If you own cats, you know that they demand photo’s be taken of them in stupid positions.

	First of all, this is Bubbles receiving a head scratch, well, until we started holding her ears down obviously, to make her look dumb.  She doesn’t mind!  She just loves having her head scratched so she’ll let you get away with pretty much anything as long as you don’t stop.
	Fiz just can’t help but climb into bags.  Anywhere, any time, any bag.  She loves them.  She’ll sit in them for hours if she can, just watching the world of non-bag go by.
	Here our two cats spend some quality time ‘together’.  They kind of tolerate each other, proximity to food calms them down (the only time they’ll sit next to each other is while they eat), but once out in the garden, there has to be a regulation 10 feet between them otherwise it’s war.
	This is Fiz’s second favourite place to sleep, on Grete’s shoulder like some demented parrot.  She walks all over Grete’s desk, face, shoulders, head and lap until Grete finally relents and lets he lie like this.  It only ends when Grete’s arm is so numb she can’t hold it there any longer.
	And here was have Fiz’s first favourite place to sleep.  On the back of the sofa in the lounge, which usually has some kind of blanket draped over it, while we sit on the sofa and watch TV.  She stretches out her full length and slowly slips behind the cushions, pushing us further and further off the sofa.  Sometimes it takes her minutes to actually crawl back out of there when we get up to leave.
	Despite the fact that the whole house is cat friendly and there’s a lot of soft furnishings, the cats just love to kip in awkward places.  Bubbles is sleeping on the third shelf of the unit in the dining room, mere inches from the top of their soft, plush cat furniture, and on top of a bunch of pointy plastic miniatures (HeroQuest)!  They both take turns kipping here, especially when it’s raining outside for some reason.
	Bubbles just loves the sun!  This is her in the middle of the year taking in some rays, on her back, looking fat as usual.  She lies like this, with her fluffy tummy on show until you’re dragged in and forced to tickle her, at which point she closes all four paws on you like some demented furry Venus fly-trap and savages your arm.
	And lastly Bubbles, in the cat-pike position.  Back legs out straight, front legs grabbing them, head tucked in.  Only the Russian judge gives her less than a 10.0.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted about the garden, but we’ve certainly not been slacking.  Neither of us can quite believe we’re enjoying doing the gardening so much.  Despite the fact that I have a suspected hernia, I’ve been trying to help Grete as much as I can but she’s having to do most of the heavy lifting now.  In fact, the pain really flared up a couple of days after I carried the top soil around from the car to the back garden last week.  Anyway.

Grete’s done an amazing job sorting out the left side border, we both put in a lot of effort getting the soil under where the deck had been turned over, cleaned out of bricks and rubble to some extent and mixed in a bunch of new top soil.  We’ve seeded that with grass, hopefully to get it looking like the other side and stop the soil washing away in the first heavy rain we get this year.  We’re still not sure what to do with the exposed brickwork and fence panels, but we’ve got some wooden edging we hope to use to hide some of it when I get the chance, and as for the rotten wood holding up the fence panel, that will have to wait until we’re both a bit more confident.

We stopped in B&Q today and picked up 6 shrubs for the right side, and a Japanese Acer for the area we’re grassing to replace the honeysuckle, so hopefully they’ll all put down some roots and do well.  The weather is certainly on our side.

Updated some photo’s at the picasa page (here if you’re really keen), and here’s a couple of my favourites of the cats from the last couple of weeks.

Bubbles (our older cat) loves the sun.  She’s got really thick fur but doesn’t let that stop her baking herself as often as she can.  The deck is a real sun trap and as soon as the sun starts hitting it she’s out there, absorbing the rays.  Sometimes she looks aware, sometimes she sits around and sometimes, she just flakes out.  Fizz is the black cat in this picture, I think she’s making sure Bubbles (the ginger one) is ok.  Click the picture for the full size version.

We’ve had loads of sun this weekend, and the cats always keep us company when we’re in the garden doing anything – so Bubbles has been really happy – but this shot just sums her up during the summer.

Fizz, the younger of our two cats, gets itchy ears.  The vet gave us a bottle of gunk to squirt into them once a week which clears out any debris and alleviates the issue.  We tried last night to inject said gunk into her ears – as you can imagine she’s not really very appreciative at the time.  I don’t think it hurts and I’m pretty sure it’s not even that uncomfortable, but if you have to hold a cat down they just assume whatever you’re doing is bad for them.  Which I guess is a pretty good assumption.  We were on the sofa, fizz between us and Grete was holding her down.  I got some gunk in one ear but the little blighter is bloody strong and she squirmed out from Grete’s grip.

In order to get some purchase and get herself off the sofa she used her back feet, claws out, and my body as a launch pad.  So now I sport a pair of nice 6-inch scratches down my left side.

We managed to wrestle her back onto the sofa and do the other ear, and she then spent two hours sulking while we watched Quantum of Solace, before finally deciding we were done and allowing us to pet her again.  Of course, she shredded Grete’s arm after the second squirt of gunk, because she doesn’t like to show any favouritism.

It’s interesting to me how different cats deal with this stuff in different ways – I guess some people just see animals as animals and when you discuss personality they shake their heads and roll their eys.  But if you’ve owned pets or been in contact with animals for a while it’s completely obvious they have a personality of their own.  Bubbles puts up a fight, but once she’s grabbed she sort of just accepts whatever you’re doing in the hope it finishes as quickly as possible, however it takes her about a day to forgive you.  Fizz never gives up – she’s always fighting – and she’s built like a small dog, all muscle and anger, but she’s pretty much over the whole thing in an hour or so.

Oh and don’t tell Grete I’m blogging about the cats, I try and maintain and air of disinterest.  Thanks

Cats got me up at 6:00am today, fighting under the bed, so I’ve spent most of the day yawning and squinting.

And now I’m sharing.

Been awake since 06:30 when the cats declared war under the bed and spent the next hour fighting it out to see who could be the most annoying.  Finally unable to cope at 07:30 when I got up and let them out.

Boy it’s cold this morning. Yeh I know, curious during winter.

Gradwell’s shared hosting seemed a little quicker yesterday, maybe someone fixed something, although they still haven’t updated my support ticket (technically they weren’t in the office after 1pm yesterday but it seemed to get a lot quicker after 4pm, I just wish they’d update the bloody ticket so I knew what was going on).

Why are they so evocative?  Click the pictures for full size images.  It snowed in Nottingham today, for about 15 minutes, really heavy wet snow which lay and then started to vanish almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Both cats are old hands with the whole snow thing so no sudden flurry of excitement from them, although Fizz did try and eat a few snowflakes as they fell on her.

She’s off to the vets again, we suspect cystitis.  Grete rang up to see what they could suggest and they had room to fit her in now, so we mugged her and Grete’s driven her straight over to the vets.

Grete and our guests are out, in Birmingham at a craft exhibition, at which they’re meeting up with Grete’s mum and aunt.

Meanwhile I’m home alone with two snoozing cats, emitting strong snooze pheromones.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Played a bit of Lord of the Rings Online tonight (and last night), been a while since we played any MMORPG’s so was quite nice to kill a few orcs and goblins.  The cough is still bugging me, the tail end of the cold and the part I hate most really.  Coughing gives me a headache and just annoys me in general.

Weather has been pretty bad last few days, windy, heavy rain, the cats have given up all hope of spending any more time outside until the early spring and settled into winter mode.  For Bubbles this essentially means trying to find the warmest place in the house to sit – and that includes on me or Grete.

Remind me to write a blog post about Fringe and/or Burn Notice.