Category: Pets

Cats, Dogs, that sort of thing. Rats, Hamsters, Rabbits. You get the gist.

Stormy Weather

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Pets, Weather

(Good title for a song that.)

Last week, I very nearly ‘blogged’ about how, with my other half away, the dogs were sleeping upstairs with me… but then the two girls started fighting, which rather took the shine off it I’m afraid. (Tt, women!)

I only mention it because last night, in something of a role reversal, I found myself sleeping downstairs with the dogs. It’s been said before that I can pretty much sleep anywhere, which is just as well really because, perhaps unhappy about me muscling in on their territory, the lion’s share of the sofas (well, the dog’s share I suppose) was already taken up and I spent quite a lot of time leaning against the side of a settee with my behind on the footstool. Despite that, and despite the need to go outside for a wee (twice) I slept very well.

Let me quickly head off at the pass the thought that this bizarre behaviour was the result of a “you’re sleeping on the settee” row (or, in our case, a “you’re sleeping as near to the settee as you can get” row). One of our dogs is tremendously nervous, easily spooked by loud bangs, or raised voices, or the noise of his own breathing. Consequently, with storm Eunice en route I knew that every shake of the window, every rattle of the letterbox, every general shudder and gust, would have Max running straight upstairs and scratching frantically at the bedroom door – and most likely with the other three close behind, not out of fear but the opportunistic chance of getting to sleep on the bed again. So the easiest thing seemed to be to stay downstairs to reassure him without the need to go pelting upstairs like a thing possessed.

Thankfully, at time of writing anyway, I can report no damage from Eunice. I have of course had to spend an hour so far this morning trying to explain to the dogs why I’m not taking them out for a walk (I felt a little like Homer Simpson when he says, of trying to convince Bart not to do something, “God help me, I even tried reasoning with him”) and if nothing else it certainly says something for the scale of this morning’s Red Weather Warning that I’ve promised to take them out this afternoon… when the wind will be down to a mere sixty miles per hour!

Luckily after a while the dogs always revert to their default position, ie they are now asleep again across two settees and a dogbed. Personally, and unusual sleeping arrangements notwithstanding, I’m wide awake – and simply from having had a good night’s sleep, I’m not wide-eyed in fear at the storm raging outside. My only concession to worry (so far…) was a sudden panic at five am about the wheelie bin becoming airborne – whereupon I brought the poor thing indoors, which is why it’s now stood by the front door in the incongruous fashion of, say, a time-travelling police box standing in a junkyard.

The storm, I gather this morning, has prompted a second Red Weather Warning for this afternoon – perhaps seeking its fortune, Eunice is heading on to London. I don’t know whether in the heart of the city it’s quite as easy as it is down here to, at very short notice, close the schools and cancel some buses and sleep half-perched on a footstool for the night. Luckily I don’t work on Fridays (my boss is forever complaining about it, tells me to stop snoring at my desk) but even if I did I think I would have absented myself today. Hopefully, given the advance warning, everyone has been sensible – and hopefully with minimal damage to property and no damage to life, the storm will literally blow over.

Meanwhile, based on our forecast, we’ve another hour or so of not walking the dogs and of not being able to hoover the downstairs hall carpet because some idiot has parked, of all things, a wheelie bin there! Hopefully my other half isn’t TOO annoyed about that.

Otherwise I might find myself sleeping on the settee again tonight.

Hooray, Hooray, It’s A Holi-Holi-day

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Confused, Friends, Moaning, Money, Pets, Work

I’m on holiday.

Not in a ‘by the pool, excuse the slow typing because I’m holding a pina colada in the other hand’ kind of way. More in a ‘days to use up and rapidly running out of year’ sort of way.

I rather struggle with holidays. In the normal course of events I’m constantly battling with  my instinct towards laziness, but ironically, when I’m actually given licence to be lazy (this isn’t an official licence you understand, I’m not getting it on direct debit or anything) it’s just… Well, it’s too much of a good thing, is what it is.

Maybe I just get bored easily. The start of the day is OK, I can easily pass a leisurely, be-dressing gown-ed breakfast while watching, say, an episode of Friends (I’m now into the final run, and Ross is fine) or some more of The Crown. After that I tend to mooch rather than rush through my bathroom shenanigans before finally getting around to walking the dogs who, long before this point, have rumbled that I’m obviously not going to work.

But when all that’s done and out of the way, and the rest of the day lies open before me, a blank canvas, world’s my oyster, blah blah blah… At that point I feel I really ought to be doing something.

And of course, there’s always plenty to do – cars to wash and windows to clean and ironing to, erm, iron and… Well, there’s an unquantifiable amount of plenty I could be doing; but that makes my time off feels like a wasted opportunity, like I’m fundamentally missing the point if I’m just going to dig out the hoover or scrub something.

I realise, to be fair, that I may be overlooking the obvious in simply BEING on holiday rather than GOING on holiday. And yet, it would just never occur to me that I could get on a plane and fly away from the road where the cars never stop going through the night to a life where I can watch the sun set and–  

No, hold on, I’ve come over a bit Dido there. We don’t live by a road where cars keep on going through the night (the occasional tractor, yes, but not cars) and if I was all that keen on sunsets, there’s one every night just behind the garage block outside our front door.

Nevertheless, slightly-outdated pop cultural references aside, the general point is correct. At least, I think it is, I’m going to have to put down my pina colada and just cast my eye back over the previous couple of paragraphs, just hold on a tic. I realise, overlooking the obvious, capital letters, sunset, tractor…

Yes, yes the general point is correct – which is that I don’t in any way associate ‘being on holiday’ with ‘going away’. Frankly, the heady mix of three dogs, five cats and just the one income has sort of seen to that over the years.

But then, the truth is I’m not really a ‘lying by the pool’ sort of person anyway –  nor a ‘scaling Ben Nevis’ sort either. Maybe what it boils down to is that I’m like Margo in The Good Life, and that I simply don’t know how to enjoy myself.

Some people can, they can switch off from the normal routine, the workaday treadmill, and step away (or fly away) and throw themselves into… well, into whatever it is they do when they’re on holiday. It’s a state of mind, an attitude that seems easy and natural but which I have to conclude, can be very difficult to reach.

Wish I was there.

What’s New Pissy Cat

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Moaning, Pets

Our cats pee. A lot.

I don’t necessarily think they pee any more than any other group of cats, and in fact I don’t even mind cat pee as such. Obviously (he added quickly) I don’t actively like it, but I’m certainly not bothered by it while it remains in its proper place. Which is inside the cat, outside in the garden, or (slightly begrudgingly but still acceptable) in a tray of woodshavings kept in the corner of the kitchen for just that very purpose.

No, my particular problem, and it’s one that is exacerbated by the fact that we have five cats (yes, that is excessive) is that ours seem to pee in an awful lot of places which are definitely NOT on the list.

One of our cats is knocking on a bit, so it would be kind of understandable (though still annoying) if it was just Sootica having the occasional spontaneous, unpreventable wee. Coming from a family of weak bladders myself, I feel it would be bad karma to moan too much about our old cat having the odd accident because frankly sooner or later it could very easily be me.

However, the fact is that it isn’t (just) Sootica. (Plus, karma or no karma, if I had an accident it definitely wouldn’t be all over the kitchen tiles or up the pedal bin. I’d be a geriatric, not an acrobat.) All five are likely suspects, and it’s now like Russian Roulette going into our kitchen because you can never be quite sure what you’re going to encounter.

Perhaps inevitably, then, I’ve developed something of a sixth sense for cat pee. Not the smell particularly, although there is something nonetheless very distinctive about it – it’s insidiously unpleasant, a smell you catch out of the corner of your nose, and not always easy to locate.

But it’s rarely the smell I pick up on first. More likely, quartering the kitchen like a tiptoeing Child Catcher type figure, I might spy a slight variation in the quality of the shadow against one wall; or a reflection of the lights from a particular patch on the lino. Some tiny insignificant detail which registers unconsciously, before my eyes (and then my nose) properly catch up.

One smell I do like is the smell of bleach – which is fortunate, because our pedal bin has needed a considerable amount sprayed on and under it these past few months. Even more maddening are those occasions when a cat has done it literally right in front of the tray, in what can surely only be a deliberately act of provocation?

In the age-old battle of Cats V Dogs, I was for a very long time firmly on the side of the Cat. Even after my wife finally persuaded me that we should get a dog (and I’m using the word ‘persuaded’ quite incorrectly there, since it was a fait accompli (no, tell a lie – it was a Labrador, I’m rubbish at identifying breeds)) I was still pro-Cat, on the grounds that they are a lot more intelligent, and require a lot less walking.

Somewhere in the intervening decade, however, that swingometer has, um, swung against the feline and towards the canine. That’s not to say dogs don’t pee, of course they do, but ours at least are polite enough to wait until they are outside to do it. There are other things they do out there too, but despite that (even despite the brief phase one of our puppies went through of eating it after they’d done it) still, in mess terms, the dogs win paws down.

But back to the kitchen (no, no, I don’t want to go back in there, please don’t make me go!!) and it sometimes feels I’m on what Kryten in Red Dwarf once referred to as “twenty-four hour wipe alert” with our cats. The smug beggars have all demonstrated in the past that they know how to do it right – yet still they continue to go where they shouldn’t go, and leave me constantly cleaning up after them.

No wonder I get a bit pissy about it.