…who loves to stand up and claw at the images on my telly…
Or drive me berserk wanting food, grabbing my ankle, howling at me as I get up for a cup of coffee—
I tell you, devising something to keep a half-Bengal busy is a challenge. Smart. Very.
I got this puzzlebox for kittehs, CatAmazing, from Amazon, just a cardboard box. And I put some kitty treats into it. He can fish one out, with some work. He comes in here begging for treats, he’s going to work for it. 😉 Heh. Good for his disposition, that hunter’s brain.
I was awakened during the night by first sirens of the emergency vehicles rushing out…then the Careflight medical evacuation helicopter coming in to pick up a patient and then taking off again 15 minutes later. THEN, the thump-bump as of someone banging on cardboard boxes on the other side of the wall to my bedroom. So, stumbling out, I find Cindy, my youngest and newest calico cat is in the bathtub, chasing her tail, and having a good old time making a racket.
Nothing as wild as Shu, though.
We had a cat that loved chasing her tail in the tub. It required cleaning the cat-hair out of the tub before using it, though. (White cat with patches of tabby striping. And a tail that was ringed from end to end.) It definitely is a noisy form of play.
It has long been SOP chez moi that before I go to bed, I check the food bowl, the water fountain, and the Littermaid to make sure there is food in the bowl, water in the fountain, and the litter receptacle runneth not over, so when it’s night-nights time, we sleep,food o’clock does not happen when mommy is asleep, and we do not wake up to the noise of the water pump in the fountain sucking air.
Tangentially, I wasn’t wild about the pattern of the vinyl flooring in the kitchen of this duplex when I moved in, and now that I’ve scrubbed it with a brush on my hands and knees to get up years of grime, I’m sure I don’t like it. It’s straight from the 1970’s — fiddly, orange, and way too busy. The previous tenants had to move to assisted living as they were no longer able to care for themselves so you know how much house cleaning didn’t get done! I ought to get a month’s free rent just because I’ve given this place the best cleanout it’s had in about five years. I doubt I’ll be able to convince my landlady of that, however.
Last week, Goober decided I was brooding too much and needed cheering up. He has always had a hidden, quirky sense of humor. He “found” where he and/or Smokey (Mr. Assertive, virtual cousin to Shu) had hidden one of their balls. Goober brought me the ball to play. He’s almost 10 and we hadn’t played ball in some time. It’s complicated by my bad eyesight. So we have been playing each night since then. I had to tell him what a good, sweet cat he is. I know he was doing it to cheer me up as well as to avoid boredom himself. Smokey will sometimes run interference, but it’s mostly Goober and I playing ball. Heheh. This has helped Goober’s (Mr. Non-Assertiv’s) sense of belonging to the, uh, pride too. He’s happier and perkier.
I can recommend a “catnip carrot.” It’s cloth, the cheaper one on offer at Amazon, and the same company has a chili pepper, banana, and fish, with a very slight discount for a 3-pack. The first time I got this, it arrived while I was away, the cats smelled it rhrough the packaging, and tore into the package, taking the toy off to parts unknown in the household, leaving the ravaged packaging behind. One or both spent time doing this; the card was still damp. The single carrot became a source of much envy and keep-away between the two cats, and it would appear regularly thereafter, hotly contested as a favorite toy. LOL, this was such a success, I got another two when I knew I’d be home to intercept the delivery and avoid, ah, feline mayhem. Also, I recommend one per cat and putting the toy up so it’s an intermittent treat, and so no feline crew blisses out too much on the ‘nip. Heh.
Holy frijoles — we just got back from the first vacation we have had in a couple years, to a con on the Big Island of Hawaii, plus a couple of days on either side. Fun but tiring; we exercised our old fut prerogative of calling it a night by ten most nights. We got a few really good side trips as well; DH is currently downloading to our gallery site incredible pictures and movies we took on our expotition to see live lava flowing into the sea. I’ll post a link later, but for now we are happy to be home and the cats are happy too, we think (they did not accompany us, but are happy for the resumption of normal schedules).
0000….lava! I’ve always want to see it in action, but since the chopper bearing a friend of mine on tour had a mechanical (and fortunately fairly soft landing) immediately after transporting friend over Kilauea (researcher)—I’ve revised that ambition. Our local volcanoes don’t give us lava. They blow it all sky high as dust, which is not nearly as photogenic once down…
Two years ago I took my friend Susan on the 4-island cruise as a birthday present. During the stop in Hilo we took the “doors off” flight over the vent that was beginning to threaten Pahoe in one of the little 4-person “flying eggs”. “Got the T-shirt.” We went over lots of radiating black lava running east, an orange window in one lava tube, and a small hole over the vent itself. She was tense, but game. 🙂 Kinda wanted to go over the bench where it’s dropping into the water. but this was on offer. Got snaps. 😉
http://www.jediknight.com/gallery3/index.php/Big-Isle
This was where we took the lion’s share of the photos on this trip, just because it was so impressive! The tour was organized by Patricia Tallman, of B5, Star Trek and stuntwoman notoriety; after a while, you just can’t keep falling 50′ into an airbag any more, so she’s starting an ‘adventure’ tour company as a backup. We were on the largest boat going out that day, which was a glorified cigarette boat with huge engines that seated 50. 35 minutes going out ricocheting full throttle across the waves, and 45 minutes on site cruising back and forth along a half mile of lava flows cascading into the Pacific. Once we got there, we were between 20 and 50 feet of the flowing lava, and frequently waves shoved us closer. On the way back, clouds that had been threatening earlier started making a fairly spectacular lighting show, so we got all four elements: water, rock, fire and air!
p.s. Videos coming eventually; I had thought they were up for public perusal, but not yet.
Videos!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXMYzprXdJ5yxc1XmMYqjIYd9G06fj-Qw
Totally neat!
Wow! The videos were especially fascinating. Was that fresh pumice I saw being tossed in the waves by the active lava flows… or is it denser fresh rock that is congealing right then and there and being tossed about before sinking?
The nearest we can figure it out is that bits of the red-hot lava ride around on the water surface on a steam layer for a while like a water droplet on a hot griddle, but in reverse. Once it cools, it sinks.
Wow! All you need is a Horta in swim shorts! 😀 Neat videos, hard to realize how very hot that must be. I notice even with constant waves over it, it’s staying molten for minutes or more at a time, adhering to rock below or melting into that, or dropping globs offf into the water to sink below. What do you get from that, pumice? Or a mix of lava types, when it flows into the water? Amazing what Mother Nature can do. I also noticed Izzy’s music in the background at one pint. (And I thought I’d memorized his last name. Now I see I need to go look at my muisic library again. Kame… two syllables with M next to each other, …)5
Bruddah Iz FTW!
We were close enough that you frequently got facefulls of the steam that boiled off the lava, or just the heat. From 30+ feet away, it still felt like you were standing in front of an open peephole in a Cone 8 kiln.
Izzy: Israel Kamakawiwo’ole;
I noticed the music too; Izzy’s medley of Somewhere over the Rainbow/What a wonderful world was the wedding song for Chris and me. I miss Hawai’i something terribly; like the southern shores of the Great Lakes, the islands felt like home in a way no other part of the globe has satisfied.
I did a search of Amazon for that puzzlebox and it said it couldn’t find it….it sounds interesting enough to keep my 4 monsters occupied for a little while. They don’t get treats very often, and when they do, one of them usually scarfs up the treats given to the other 3. Sophie won’t lie still long enough for me to give them to her, and when I do put them down, she never gets back to them in time before Sydney, the feline vacuum cleaner, has found them and eaten them.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009R3SFBC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
THAT’S why..I did a search under “cat maze feeder” “cat treat puzzle”, etc….thank you.
BTW, I’m taking an online course in WordPress website design…for SOME folks, it’s intuitive….I tend to overread and get too caught up in details that aren’t relevant. I’m going to be transferring my kendo club’s website off the current hosting service (>$150/yr) to another hosting service and using WordPress instead of the code that I got from the previous webmaster. So far, after 3 lessons, I’ve learned how to set up a blog, how to set up pages, now working on heirarchies, adding links, etc. Yes, it’s simple, but as I said, sometimes, I just look at it the wrong way…..hopefully, by the time the course is finished sometime in late October, I’ll be ready to shift the website to the new hosting service and have the domain pointing that way. $3.95/month is a lot cheaper than $12.50 a month….
I lost a reply in cyberspace somewhere…first time that’s happened…..
It says it’s currently unavailable and they don’t know when or IF it will be available again….:(
No promises . . .
http://catamazing.com/
Thank you…..it isn’t as expensive as I thought it would be…I wonder how it would hold up against 4 determined felines…..