Just another Saturday afternoon

Nothing like being at home on a Saturday, churning out loads of laundry while the sun is shining and a decent breeze is blowing. I’m not exactly sure what she was after….maybe she just likes watching the motion of the sheets and the water.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if cats had opposable thumbs? They could help you hang out the laundry.

But then they’d also be able to raid your pantry, your fridge, mess up the linen closet….okay, maybe it’s a good idea they don’t have them. Otherwise they might be worse than kids.

Reclaiming the bathroom

When we moved into our new house last September, I had my first bath in our new tub. Given the bathroom is where the litter tray is, I haven’t used the bathtub since.  Having the litter tray outside is just one of the many perks of having a cat park but we haven’t put one up at this house as yet. The one we had at the old place doesn’t quite suit where we would like to put it here and unfortunately the company we went with last time no longer operates as an installer within Queensland.  They do have modular kits available on their website but to use them without extensive modification, we would need a lot more room in our backyard.

So we looked at a few other options but so far, we are yet to come across one which is worth it to avoid DIY activities reasonably competitive and will give the cats the amount of space we would like them to have. We’ve investigated using aviaries, DIY kits and netting but none of them seem to fit the bill. So it looks like it will be the DIY route if we are going to do it at all. It should be easy enough to do but fairly labour intensive. By my best calculation, it’ll be a good weekend’s worth of work. And that’s assuming we have the faintest idea of what we are doing once it comes to doing it.

I’ve put in a very dodgy concept drawing below. The idea is to put in a cat flap in our dining room window, use some of the existing tunnels from the old cat park to create a walk way into a bigger timber frame enclosure which will be about 4m long x 5m wide x 2m high. Whack in a couple of timber ramps around the edge, some hammocks, encase the whole thing in chicken wire and voila, DIY cat park. There’s even enough room in there to put a small garden setting in there and perhaps a few plants. The only thing I haven’t quite figured out yet is how to protect their litter from rain. Maybe a small dog kennel?

It’s still just a concept but it’s a bit more of an idea of what we can do than we’ve had previously.

Wordless Wednesday

Have kitty, will travel

Personally the only thing I consider a bit of a downer about going on holidays is leaving the cats behind. I would never consider taking them with me on a holiday that involved more than going from this house to another house and just hanging about there for a few weeks. And let’s face it, if you are just going to go and hang out in another house, you might as well stay home.

I’m in the midst of looking at different destinations for an overseas holiday in a few years time and I was surprised to find this story about a couple who travelled some 15 000km with their kitten. They are French, so the entire website is in French. My knowledge of the language from my high school years is now fairly residual….I know enough to be a bit dangerous with it. But from what I gather, kitty travelled with them from Miami US to some place way down the bottom of South America, Ushuaia.

I think this is one of my favourite photos that they have shared from their trip. Cuteness!! There are plenty more in the Portfolio section of their website Turn of the World.

The view from my front door

It’s been a very uneventful few months around here, at least as far as the moggies are concerned. Plenty going on in our lives but they are just doing the usual – lounging round the house and waiting (somewhat impatiently) for us to decide what form their cat park is going to take. We still have components from the one at our old house (the new owners didn’t want it) but it was designed to fit that site. Where the new one will go is relatively flat and the modules we have don’t really lend themselves to this kind of terrain. I’m even going to and fro about whether we will go for a CatMax kind of enclosure or another CatNip inspired creation.

In the meantime, they are just chilling out inside. I snapped this photo of them from the front door as part of the My Place & Yours Theme for this week at Hello Owl. One cat on the kitchen counter waiting impatiently for dinner, the other curled up on the recliner and most likely reluctant to give it up. Now the cooler months are here, I imagine that it will be even harder to extricate Rosie from her cozy spot there. There’s no doubt about it – she is an expert lounger. She could definitely give Zoe a run for her money.