It is hard to write on your music as you are listening to learning tracks when the kitten jumps up and lays on the paper. He wasn’t there to cuddle, he heard the crinkling of paper, which is his second favorite sound after the opening of a can. He was ejected for foul play. I just need to remember that the claw hole is not a breath mark.
I’ve been slowly working away at my recycled yarn cat mats (which I first blogged about here), and decided to line the cats’ favorite basket. I started with a magic circle and used single crochet stitches. It starts as with any flat round crochet work, with increases spaced by single stitches that gradually increase in number, but as it climbed the walls of the round basket I found that I was still adding increases but not increasing the singles. That sounds more complicated than it was, huh. Here are some cat pictures.
I didn’t write things down as I went, I was crocheting by feel, but here is the approximate pattern, for those inquiring minds that want to know.
Mr Tom and his Shadow still come over to get brushed. I use a small wire pet brush to remove the burrs and give them a good once over. If they had it their way I would spend all day brushing them. At least the matts on Mr Tom’s belly are down to just a couple small clumps under his arm pits. And I know I did this to myself, working so hard to get them accustomed to the brush. Now if Momma cat would let me help her, although of the three, she does the best job grooming her long fur on her own.
I have taken to throwing small stuffed animals into corners for the kitten to find. He likes to carry them around the house, drop them, then chase them like they just tried to make a daring escape. The octopus toy makes me laugh; it has a happy face outside, then is reversible to show a sad face. I caught a video of Thor the kitten playing with it, and it started off happy, and ended up sad, as the playing inverted the toy. Here is the video.
Mr Tom, our neighbor’s outdoor cat, has taken to hanging out in our back woods, rather than just the meadow between our houses. I went back to see where he was hanging out and found that our ATS system sprinkler had a pool. Oops. Something (probably an armadillo) dug a burrow near the sprinkler head, and the hole filled with water. A problem for us, but it made a nice cool “beach” for cat lounging in 100 degree weather.
My husband collapsed the hole, repaired the sprinkler head, and filled the area with rock to support the head and discourage digging. I asked him to also get a large flat paver, so there was still a place to lounge.
The next water woe happened when the hose feeding water to the garden and the coop split, in the middle of the night, and flooded the area around the coop. That was not fun to find at 5:30 in the morning.
I bought a new hose, and rather than running it along the ground, so the hose had to come up and make a tight bend to attach to the manifold, I used heavy duty cable ties to run the hose along the top of the metal fence, so it would come down to connect, thus avoiding stressful bends. We’ll see how it holds up.
The waterways around the coop still work, and the flood went around the hens’ doors and food. The birds in the woods were particularly happy that day. We really need rain.
Critters and Craft 