Sleeping Places

I swear, Psycho Cat has the cushiest life sometimes. This morning, after a hard night out going in and out all the time, we found him sleeping like this…

It’s a hard life, isn’t it?

Oh, and yes, that is my manky foot at the top of the first photo. Shows the poxy creature’s brave, as well as a lazy little git.

Weekend

Hound woke us both up this morning by repeatedly jumping on the bed.

Now, an hour later, I’m still awake (and writing rubbish like this) and Hound is fast asleep in her basket.

And it’s still only 8am. It must be a weekend.

Canine Destructo

Over the weekend, Hound had a spectacular time. On Saturday night someone had fireworks, so she went orbital. Somehow she managed to get her leg tangled in the cable to my phone charger (which was connected to the phone at the time) and in her panic at fireworks just hauled the cable out of the charger. So charger = kaput.

Yesterday, she managed to catch the charger cable for Herself’s phone, and pulled the phone on to the (hard, ceramic-tiled) floor. So phone = kaput.

The overall lesson is obviously that we need to be more careful with the position of cables for phone chargers. Then again, in eight years of having the bloody moronic creature, she’s never done this before. So I don’t know – but we will be more careful with the cables, anyway.

Other than that, it looks like Herself will be getting a new phone, due to Hound-induced damage. We’ll see – it might work again, but right now it’s looking pretty knackered.

Spectacular Sleep

Last week, Hound wasn’t well – a matter of having aspirated some food, coughed on it, breathed it back in, coughed on it (and so on and so on) – which is a fairly regular occurrence with her megaoesophagus. It happens at least once a year, and we just get her some antibiotics from the vet to knock the infection on the head.

However, those antibiotics do tend to hit her like a hammer. In this case, she went to sleep like this…

Truly the sleep of the nearly dead.

Thundrous and Orbital

Last night, we got woken up by Hound at about half three. She was totally orbital and pretty distressed although initially we couldn’t work out why. Usually she’s only like that when she’s been ill, and puked in the house. And she was certainly stinking – although that was (I figured out later) just her frightened/terrified smell – when she’s in that state, she gets evil farts, and they pollute the entire atmosphere of the house.

Anyway, I let her out into the garden just to let her vent out whatever was bugging her – and that was a mistake. Because the actual reason she was orbital was because there was a thunderstorm coming. Cue Hound barking insanely at the sky until she eventually came back in.

And at that point we still had to deal with a Hound in orbit. She eventually calmed down a bit, and came to lie under the bed (along with trying to burrow her way through the wall) but for the first half hour or so she was just mental.

I don’t think we’re ever going to break her out of her terror of thunderstorms. We might be able to lessen it a bit over time – although personally I doubt even that – so we’ll end up just figuring ways of managing her during the storms. When we bought a new bed last year we looked completely mad by checking whether there’d be enough room for Hound to creep under it – but there was a reason for doing so, as last night showed. Now we just need to figure out how to make sure she doesn’t do the burrowing-through-the-wall thing while she’s under there…

Mind you, the storm was fantastic – not that Hound thought so, of course.

Namesake

When we got the chickens back in November, we decided to name them after our grandmothers. (With the exception of one grandmother, who happened to have the same name as Herself – obviously that was a no-no)

One of the grandmothers- Gladys- was renowned as a dragon of epic proportions, and capable of having a right temper on her.

The chicken named after Gladys is turning into a similar creature – it’s very spooky. At the moment she’s all broody (again) and is pecking out at me whenever I try to move her. (The eggs aren’t fertile, she’s just sitting on them, and not getting up for food/water, which is a bit of an issue in the current temperatures) She’s even taken to pecking me when I put her on her perch at night – that’s a new development, only started this week.

All told though, it’s looking like we really should’ve thought more about the names before applying them to the girls. Ah well, live and learn.

*Splut*

Yesterday, I mowed the grass for the first time this year. It really should’ve been done a couple of weeks ago, but the weather at the weekends has been so wet that it just wasn’t feasible to do it.

Which, of course, meant that the grass was high enough it was almost obscuring the dog. It certainly obscured a lot of her toys – and some other “presents” she’d been leaving in the garden. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

At least the mower started up first time (well OK, on about the third or fourth pull of the starter) which I really wasn’t expecting – I know my technical abilities all too well.

But it worked, and once I knew it was working, I went round the garden on poo-patrol (or shit-shovelling, as it’s also known) so that I didn’t hit anything too sludgy. I even picked up most of the dog toys that were visible – they have a nasty habit of buggering mower blades, among other things. (They also cause the dog to get all stressy – she’s not a fan of losing toys) Fairly successfully, I thought – a full bag of poo, for one thing.

And yet still, while doing the grass there was that *thunk* noise of a dog toy (this time a rubber ball) as well as the far-too-familiar *splut* sound, as freshly-laid dog-egg hit the spinning mower blades.

Snoring Cat

I know I’ve said before that Psycho Cat snores like a trooper – enough to wake me up, in fact. However, I think that most people don’t really believe that. Currenty I’m sitting in the living room, and can hear him snoring away in the bedroom.

So I recorded him. I have to emphasise, this has not been amplified, or tweaked in any way – all I did was cut off the “start of recording” beep at (funnily enough) the start of the recording.

If you click this link, you’ll download the file to hear the little git in all his glory.

Enjoy.

Broody (Again)

Gladys, one of our hens, has gone broody again. She did this back in January as well so it’s no big shocker to see her doing it again.

It’s just one of the things with owning chickens, they will go broody on occasion and sit in the nestbox. What’s amusing is that this time round Gladys is being remarkably grumpy, and doesn’t want to be shifted off the nestbox at all. I don’t mind – again, it’s part of just being chickens, and having chickens, but she’s extremely grouchy and really doesn’t want to be moved at all. I’ve been pecked a couple of times

We do have to move her, of course – partly to get the eggs from under her, but also to make sure that she’s getting food and water.

Still, it all just adds to the fun of owning animals – and particularly owning chickens.

Malevolent Moggy

Since the cat had his run-in with the shaver last week, he’s been even madder than usual.

So far, he’s decided that he now doesn’t care whether Hound likes something or not – if he wants to sit on me in the living room, then that’s what he’s damn well going to do. We haven’t yet worked out if this is just because he’s cold and wants to warm up by sitting on me, or if he’s just in a “Fuck you, and fuck the rest of the world too” mood. Honestly, it could even be a combination of the two.

The ultimate (so far) Feline “Fuck You” though, has been one morning this week, where he decided he was going to sleep in the dog’s basket during the day. Hound wasn’t there to see it – she’d gone to sleep somewhere else in the house – so he got in to the basket, curled up, and went to sleep.

Hound, when she found out, was beside herself – she just didn’t know what to do. She would bark at the cat, then run back away. It was hysterical to watch. Eventually, Psycho Cat just got up, glared at the dog, and stalked out of the basket, coming over to sit on me on the sofa instead.

I don’t know if his mood is going to stay once his fur has grown back – but I almost hope it does, because it does mean the dynamic is changing (again) in the house, and this time it’s changing in Psycho Cat’s favour…

Trimming the Cat

Once more, it’s the time of year where Psycho Cat goes to the vet to get all his tangled matted fur cut out/shaved/dealt with. We’ve worked out that it’s actually all his winter fur coming out, but rather than falling out it gets tangled in the new fur, and just leads to him looking utterly manky.

Apparently it’s a fairly common issue with long-haired cats, although our case is a bit extreme because he’s a mucky little git and doesn’t clean himself properly. (Something I’ve never seen with any other cat, and due (I suspect) to being separated from his mum too early, before he learned about proper grooming, although that’s something we’ll never know for sure due to Herself only getting him when he was “about” eighteen months old)

So he’s off today to the vets (in about half an hour, actually) and he’s already not happy. Because he’ll be under a general anaesthetic, he’s not been allowed to have any food since half nine last night – and he’s currently stalking round the house, yelling that he’s hungry, and that we’re all rotten for not feeding him. He’s even less impressed now I’ve brought the carrying basket for him in from the garage – now he knows that something is most definitely Not Right.

He’ll be happier once he’s back from the vet, although it’ll probably (as usual) take a couple of days for us to be properly forgiven for taking him there. But once he’s tidied up and not so godawful matted he’ll be happier – he doesn’t actually like it when he’s in this state, but he does fuck all about it, which is why we have to go to these lengths to get it sorted.