Eucalyptus Country

How often have you heard that phrase?? Kids say it all the time, particularly when they’re told they have to wait until dinner. And I know I’ve been guilty of it myself when I’m late for a meal. If a cat could say it, I think Rosie would be saying it most of the day. Of course, she is hardly starving and gets her 2 square meals a day. I’ve been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to reduce her intake and therefore her weight. At her last vet check, she weighed 6.5kg and I was instructed to increase her meat portion and cut down on her dry food.

I started to feed her the “light” version of Hill’s Science Diet – what I like to call food for the weight challenged feline – and boy does she know it. It’s lighter in colour, lighter on odour and presumably light on flavour as well. She eats it quite happily in the morning but god help me if there isn’t meat defrosted for her dinner. However, six months after starting this new feeding regime, she has lost no weight whatsoever. Her coat is beautiful and shiny, her eyes are bright and her teeth and gums look great….all in all, she looks very healthy and appears to be very content.

I just wished she was so full and content at 4am when I would rather be sleeping.

This past week, I decided to throw caution to the wind and get a proper pet bed for the cats to sleep in. I’ve been very reluctant to do this before, mainly because Mojo has a perfectly good pet igloo that he decided to no longer use about two years ago and I have never seen Rosie in it at all. But having seen Rosie snuggle into my mink blanket thrown on top of the blanket box, I thought perhaps at least one feline might appreciate my efforts.

Really nice plush pet beds are not exactly spare change, so I decided to be cautious and only get one to start with and see what happened. Well what do you know? Mojo decided that he liked it quite a lot and so then I was in a bit of a quandry. You see, it seems they developed a routine over a couple of days – Rosie got the bed between 10pm and 6am and then Mojo would take over around 8am and guard it until 10pm at night. But I kind of felt bad (no doubt due to my fellow pet lovers at AFW) that they did not have one each. I know – what was I thinking?

So now I have two, so they have one each. BUT, it seems that the sun-warmed front bedroom is still the place to be, despite having two beds available. After a little bit of fussing over Mojo, he finally relented to sharing the space, if not the bed itself. Pity it’s not a good quality photo because I only had my phone handy…..I’m pretty sure I may never see this again!

The last couple of days have been delightfully wet in south-east Queensland. I noticed last night coming home from work that there has been so much water coming down that the reflective E-TOLL paint on the motorway has been partially washed away! Still I’m not complaining.

I’m pretty sure this little white kitty has had enough of the rain though. She has come to visit once before, only to be scared off by an extremely hostile Mojo who just happened to be in the cat enclosure at the time. I guess he figures that he already has to share it with one other cat – no way is he sharing with a third!

She’s very sweet, fairly timid and in reasonably good body condition but no collar to tell me her name or where she lives. It was raining really heavy here most of yesterday and I just felt sorry for her sitting out there in the cold. So I put out a small bowl of dry food and water in the patio as well as a clean warm blanket for her to sleep on while she was waiting out the rain to go home. The food was gone by the time I got back from work, so I’m only assuming she was hungry.

I know I will probably pay for my kindness in the long run because if she is a stray, she will probably return for more food and comfort. If she does, I might see if I can get close enough to check her ear for a desexing tattoo and feel for a microchip.