More death...

There’s been another death.  We will never know if the cat was involved this time.  Perhaps on this occasion it was suicide but in the absence of written confirmation of intention, I believe the coroner would have to record death by misadventure.  Whatever the cause, the tell-tale sign down by the feather still stuck to the glass records the poor pigeon’s last thought: Oh shit.

Living with a killer

I've never lived with a killer cat before.  The odd mouse, yes, but a daily kill - or two - is new to me.

I've learnt not to come downstairs in the morning without shoes.  I did it once.  It is quite dark in the kitchen in the morning and those worn, dark, slightly sticky carpet tiles harbour dark stains and Jack-the-Ripper shadows even on the brightest of days.  The day I thought the kitchen was all clear but then felt something revolting between my toes was not a good one.  "Get Daddy," I commanded as I went off to wash my foot without inspecting it.  Ian is amused by it all and cheerfully corrected me: "It wasn't its guts, it was brain."  Thanks.

So, I've learnt to scan the floor when I come down in the morning, but in the past couple of weeks Izzy's moved to a whole new level.  She particularly likes Ian's choir nights and pub nights confirming in my mind that cats are evil, vindictive creatures - she's never like me much and I'm almost certain this is less for the fun of the kill than the pleasure of making me spend an entire evening with my feet elevated above the carnage.  Now it's not just mice she brings in to taunt, but birds, and birds of all sizes at that. 

Perhaps I should gather up the feathers instead of vacuuming them.  We could go into duvet production.

Izzy's a small cat.  By the end of summer wood pigeons are large birds.  I'm not entirely sure how she even manages to squeeze them past the clatter of bicycles and through the cat flap, but she does. 

Fortunately this afternoon I'd not been in the kitchen when Ian walked in chuckling at the lastest blur of feathers and contribution to the family pot.

Tonight she brought in a tiny bird, trotted past me to her preferred rug of torture and began the kill.  I am squeamish; I summoned Ruth.  Izzy ducked and dived as we tried to get her out of the way.  She grabbed the bird and took it under the stairs, but we cleared a path and the bird was suddenly exposed.  Izzy snatched it away to the playroom, but clearly realised even an emu could escape detection in the chaos and she soon had it back on her preferred rug where she recommenced her circling.  We couldn't catch the wily cat nor the nervous bird.

Suddenly Izzy grabbed the bird and broke away from us heading up the stairs and onto the altar rail.  The bird escaped and Izzy lost sight of it hidden above the stair.  Briefly.  Then she was down on the beam and popped up underneath the rafters.  Izzy looking at me from one side of a joist, the bird from the other.  Then back up onto the altar rail and down she dropped safe in the knowledge that we could reach neither her nor her prey.  But the bird got away and amazingly could still fly. 

So here I sit.  The bird is now high up on the wall completely out of our reach.  The cat is locked in the kitchen.  Stalemate.  For now.

I imagine when Ian gets home he will walk through the kitchen, find some alternative corpse on the floor and come in chuckling to tell me about it.

Ugh.

Genius

My husband is a bloody marvel.  In the 18 months we've been here it has never crossed my mind that there is an alternative to shoving the vacuum cleaner back into the cupboard hard enough that the dustpans and brushes would simply be forced out of the way.  Ian had a brilliant idea.  A hook.

Now if only he'd thought to use the dustpans sooner!

Kitchen carpet

Whoever would have guessed that anyone could make our kitchen floor look worse?  Well, the puppies certainly have... but they are so cute!

Spring has sprung

Our first blossom is here.  The days are getting longer.  Hooray.

The countdown has begun...

... time to start gardening!

Puppies

Not a lot to do with the house, but too cute to ignore... and Bonny is doing her best to dig up all the old carpeting ready for its replacement (20 years too early, girl).

Bonny is owned by Dogs for the Disabled and all of these adorable pups will become assistance dogs.  You can see more about what they do here, or better still you could make a donation. 

Wedding preparations

Melanie was clearly relieved when last weekend I told her I could see no earthly reason to keep the rather attractive net curtains round the swimming pool.  We’ve been here over a year and I can see no seasonal advantage to them.  

 
We have occasionally had strays wandering around the garden, but, Ruth aside, we’re generally not skinny dippers and anyway the curtains sagged so that they would have hidden our own sagging.  So, the curtains are down.  The pool looks a little tidier and they will go to school as part of the charity fabric collection… unless of course Melanie’s looking for a budget bridal train.

Spring

Ruth was the first to spot signs of spring this year – possibly rather premature ones judging by how cold I am right now.  She took these photos on January 7^th.

 

Team work

We have mice, so we got a cat.  Now the cat catches mice.  I hate it.  When the cat wasn’t here, the mice kept out of the way.  They probably came and nibbled the butter, but I didn’t know.  Now Izzy likes to bring the mice into the sitting room to play.  Is it my imagination or does she like to catch mice on Mondays and Thursdays – choir and pub nights?  It’s not that I feel sorry for the poor little mice, though there are times she makes Abu Ghraib looks like Butlins; the problem is that I really hate mice.  I’m a wimp.

Bonny isn’t such a good mouser, though Izzy has been known either to give up or lose track of a mouse that Bonny then relocates, but she does enjoy the game.  It must seem to the mouse like it’s dealing with a small and intellectually terrifying torturer with a burly thug, silent but menacing, always over her shoulder (though in this case while the torturer’s tail flicks with evil the thug’s tail wags with unbridled enthusiasm).

Why our swimming pool leaks

I spent a good part of the week that Ian’s been away moving the “fleet” around.  The BMW needed its MOT and in order to get its certificate needed the tyres replacing.  The Mini’s brakes did something alarming the day before Ian left last week.  When the front brakes were fixed Wayne at the garage recommended we don’t leave the back brakes too long so I took it back in to fix that… and just to complete my week, dropped off the Subaru so he can see if he can find the leak in the washer water as now you may as well save yourself the effort of opening the bonnet and just pour the screenwash directly on the ground.

In the course of all these garage visits and because Wayne’s been unable to find the letterbox for dropping keys and bills, we got to talking about the house.  Apparently he used to come up here as a kid to swim.  I told him the girls love the pool but it’s probably not quite what it was, that it has a leak.

He wasn’t at all surprised: he’d heard Norman had had a little difficulty when a tree started growing through the floor of the pool.  I guess that could cause some movement.

I love that we’re still picking up little gems about the house.

Incy wincy hasn’t a hope

Storms are battering Britain today.  When the weather is foul our house feels rather safe, and yet not far from the elements.  We are well protected with few windows on the road side of the house and the garden side has tall trees and a hill behind.  So while we hear the rain and wind hammering on the roof, we feel pretty snug.

This morning I was looking out at the storm and caught sight of something blowing frantically between the trees.  I called Ruth over to look, it was the ladybird swing that had taken on a life of its own.  Ruth ignored me – she’s reading the Oz books Catherine gave her for Christmas.

As I talked to myself, there was a sudden change in the sounds nearby.  The water was no longer tumbling down the drainpipe but sounded like it was just being poured off the roof.  A moment later, more water noises joined the orchestration of the storm – a tap had turned on inside the house, right by my ear.  Water was pouring into the pool room.  It was being channelled down through a huge cobweb.  I called the girls to run for cups and the duster.  The cups were to catch the water and two were needed because it was pouring in so fast that regular emptying was required; the duster was because the water sieved through the cobweb wasn’t coming down evenly so there was no way of knowing where to put the cup.

I stemmed the flow and dusted… the ultimate multitasking.  But what a mistake.  With no cobweb the water just poured down the work into everything, the brickwork, the shelves, the curtains, the books.  Quick, find a spider.  I always knew dusting was a bad idea.

The problem proved to be relatively minor, a few too many leaves, plus a ball that shoots from a toy gun, stuck in a sloping gutter/drainpipe (what is the official angle at which a gutter becomes a drainpipe?)  Ian had already spent ages unblocking the gutters and the downpipes in finer weather (and bad weather too, if I recall correctly) so my task wasn’t too bad.  But boy the water was cold.