Click for the full size image, which I think you might need to do, to read the text.

If you ever wonder why Grete stops talking to you while you’re on the phone, or maybe some online chat or game.

Here’s why.

Fizz climbs onto the back of Grete’s chair and then onto her head.

Fizz hates the snow, she doesn’t like how it falls on her head without warning and how it looks on the ground.  I’m not sure she’s that bothered about the cold but the snow itself is a real issue.  She’s been out a few times, but she comes running back in.  I wanted a few shots of the garden (see previous post) and she wandered out.  While she was staring intently at the snow on the grass wondering if it was worth checking out, I managed to sneak up behind her.  These 5 shots are taken in the space of about 1.2 seconds.  She was a bit surprised, I love how in the fourth shot, her tail telegraphs the direction she’s about the head.

I was playing with the Picasa ‘movie’ stuff, because Grete suggested making an animated image, and as usual, it makes it too easy!  Here’s the youtube vid

Grete’s dad stayed over last night after a semi-surprise visit.  He brings his little dog so we didn’t see Fizz all evening (she doesn’t like the dog) but Bubbles just tends to do her own thing, trying to pretend the dog doesn’t exist.

Once Grete’s dad left, it took us a couple of hours to convince Fizz the house was safe, but she finally came downstairs on her own.

We’d noticed Bubbles was keeping her tail down yesterday, but that’s a pretty natural pose for cats which are a bit spooked and just trying to go under the radar, but we were less happy when she kept doing it today, and then when we tried to investigate she made some pretty unhappy noises.

So 5pm visit to the vets, and I guess we both knew something was up when we got her into the cat box without any major struggling.  The good news is that it’s just a couple of small wounds on her back, near the base of her tail.  Either from Fizz or from some other creature in the neighbourhood, that had gotten a little infected and swolen.  The vet (and the vet we use is superb, Ashfield House Vetenary Hospital in Long Eaton, I really recommend them) had her cleaned up and gave her some painkillers.  We could tell almost immediately before we left she was happier because she was standing up in the cat box demanding to be out.  She’s got more painkillers and a course of anti-biotics to get through over the next few days.

Which means a lot of tuna.

We didn’t get into Tesco until 7:30pm to buy food for ourselves and the weekend, and haven’t been back in the house very long.

So a hectic two days.  Hopefully Bubble’s will heal up nicely and she won’t need a return visit.  This is her finishing up Fizz’s share of the tuna.

So I’m playing a computer game (yes, Lord of the Rings online as it happens) and Bubbles decides she wants to sit on my lap.  She’s taken to jumping onto my desk and sitting, staring at me until I move by chair back far enough for her to get to my lap.  I guess it’s getting toward winter.

Anyway, yesterday I was a little busy, so I ignored her for a few moments.  But she decided that wasn’t good enough.  Click for the full images.

It’s not easy taking photo’s of your left arm, with your iPhone in your right arm when you can’t see the screen.

Well, while I was recovering from surgery seemed the ideal time to leave the cat sprayer switched off since setting it was beyond my frail and fragile post-op body (or something).  It went okay for about a week, we had some rain in that time which keeps the enemy cat away normally anyway, and on the nights that were dry it didn’t come around.  However, it eventually realised the device was off and we got up one morning to find it had sprayed and the place stank.  It did it again during the day, a day or so later.  We started turning the water sprayer on again in the evenings and that seems to have worked.

Except one day over the weekend we were both sitting in the computer room, Fizz was resting on her chair (hard day in the sun and she needed a break).  We heard a cat-chirp and both looked and the little bugger was either just coming into the room or just leaving the room and sprayed the bloody woodwork as it left.  Since we managed to catch it so early it was easy to clean off and left no smell but the little shit is clearly getting braver.

Having said that, we’ve not set the sprayer for a couple of nights again since our cats are out so late when the weather is this good and it’s not been back, so I think we’re wearing it down slowly.  I’ll set it tonight I think, just in case.

One of the cats in our neighbourhood is male and has not been neutered.  As a result, it quite happily sprays to mark its territory and that spray absolutely reeks.  Annoyingly for us, the edge of it’s territory is the wooden frame under our patio doors.  If you have a male cat, please, please get it neutered, otherwise they’re a nuisance above and beyond the regular cat bad behaviour (digging up any fresh dirt in your garden to use as their loo).  It took us a while to work out the smell wasn’t one of our cats, we even bought a UV light so we could find out where our cats were pissing in the house (because that’s what it smelled like).  When we couldn’t locate the source of the smell we eventually started searching outside.

It looks like the cat has been spraying for a while, but the deck used to sit above the air vents under our floor on the outside of the house.  Now the deck has gone, the smell basically goes straight into the vents and into the dining room.  When it rains it reeks even worse.  We cleaned and treated the wood, and while it was covered in plastic (to assist with drying) the cat even sprayed that, which proved beyond a doubt what was causing the smell.  Every morning since then we got up and it had sprayed again.  It was much easier to clean off the wood after it had been treated and was waterproof, but it’s unreasonable for us to have to clean our woodwork every day just because someone can’t be bothered to neuter their cat.

Grete went on the hunt for some solutions and found a motion detector based water spray in B&Q which people reported working (sometimes).  We needed something that wouldn’t scare away our cats since they use that door as their main entry into the house.  This solution looked ideal.  The motion sensor works up to 10 meters away, and as we found out if the hose pressure is high enough the water spray will go two or three times that far.  Anyway we bought one last weekend and set it up on Sunday when it was baking hot (luckily).  I was soaked!  Took a little while to get the water pressure and sensor combination right so that the water didn’t just spray into next doors garden and during that time I set the sensor off about 15 times, getting sprayed from head to foot each time.

Each night once our cats are in we turn it on, and Grete gets to turn it off in the mornings (in a military style operation to avoid our cats setting it off and getting spooked).  So far, the male cat hasn’t sprayed once since we started using it, and we’re hoping after another week or so it’ll give up trying entirely and we can leave it turned off.  If it does start again we can just plug it back in for a few days and hopefully it’ll get the message.

Here’s a couple of pictures of the device in place.

I sometimes have a candle on my desk or somewhere in the room, a scented one.  At the moment it’s mulled wine.  About 15 minutes ago Bubbles (cat #1) jumped up onto my desk, brushed passed the candle and set herself alight.  She stepped over my keyboard and I managed to pat her on the side once pretty hard and the flames went out, but the damage was done.  The room stinks of singed hair, Bubbles went sprinting out of the room not because of the flame, but because of me giving her a thump and then both myself and Grete making a lot of noise and ‘chasing’ type noises to check she was ok.

She was hiding upstairs, we dragged her out, brushed and combed her down, and she’s phsyically fine, although her pride is dented.  She’s got a really thick multi-layer coat and the flames have singed the outer long hairs and the very tips of the second layer, but never got anywhere near her skin.  We gave them both some tuna to help convince them they weren’t going to the vets (the normal result of ‘chase’ type noises).

Scary for a moment.

Grete’s making a rug, and Fizz insists on letting everyone know who it’s for.

And this is me painting the base on one of the zombies.

So the cats are sort of coping with the presence of a dog, Bubbles is being oddly bolshy and while obviously not happy about the Not Cat that is walking around her house she’s coping ok.  Fizz however is in hiding and has been for the whole weekend.  She is not happy at all about the dog.  Funny that Fizz is the dominant cat but Bubbles is the one being most normal.