by
Scratch That
Would happily trade today for any other given day. Would be breaking all my rules to talk about any of it except for the reason I’m sporting this rather gruesome addition to my facial features…
It started at 8am with very angry knock on the front door.
My early caller was Mrs Gerry-Hatrick from the house behind ours. Now, to preface, Mr Gerry-Hatrick, is the nicest of neighbours you could hope for. An amputee courtesy of WW2 and hard of hearing due to his age I often see him for a quick chat on my morning jaunts up to the café. He inquires after me, and the puss chats about the footy and generally is just lovely. But as is the way of the world sometimes he’s married to a woman who could gently be described as a bit of a fishwife.
Before you go ahead and hate her on my behalf you need to understand that I get why she is the way she is. Clearly she’s been hurt bad somewhere along the line and she’s making everyone else pay… it sucks, it kills everyone she’s around when she’s giving out a tirade like she did this morning, but I do get it. I don’t hold it against her.
Anyway, she’d got a bee in her bonnet because one the two trash bins put out on the edge of the road for collecting this morning was overfilled, council have very strict policy as regards what they’ll pick up with the automatic trash picker-upper and the offending 5 small bags of trash were left on the berm much to the horror and disgust of Mrs G. Deciding to take matters in hand she came round, knocked my door down and proceeded to rant and rave at me on my own behalf and as a proxy for my fellow building occupants, even going so far as to call us pigs. Me, a pig.
Thanks very much.
Now, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with a cat scratch on my face…
Well, while she was going off her nut at me she was holding the screen door open and Puss, who I’d gently placed on the top of the dresser out of the way, had caught a sniff of freedom and took it into hear head to make a bolt for it down the front of the dresser (the one that houses all my glassware, no less) in the hope she’d get as far as, and out of, the door. In the process, two of the glasses hit the deck, thankfully staying in one piece but as I grabbed her to prevent the escape I was not so clever as to manage to miss the flailing claws.
Of course, having copped it, both emotionally and physically, I showered, dressed (yes, I’d answered the door in my dressing gown) and I took responsibility for clearing up the rubbish (which amounted to picking up each of the 5 bags and dropping them in the bin) wheeling the bin back to it’s usual place. Now, given that for the last few days I’ve been walking past the bins, noticing that one of the bags on the top of the pile was mine (having been raided by the local possum posse) it would stand to reason that one of the bags on the floor would have been that one.
It wasn’t, leading me to belive that the offenders were in the other household adjoining our building rather than one of the residents from upstairs. Of course, you can’t tell that to a ranty old lady, it’s better just to suck it up and move on.
They said there’d be days like these.
I believe ’em.
Prrrrfect
I’ve been living alone now for some weeks. I won’t lie, it took some getting used to. Chino was a massive vibrant element of this household and not having him to come home to (as much as it makes me sound like a sad act) has been rough. Rough enough to still reduce me to tears on rare occasions.
I’ve had every intention of getting myself a successor to his Lordship but have been biding my time for several reasons. One was the extreme busyness of the intervening weeks, two was the expense, three was to give myself time to decide whether I wanted to go with another Burmese, four, the choice between an adult or a kit and finally, five, to give myself time to get over the trauma.
So I’d been saying, "I’ll look at getting another cat once May 10th (party) has been and gone" because there was just too much going on before then… In truth, there really was no question I’d get another Burmie, I was just so completely charmed by Chino that I wasn’t able to look past them. Which of course, introduces the issue of the expense. A kitten would cost $500 or more, completely unjustifiable so soon after having spent that to get Chino so the next logical step was to look at getting an adult.
It seemed a female might be good, maybe a girl would be a little less likely to wander, an adult because she’d be cheaper, and maybe used to living inside. I’m not wholly keen to allow a new pet to have such free reign as Chi did, so after some bulletin board hopping it seemed that a breeding female who was a couple of years old and no longer required by the breeder and who had not lived outside might be the answer to my cat shaped vacuum.
Once our major conference had been and gone I was browsing the web, as is my habit, and thought to put in the search string ‘adult rehome burmese’ and stumbled across a forum offering "Princess Lulubelle" as free to a good home. I dropped the owner a line, hardly expecting a free Pedigree Burmese to be still available and to my great delight, she was!
After long introductions, the exchange of photos and stories of Chino and Lulu, and the satisfaction both that I’d be a suitable family for Lulu (on their part) and that transporting such precious cargo from Queensland to New South Wales was affordable (on my part) the process of adoption was begun. As it happens, she’s only a year old, younger than Chino was and was a precious family pet who needed a new home as her ‘Mum’ turned out to be serverly allergic to her. After a little under a year of trying to moderate the symptoms it really just needed to be that Lulu went live with someone else. So sad for Lulu’s best little girl friend Jade(4) but very, very happy for me.
For various reasons it wasn’t until this week that it was possible to get her here, which in the grand scheme was just perfect timing. I’ve let out little squeaks around the internet that I was going to be getting a new cat but just didn’t want to make it ‘official’ until she was actually here… not that I’m a great believer in fate or Murphy’s Law… but more as a disappointment preventative if anything did go horribly wrong…
So finally, here we are, it’s Wednesday May 14th and Lulu has weathered the long trek from the Sunshine Coast to the Big Smoke, still smelling of the straw used to line her travelling cage (poor little blossom must be well pleased to be out of that) and she’s found the sun spot on my living room floor to have a snooze in.
She’s given the flat the once over, found and used the litter tray, found the food and had a bit of a ‘nom, nom, nom’ snuggled me a few times and by and large made herself right at home!
If, as I am, you’re a bit of a believer in a benevolent deity, you look at situations like this and think there are just too many perfect elements to this story not to think He understands how important having a puss is to me and that all the little dreams in my heart in regards to my next puss have been neatly put in to place.
You can’t ask for more than that.
(as I write this closing she’s trying to climb the louvre windows… can anyone say ‘deja vu’?!)
Deeleea & Lulubelle
We Interrupt this Encyclopedia…
Hey, you guys are awesome… unbelievable. So much internet love and sympathy. Even the real life sympathy has been amazing… given the state of me one might well have thought I’d lost a family member. I won’t lie, it totally feels like I did.
This is the last Chino post, and it’s simply because I want to remember all the cool stuff, not because I’m seeking any further sympathies or warm fuzzies, I’ve so appreciated those I received. Really.
Remembering Chino
I delay going to bed till very late and when I get there I take drugs to sleep because Chino used to snuggle up under my chin and in the crook of my shoulder and stay there all night. Sleeping is not the same on my own.
It’s a lot easier to blog, because there isn’t a cat between the mac and my belly. He used to squirrel his way onto my lap regardless of the computer. I had to get used to typing with a somnolent cat’s face pressed into the crook of my elbow. It made typing a bit slower… a bit less comfortable… but it was well cute.
I still turn every time the wind chimes in the garden go off because they sound like the bell on his collar. The one that’s lying on my sideboard, the one that doesn’t ring any more.
I expect him to come running to the sound of my keys as I get out of my car at the end of a day at the office. If he didn’t come straight away it was usually because he was sacked out on the sofa after a day’s adventuring…
I really miss him running up the bench and fridge and skidding to a halt on the top of the dresser when he heard those same keys and knew he was about to get a treat as I made my way out the door. (He hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that he was getting the treat to prevent a fight at the doorway while he tried to get OUT… hah-haaaa suckkah!).
I miss opening the bathroom door and nearly tripping over him on my way out of the shower… he couldn’t bear a closed door…
I miss that he’d come running whenever he heard me pulling out a length of dental floss… it really was his favourite toy! Those crazy contorted pix I took of him some time ago were all about the floss… It go so I had to pull double the length I really needed to accommodate his need to try and attack the end…
I miss the hide and seek… a sure fire way to get him to come to you was to tease him by hiding, or pretending to hide behind a bush in the garden… or behind a door… if you kept peeking out at him and teasing him thus he was guaranteed to come running right back to get me… it was utterly irresistible to him!
I actually miss hearing him trying to break into my bedroom…
I miss rubbing my face in his belly… softer than rabbit fur…
That being said, I actually don’t miss the 6am starts.
The window climbing.
The anxious moments when he didn’t come when he was called.
The lizard presents.
But they’re small potatoes in comparison to missing the unconditional love. I could shut that cat out of my room, leave him on his own for the weekend (which I only did once, mind) spray the living daylights out of him at 2am and throw him off the bed when he was pissing me off.. and he’d STILL come running when he saw me at the end of the day… he’d still snuggle under my chin come bed time. He’d still throw himself at my feet and roll over for a belly rub.
When there ain’t anyone else in your house giving you that kind of loving it’s a pretty tough thing to let go.