybe she has always had problems? How sad it is for an animal to be in a world of silence? Obviously it is sad for a human too, but we can learn and adapt with help from others. What does an animal do? In the wild this would make the animal susceptible to danger and probably the animal may not survive for long, although there have been remarkable stories of some species of animals helping each other. There was a remarkable picture in the papers recently of two dogs. One of the dogs was blind and the other dog would always stay right next to him, in effect being this other dog's eyes. How amazing and wonderful? I think Ripley has become to reliant on us humans and I do worry how she will be in the summer when she goes out more. We live on a main road and the cars speed along. To be honest , she has never wandered far so I do think she will stay in the garden mostly, but you never know. If this had been Jonesy I would have worried even more, though. He was a roamer and being deaf would have been extremely dangerous for him. How protective do I feel over all my cats.....and yes I still miss Jonesy more than anyone knows...........

Cat cuddles rule okay!................

It's been a while since I have been here because I have been ill...again! Some nasty flu bug grabbed hold of me and left me with the cough from hell. Quite a few sleepless nights took their toll and my poor husband has got it now. Still I am back to my usual witty, frankly fantastic, self........ lol, only joking......so keep an eye out for my blog please.
While I was moping around feeling sorry for myself I got to thinking about 'cat cuddles'. I touched on this in January when I was ill last time, but searching through my old pictures reminded me of how cats have been around in my family for generations. Cats crop up in stories about the family as well. For example, when I was small my grandmother had a cat, although his name has slipped my mind for now. This cat scared the daylights out of my mother, apparently! I suppose having grown up with dogs in her family, combined with arriving in England to marry my father unable to speak hardly any English , must have exacerbated the situation? The very large tom cat used to sit on a stool and generally swipe anyone that walked by with his huge paw....my mother's words not mine! It does seem that my uncle used to tease and tease this cat so he was probably an old irritable male who simply wanted a peaceful life? I am a firm believer that you can help the personality of an animal by the way you behave towards it. For example we never ever hit our pets, or poked them, or wound them up until they were annoyed and restless. We made sure they knew....and the two girls we have now also know.....that they were loved. We petted them, stroked them, talked to them and generally loved them to bits. Maybe that is why all of our cats have been very laid back, gentle, loving animals that are friendly to everyone? Not always a good thing, as an animal like that tend to be very trusting of all humans and very approachable......as we learnt to our cost with the lovely black and white tom cat,Tank, but that terribly sad story is for another day.......! Still, on the other hand, it meant Jonesy in particular was very well known, and very well loved, in our neighbourhood. I remember taking Jonesy to the vets one day and the vet appearing to be rather nervous of him as we took him out of the basket. Even to this day I cannot understand that, because all of our cats have been so gentle, but maybe some cats visiting the vets are scared or hurt and lash out? A cat's claw can hurt real bad if it catches you in the delicate skin.
When I was married my parents acquired two kittens. Well actually what happened was that my brother said he would take one....and then had to move and couldn't keep him....and I said I would have one and then didn't want to separate them. It was a good idea because my brother and I could still see them but they lived with my parents. Good company all round! They were two absolutely wonderful fun loving black and white kittens called Nosey...because he was.......and Porky....because he was.Nosey was leaner and more aloof than Porky, who was far more genial and laid back. Both were lap cats. though, and my sons tell me they have great memories of those two pets.
How lovely it is that we have had the privilege of sharing our lives with these amazingly generous animals? These cats have allowed us to enfold them into our lives. They have shared our laughter, our sadness, our food, our families and indeed our cuddles, and anyone who has had a cat snuggle back into the crook of their neck, or arm will understand exactly what I mean when I say 'cat cuddles rule, okay'.

The grassy addiction.............

Although it is bitterly cold and frosty outside and I can't see the grass under the white crispy coating, for some reason this morning I have remembered how the cats acted around a certain patch. It was a tiny piece of what just looked like normal grass to me. All the cats would trot over to this piece of leafy strands and generally chew on a blade for a few minutes and then they would react in a variety of amusing ways. Ripley would rub her head from side to side over this part, turning her head in a rotating motion until we thought she would fall over with dizziness. Peanut just sniffed it and seemed to fall into a dopey stupor. Jonesy would throw himself into that grassy carpet with the sort of abandonment you generally see in a young kitten. He would roll his whole body around, sprawling on his back, legs akimbo,arching and looking, for all intents and purposes, like a cat who has indeed got the cream!! All this would only go on for a few minutes and then they would each simply get up and trot off like nothing whatsoever had been going on! They almost became addicted in the end, as it happened every day.
Hubby and I have looked and looked at this patch of grass. It looks the same as all the rest of the grass to us! It didn't end up the same colour because in the last summer that Jonesy was ill he used to simply lie in this very same patch. The grass ended up a sort of yellowy dullness where it never got any light! We could not, for the life of us, see what difference this little bit of grass was to all the rest. Of course we had many theories, mainly based around cat nip, but have never really investigated more. Why would our cats go into this type of ecstatic lethargy in this area? It certainly didn't act the same on humans.......not that we tried chewing it, I can tell you! The cats didn't always eat it but they did always react similarly. Having hunted around on the internet for pictures of cat nip, it is plain to see this patch of grass was not that plant. Weird! Apparently there is such a thing as wheat and oat grass for cats....or anyone for that matter!..... and although research suggests it is good for their digestion, it doesn't explain the sheer happiness they appeared to experience? Mind you a good piece of chocolate cake will give me sheer happiness, not that I rub myself in it. Ooerr!

Winter wonderland cats.........

It's minus goodness knows what temperature outside and the possibility of snow looms large! Knowing Ripley and Peanut, they will carry on just the way they have been doing in this chilly weather and stay close to the radiators, or curled up on a bed somewhere. I don't blame them one bit as I do just the same, along with cuddling a hot water bottle if I am lucky.
I must admit the girls are not even curious about snow, but Jonesy and Cepha were. I will always remember their very different reactions to the cold fluff wafting down from the sky to settle on the ground. Have you ever noticed how a silence descends on the world when it snows? I like to wrap up and stand by the open sun lounge door watching the quiet flakes float down. Jonesy liked to do this too. When ever I opened the door during a snow flurry he would come and sit next to me gazing at the wonder. His ears would twitch and flick as he looked around, but, to be honest, if he didn't have to actually go outside he was happy. Once or twice I would gather him into my arms and stand outside while it snowed, and it would make me smile to see him stare about. It was almost as if he couldn't understand what was going on....and why was it so white. I wonder if cats see in colour? Jonesy would make no effort to get out of my arms, or even struggle to get back inside, but he was clearly happier once we were actually back in doors! To be honest it was about the only time he would use the litter tray.
Now Cepha was much braver. As I have mentioned before, he liked the rain and storms, so snow was no obstacle. He would launch himself out into the snow with the kind of glee you tend to see in children. If the snow was deep he would bounce and leap about with a kind of joyful abandonment. Any drifting flurries hovering in the air would be met with his nose up, as if he was sniffing the crisp air. To say Cepha loved being out the quiet world of white wonder is not an exaggeration, because he clearly did.
It's funny how each of the cats were so different in how they dealt with the unpredictable British weather. Here, in the south, we don't get snow often enough for our pets to be used to it. Maybe that is why all of my cats behaved the way they did each time we were greeted with the winter wonderland?